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Millane familyGrace Millane had dreamed of travelling the world since she was a little girl.
“I found a school project she did about New Zealand and it said ‘I’m going there one day’. And she did get there,” her mother Gillian says, proudly.
Growing up in Wickford in Essex, Grace was a livewire who made friends wherever she went.
“She was my best friend, we would always disappear to the pub for a quick drink and we would go away on holiday together,” Gillian says.
Five years ago, after graduating from the University of Lincoln, Grace set out on a year-long solo backpacking adventure across the world.
After a six-week tour of Peru, she arrived in New Zealand. Less than a fortnight later, on the eve of her 22nd birthday, she was strangled to death by a man she met on a dating app.
Grace was constantly in touch with her family but had not responded to their birthday messages on 2 December, so they reported her missing to the police.
Gillian was recovering from surgery for breast cancer and not able to join the search. Her husband, Grace’s father David, flew out to New Zealand but a week later, their daughter’s body was found in bushland on the outskirts of Auckland.
During a three-week trial, the family had to sit through her killer’s attempts to pass the murder off as “rough sex” gone wrong and his claims that Grace asked to be strangled.
“I felt like Grace was on trial and she couldn’t defend herself. As a parent, I didn’t want to listen to that. It was horrendous.
“You can’t ask for your own death. It is ludicrous this can be used as a defence.”
A jury unanimously convicted him of murder and he was sentenced to life in prison.
The family decided never to mention his name again. “We never say it. It’s a waste of energy. I don’t care about him, I don’t think about him,” Gillian says.
Gillian has since campaigned against the rough sex defence, with the charity We Can’t Consent To This, and has helped to change the law in England and Wales.
Two years after Grace’s murder, Gillian’s husband David died from cancer, which left her in a “really dark place”.
Gillian credits her family and friends, long walks and “lots of counselling” for her still being here today.
“I did contemplate suicide. That is a horrid place to be. But I couldn’t bring any more sadness to the family. Grace had such a bright future and it was taken away from her and us.
“I will never see Grace in a wedding dress or see her grandchildren. This is a life sentence I’ve got. This is me until the day I die. But there is a light and I found it. You have to find that inner strength.”
David died during Covid and they could not be together as a family but Gillian later threw a memorial party and it became a turning point.
“A friend dragged me up to dance. I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do but I laughed and I looked around the room and everyone was smiling.
“My toes stay in the darkness but the rest of me is facing the sun a bit. Sometimes it goes up to my waist and I do go into that black hole but I have people behind me who support me.”
Christmas is a very difficult time for Gillian, so last year she decided to spend it climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, which was “incredibly emotional”.
“I went from not wanting to leave the house to climbing a mountain on the other side of the world.
“I had to train and be focused. I didn’t realise the power it was giving me and how much it was helping me.
“Everything was aching but I knew Grace and David would be pushing me up there. They wanted to still be here, they didn’t want to go, so I thought ‘right get up there’.”
Gillian left a stone for Grace and David at the top, in tribute to them.
“Whenever I go somewhere special, I put the stones there, so they are travelling. If someone picks a stone up and moves it, they go somewhere else.”
Her efforts raised £33,000 for the White Ribbon charity, which aims to end male violence against women. Gillian received a thank you card from the charity, saying the money had been used to fund education programmes in 65 schools in the Hull area.
“I just want to raise awareness and get that message out there about violence against women so that no other family has to live this life I live,” Gillian says.
Four years ago, with her niece Hannah, Gillian started the charity initiative Love Grace. They collect donated handbags and fill them with toiletries for domestic abuse victims.
So far, they have filled 15,600 bags for women in the UK and across the world and they received an award from the prime minister.
Grace loved handbags, Gillian says, and each bag has a tag on it with her handwriting.
“It’s a simple idea but it has really taken off,” Gillian says. “We were just doing it for our grief so that Grace would never just be a number.
“They get this bag, they are not expecting it and they have gone through hell. We get hundreds of letters from people who have received the bags, it’s heartbreaking.”
Next year, Gillian is applying for Love Grace to become an official charity and she will be training for a trek to Everest basecamp in September, with a plan to place two more stones there.
One day she hopes to travel to New Zealand, a country which Gillian says has really taken Grace to their hearts.
“I still get loads of messages of support from there. It wasn’t New Zealand or travelling that killed Grace, or anything she did. It was that individual.”
Five years on from her daughter’s death, living without Grace has not got any easier. But Gillian is still trying hard to face the sun.
“I should never have buried my child and certainly she should never have died the way she did. People keep saying I’m really strong but I don’t think so, I’m just a mum.”
She adds: “I am more resilient than I ever thought I was. I do think David and Grace would be proud. I think Grace would laugh and say these treks are a mid-life crisis.
“I will never get over it but I just know I’ve got to make the world a better place. I want to change things so that no other family has to go through what we go through. That has got to be a good thing.”
If you, or someone you know, is feeling emotionally distressed, BBC Action Line has put together a list of organisations which can help.
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SHANGHAI: The world of Chinese chess is in uproar over rumours of cheating and a bad behaviour scandal that saw the national champion stripped of his title on Monday (Dec 25) after a victory celebration ended with him defecating in a hotel bathtub. Xiangqi, or Chinese chess, has been hugelyContinue Reading
TAIPEI: Taiwan is not seeing any signs of large-scale Chinese military activity before elections next month but is keeping a close watch on China, the island’s defence ministry said on Tuesday (Dec 26). Taiwan’s Jan 13 presidential and parliamentary election will shape the Chinese-claimed island’s relations with Beijing, which hasContinue Reading
BEIJING: Chinese state media accused the Philippines on Monday (Dec 25) of repeatedly infringing on China’s territory in the South China Sea, spreading false information and colluding with extraterritorial forces to cause trouble. The Philippines has relied on US support to continually provoke China, with such “extremely dangerous” behaviour seriouslyContinue Reading
Today’s extreme focus on the Bank of Japan is pivoting to how the People’s Bank of China plays the economic minefield that lies ahead in 2024.
Over the next 12 months, China will stress test Asian economies as rarely before. Beijing’s dueling priorities of stabilizing growth and reducing the frequency of boom/bust cycles will center on the actions of Governor Pan Gongsheng at PBOC headquarters.
Since taking the PBOC’s reins in July, Pan has been a study in monetary restraint. Even as the all-important property sector stumbles, Pan’s team has avoided channeling giant waves of liquidity into the market. Targeted blasts, yes. But Team Pan is foregoing the powerful easing moves that traders came to expect from previous PBOC leaders.
One reason is that the yuan is under growing pressure in global markets. Nothing would get China closer to this year’s 5% growth target faster than a lower exchange rate. Pan, though, is prioritizing yuan stability over stimulus in ways that continue to confound hedge funds betting on a weaker currency.
This patience is partly about China’s default-plagued property developers. Each drop in the yuan makes paying off offshore debt more expensive and challenging. It’s also about the PBOC’s determination not to reward bad behavior through moral hazard-encouraging bailouts.
Yet this balancing act may become more precarious as China’s domestic economy underperforms at the same time the external sector disappoints.
This isn’t the only way China will stress test Asia’s economies. Writing in the latest Global Polarity Monitor newsletter, Asia Times’ David Goldman argues that China will engage in “limited, stylized probes of Asian governments’ pain threshold” in naval and military matters.
Questions about the region’s economic pain threshold vis-a-vis China’s slowdown loom large as 2024 approaches.
Though the US has beaten the odds and avoided a recession, this luck might be running out. The cumulative effects of 11 US Federal Reserve rate hikes in 18 months – and the highest Treasury debt yields in 17 years – are generating intensifying headwinds. Europe is facing a treacherous 2024 as the German economy contracts.
“The fiscal woes of the last month have clearly left their mark on the German economy, with the country’s most prominent leading indicator showing just how difficult it will be for the economy to bounce back,” says ING Bank economist Carsten Brzeski.
Japan, meanwhile, may already be in recession. Data since the economy’s 2.9% contraction in the July-September period offers little hope Japan isn’t ending 2024 in the red. The sense of fragility was buttressed by the Bank of Japan’s decision on Tuesday (December 19) to leave quantitative easing in place.
Following the no-action on rates announcement, BOJ Governor Kazuo Ueda said it would be “inappropriate to think that we will rush to change our policy because the Fed is likely to move within the next three to six months.” That, he added, means the BOJ will “observe the situation for a little longer.”
To economist Krishna Guha at Evercore ISI, this means the BOJ will “methodically” prepare the ground for a first hike to exit negative rates rather than shock markets with a surprise exit, perhaps by April.
Yet that might depend more on how China fares in the months ahead than any other variable. As China’s economy loses altitude, “the case for early [BOJ] normalization is in jeopardy,” says Carlos Casanova, senior economist at Union Bancaire Privée.
As of now, the “conditions for [a] BOJ to pivot” away from QE “have not yet been met,” Casanova says. The first condition, he adds, is for 10-year Japanese government bond (JGB) yields to be at or slightly above the “new upper bound” of 1.0%. The second is for inflation to remain above the BOJ’s 2.0% target for an extended period. Both conditions remain uncertain.
Here, the BOJ isn’t operating in a vacuum. Economist Louis Gave at Gavekal Dragonomics notes that “assuming that the Fed is sounding dovish more for political reasons than any genuine concerns, the next few months should see a weaker US dollar.”
If, at the same time, Gave says, the “Bank of Japan eventually abandons its negative interest rate policies and China’s stimulus attempts start to gain a modicum of traction – and the People’s Bank of China has ramped up liquidity injections of late – we could end up with a setup that is bearish for long-dated bonds across OECD countries. Most, but especially, in the US.”
Among these central banking powers, the PBOC is a real wildcard in 2024. Odds are the BOJ will be forced to “taper” a bit in the months ahead, says Kelvin Wong, senior market analyst at OANDA. “It seems that mounting pressure from the public and private sectors has arisen.”
Wong notes that prominent Japan business lobby Keidanren head Masakazu Tokura is urging the BOJ to “normalize monetary policy as early as possible.” Intriguingly, Economy Minister Shindo attended the BOJ’s December 19 meeting as a representative from the Cabinet Office.
“It’s rare,” Wong says, “for a Cabinet minister to attend BOJ monetary policy meetings as such ‘attendee roles’ are usually assigned to deputy ministers. In the past meetings that cabinet ministers attended had resulted in major monetary policy changes such as the launch of the mega quantitative asset-buying program in April 2013.”
Headwinds from China are among the forces complicating BOJ rate decisions.
The same goes for Bank of Korea officials in Seoul. Sputtering mainland demand has caused an about-face in South Korean exports. In recent months, the BOK cited weak global demand, led by China’s slowdown, as depressing demand for tech goods, undermining the country’s outbound shipments.
Taking a longer-term perspective, economists are mulling what China’s downshift means for the region.
“The Chinese economy has grown at an unprecedented pace since the 1980s, gaining importance globally, particularly after the country joined the World Trade Organization in 2001,” notes economist Sewon Hur at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
However, Hur notes, “the pace of growth is likely to slow as China’s economy matures because of its demographic structure and its increasing proximity to economic and technological frontiers.”
Additionally, Hur argues, “China may face more significant headwinds than would be typically expected. Notably, the country’s growth in total factor productivity — the efficiency of production — the largest contributor to China’s growth, has steadily declined since 2000. This trend is projected to continue over the next decade and beyond.”
As Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang get a handle on the economy’s troubles, Southeast Asia might come into its own as a regional growth engine, argues Eunice Tan, a credit analyst at S&P Global Ratings.
“This shift could constrain the medium-term upside for China’s issuers while improving those of issuers in India, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia,” Tan says.
S&P projects that China’s gross domestic product will slow to 4.6% by 2026 after growing at a 4.8% pace in 2025. By comparison, S&P sees India growing 7.0% by 2026, while Vietnam grows 6.8%, the Philippines expands 6.4% and Indonesia accelerates at a roughly 5% pace.
“Despite stimulus,” Tan says, “China’s property sector remains stressed. Constrained access to credit support and high corporate debt leverage are denting liquidity profiles, particularly of property developers and heavily indebted local government financing vehicles.”
At the same time, Tan adds, “we expect regional interest rates to likely stay high, given the US Federal Reserve will maintain a tight monetary policy to bring inflation within target. Our base case sees the US and Europe avoiding a recession in 2024, but the risk of a hard landing remains, which could affect Asia-Pacific’s exports to these regions.”
Making matters worse, China’s stumble could generate any number of downside surprises in the year ahead. The problem is that the government still hasn’t “addressed the most important issue: credit risk related to developers,” analysts at Macquarie Bank write in a report.
“Without a lender of last resort, a self-fulfilled confidence crisis could easily happen as falling sales and rising default risks reinforce each other,” Macquarie argues. “Indeed, some large developers have recently seen their credit risks rising rapidly.”
Economists at Nomura add that “China’s property sector has yet to bottom out. Markets appear to have been a bit too optimistic about the property stimulus policies over the past two months.”
If there’s any good news in the short run, write economists at Citigroup, Beijing’s “continued emphasis on supporting real estate financing and local government financing vehicle (LGFV) debt resolution will continue [to help] prevent risks [from] escalating.”
Citi analysts note that “as fragile growth continues to call for an accommodative monetary environment” by the PBOC, “more supports are still needed to boost private sentiment.”
Last month, Moody’s threatened to cut China’s credit rating, highlighting concerns over the slow pace and cost of bailing out highly indebted local governments and state firms slammed by the property crisis.
The specter of an actual downgrade of the second-biggest economy only adds to the ways China will stress test Asia in the year ahead.
Follow William Pesek on X, formerly Twitter, at @WilliamPesek
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The Bank of Japan’s decision to leave interest rates unchanged on Tuesday (December 19) has more to do with events in 1999 than 2023.
Twenty-four years ago, the BOJ became the first major central bank to slash borrowing costs to zero. Over the next two years, in 2000 and 2001, it pioneered quantitative easing (QE).
Two-plus decades of free money has a way of warping economic dynamics. Over time, Japan gave new meaning to the concept of “economic capture” as the public and private sectors grew dependent upon QE.
This phenomenon more than anything else explains why Governor Kazuo Ueda is keeping the BOJ largely on autopilot. As the yen surges in anticipation of a BOJ “tapering,” Japan Inc is already nervously on alert and announcing downward revisions to earnings guidance.
This is fast removing the last of the risk tolerance that Ueda’s team might have had since April, when he took the helm. Back then, expectations were high that the BOJ would exit QE.
Instead, Ueda’s team made some minor tweaks to yield levels, but zero steps in the way of monetary tightening. In doing so, the BOJ missed its window to begin normalizing Japan’s rate environment.
More recently, the economy contracted 2.9% in the July-September period from the previous quarter. This is fanning fears Asia’s second-biggest economy is in recession as China slows and elevated US yields crimp global demand.
Add in the yen’s surge and it’s hard to see Ueda thinking now is an opportune moment to begin a pivot away from QE. (The yen declined 1% today on the BOJ’s decision to hold rates steady.)
That’s especially so given the BOJ’s policies these past 10 years. Since then, the central bank supersized its balance sheet in ways no other Group of Seven nation institution ever had.
Taking a more aggressive approach to ending deflation was exactly what Ueda’s predecessor, Haruhiko Kuroda, was hired to do. In 2013, then-prime minister Shinzo Abe tapped Kuroda to grease the skids for history’s greatest monetary onslaught.
Kuroda didn’t disappoint. He cornered the government bond market and gorged on stocks via exchange-traded funds. By 2018, the BOJ’s balance sheet was bigger than Japan’s US$4.8 trillion economy. The BOJ also became the top holder of Nikkei Stock Average and Topix index stocks.
But now that Japan is veering toward another recession, the question is whether the economy can withstand higher borrowing costs.
“The recent run of data has left the Bank of Japan in a difficult spot,” says Stefan Angrick, senior economist at Moody’s Analytics.
Angrick adds that “private consumption is treading water as wage gains trail inflation and employment conditions soften. Exports, which benefited from a rebound in car shipments and foreign tourism early in 2023, have been broadly trending sideways as weak global demand has capped growth.”
At the same time, GDP in the third quarter disappointed. Fresh fiscal support will keep the economy from sinking. “But,” Angrick says, “we don’t expect output to see major gains until the middle of 2024 as domestic and external demand stay on hold throughout the first half.”
And now, the BOJ is essentially trapped. Kuroda could have at least set the stage for exiting QE. On December 20, 2022, he tested the financial waters by letting 10-year yields rise as high as 0.5%. The moves sent shockwaves across global markets and the yen skyrocketed.
“With extremely high uncertainties surrounding economies and financial markets at home and abroad, the Bank will patiently continue with monetary easing, while nimbly responding to developments in economic activity and prices, as well as financial conditions,” the BOJ said.
Katsutoshi Inadome, senior strategist at SuMi TRUST, says “we expect” a policy “change is very likely next year. We believe it is likely the BOJ will raise interest rates in 2024″ after the central bank gets “a clearer view of forthcoming wage increases.”
Inadome adds that the BOJ “doesn’t want to start hiking at the same time the US begins cutting, so ideally it wants to begin its own policy changes before the US switches its policy.”
To be sure, Kuroda could have at least set the stage for an exit from QE. On December 20, 2022, he tested the financial waters by letting 10-year yields rise as high as 0.5%. The move sent shockwaves across global markets and the yen skyrocketing.
Kuroda never tried again. Between December and April, when he retired, Kuroda avoided any notable steps that might unnerve markets. Basically, Kuroda punted the hard decisions forward so that Ueda could make them.
Since then, Team Ueda let 10-year yields top 0.5% in July. Once markets registered their shock, the BOJ spent the next several days racing to buy assets to communicate no big changes were afoot. The same in October, when the BOJ let yields top 1%.
It’s a pattern that’s played out since 1999 more times than economists can count. And one that’s now limiting the BOJ’s options.
The yen’s powerful rally these last 10 days was driven more by events in Washington than Tokyo. As the US Federal Reserve signaled a likely end to its most aggressive tightening cycle since the mid-1990s, the dollar fell.
As the yen rose, rather innocuous comments by Ueda about the BOJ keeping its options open accelerated the yen’s ascent.
Now, Ueda finds himself in an impossible place — between global markets clamoring for action and domestic tensions telling him this isn’t the moment.
“A hawkish signal from the BOJ has the potential to push the US dollar to the yen below the 140 level, even with prevailing oversold conditions,” says Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote Bandank. “Conversely, should the BOJ disappoint the market once more, any price rallies could draw the attention of top sellers.”
Among the tensions with which the BOJ is contending: the lowest approval ratings of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s two-plus year reign.
Kishida’s 17% support rate makes US President Joe Biden almost seem popular. It reflects both political scandals and inflation outpacing both GDP and wage growth. That Japan may be in a recession hardly helps.
Though the BOJ is technically independent, Kishida’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) knows how to make life difficult for hawkish BOJ governors. This dynamic often has the BOJ pulling punches to avoid controversy.
The China factor is its own wildcard. With China growing the slowest in 30 years and the property sector in chaos, Japan has reason to worry Asia’s biggest economy will be exporting deflation in 2024.
Virtually everyone agrees the BOJ must begin normalizing interest rates as soon as possible. Not only have 24 years of zero rates warped credit markets, but they have also deadened the “animal spirits” needed to reinvigorate Japanese innovation and competitiveness.
But it’s hard to imagine the process beginning with the threat of more US Fed rate hikes hovering over Japan Inc. Despite widespread expectations that the Fed is done tightening, US inflation remains well above Tokyo’s 2% comfort zone amid historically tight labor markets.
Japan has the opposite challenge. The big question on Ueda’s mind is being confident he’s “gathered sufficient evidence of a virtuous wage-price cycle,” says currency strategist Carol Kong at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Japanese consumer prices rose 2.9% in October from a year earlier. Though down from a 4.2% rate in January, a 41-year high, inflation has now increased for at least 17 consecutive months.
Worse, it’s the “bad” kind of inflation — imported thanks to elevated energy and food prices, not organic pressures at home.
Over the last two-plus decades of QE — and especially the last 10 years — ultraloose BOJ policies sought to generate “demand-pull” inflation as strong consumption drove companies to hike prices and fatten paychecks.
Instead, Japan’s inflation is of the “cost-push” variety. It owes far more to Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion than BOJ easing. This is exactly the opposite of what Ueda’s predecessor Kuroda intended between 2013 and 2023.
At the same time, surveys show that Japan’s 126 million-person population economy isn’t enjoying this “victory” over deflation. Prices are rising faster than wages, an unwelcome dynamic that’s hurting household confidence.
This tension explains why Kishida’s approval numbers are mired in the low 40s, at best. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly meeting recently, Kishida described the economy as “currently still not fully stable.”
He pledged that Tokyo will unveil “measures to counter inflation” and “social measures to counter declining population.”
It’s a rough political environment for Ueda to navigate. But it’s one created by the events of 1999. And it suggests the BOJ will hold rates near zero longer than many investors realize.
Follow William Pesek on X, formerly Twitter, at @WilliamPesek
