and bloomberg reporter ken hoffman, who just returned from china, says he has plenty of anecdotal evidence that the economy there is in greater trouble than can be seen by the numbers. he joins us now. so you focus on metals mining. when you went through the countryside, what did you see? >> so the new government came in about four years ago. about two years ago they had a meeting called the third plenum where they decide the country's future over the next ten years. what people were tell me is this is a completely different china. they are really going to change everything about what china does. and this was the first time i witnessed that change which is instead of you know, china consumes about half of the world's metal and mining cement, i think it's every 12 days they consume an entire year's worth of u.s. cement demandment now you are seeing the country saying enough is enough. you have heard the under the dome documentary about pollution. and they're really leaning toward sort of upgrading the economy with-- and it's going to have big implications to the world. >> srennivasan: so yo

the senior mining and metals analyst for bloomberg intelligence is that reporter ken hoffman, he joinseling to china for 40 years now. how bad is it? kelvin: 20 --ken: 20 years. i am not that old. what we saw is when this government came in and said we are going to change things centralize the government, stop the local government from crazy over-spending. this is the first time i went through china and saw it. i saw so many idle cranes. you drive around the city's -- the second tier cities, you really saw the slowdown. when we talked to executives what they told us is the numbers we are seeing, the numbers coming out of china are really bad. housing starts are down 18% -- new housing starts are down 18%. it is worse than that is what they are privately telling us. they see a slowdown. you see it in the stock market. people are not investing in real estate anymore. they're taking the money for fear of losing it in the real estate market and putting in the stock rocket. the money is there, -- stock market. the money is there, but a family. it is having a major impact on iran or, copper,

i have ken hoffman coming on. he has just been on a huge trip across china.at it is a lot worse than any of us think. he said he saw tons of cities with abandoned construction sites, idle cranes, half finished buildings. he thinks things are going to get worse before they get better. brendan: this sounds a lot like what you are saying earlier. you have official data from the chinese government and anecdotal data. you trust the official data? >> we look at a variety of indicators. obviously, you have to forecast gdp. that is part of our job. you need to guess what the government is going to deliver. we look at electricity, transportation, other indicators of data, retail sales. francine: you focus on whether the ghost towns mean we are going to see growth of 4% instead of the 6% we are expecting? >> are we going to see official growth at those levels? we are predicting official growth that 7% and we will predict that growth will slow down over the next couple years. olivia: we like to talk about the difference between main street and wall street in the united