The Incredible Shrinking Surplus

This article discusses the current trend of China's large account surplus diminishing. Some economists believe that the Chinese account surplus was a root cause of the current financial crisis. Therefore, financially speaking for the rest of the world this is seen as good news. However, as the article goes on to discuss, many people are wondering how accurate China's figures are in this sudden shrinking of the surplus. China is somewhat notorious for having less than perfect economic statistics, so how reliable is this data? The article goes on to discuss possible ways for the Chinese statistics to be off, and a conspiracy theory is even mentioned.