China’s stock market crash: latest news and analysis

China is the world’s second-largest economy, after the United States, and it’s been growing so rapidly for so long that rapid Chinese economic growth has become part of the landscape for an entire generation.

Yet in recent years, people have been warning that the model underlying that rapid growth is unsustainable. And it now looks like the summer of 2015 is the time at which the unsustainable trend finally came to an end.

China’s stock market has been crashing this summer, which is both a sign of and potentially a cause of underlying economic problems in the country. Those problems have also led to a reduction in the value of China’s currency. This instability has roiled global financial markets more generally, but Apple — America’s largest company — has been hit especially hard, losing 18 percent of its value over the past six months and wiping out many tens of billions of dollars of paper wealth.

China’s benchmark Shanghai Composite index fell 1.2 percent on Wednesday, the fifth straight day of losses. Here are 11 charts that show some of the economic forces driving China’s stock market turbulence.

Between June 2014 and June 2015, China’s Shanghai Composite index rose about 150 percent, reaching a high of 5,166 on June 12. Then the bottom fell out of the market. In less than a month, it fell to 3,507 — a 32 percent decline.

Candidates say a lot of silly things when they’re trying to be relevant during campaigns. But Scott Walker’s Monday statement on the Chinese economy ... well, it’s a special level of bad. And it’s bad in a way that underlines one of Walker’s fundamental weaknesses as a candidate.

Walker calls on President Obama to cancel an upcoming state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping — as punishment for, among other things, the fact that Chinese GDP growth is slowing down. Lest you think I’m exaggerating, here’s the full statement:

China’s Shanghai Composite Index has fallen catastrophically — by 7.6 percent just on Tuesday. The decline follows a huge Monday collapse dubbed “Black Monday” and is part of a four-day slide; on the heels of another huge decline in July, this has erased the Chinese stock market’s 2015 gains entirely. On Monday, stock markets around the world dropped as well following the Chinese losses.

So what does this mean for China? China’s stock market is not a major part of the Chinese economy, so it’s unlikely that this crash alone will trigger a broader economic crisis there. But the political consequences could be quite serious. There is a big debate going on right now within China’s leadership over what to do about the economy, and this turmoil could push that debate in the wrong direction.

We’ve been here several times before: a sudden and dramatic lurch in the Chinese economy that looks like it could be the Big One, the beginning of the end of China’s economic miracle, perhaps even the beginning of the long-dreaded Chinese economic crash that would be globally disastrous.

Every time, China’s leaders have managed to fix the problem before it became a catastrophe. The Big One never comes. There are two schools of thought on this. One says this is because China’s leaders are smart, the country’s economy is basically healthy, and everything will be fine. The other says that these fixes are temporary, that China’s leaders are kicking the can down the road, and that China’s economy is ultimately unsound.

The Chinese stock market is in the news. And even though you probably haven’t been day-trading Chinese stocks, it’s a fascinating situation with potentially grave implications for the world’s second-largest economy. This looks to a lot of people — especially smug foreigners — like a Chinese version of the stock market mania the United States experienced in the 1990s. A bubble, in other words, that’s in the midst of popping. But financial markets are inherently unpredictable, so you should be wary of anyone who sounds too sure they know what’s going on.

So what’s happening? Well, one should always be cautious about being sure you know what’s happening in financial markets.