Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, financial markets, and the world economy - where China's GDP is sprinting ahead while its consumers are still tying their laces.

Roaring exports lifted China's economic growth in the third quarter, despite consumer spending that lagged far behind factory output. The country's GDP grew by 4.5% year on year between June and September, beating economists' expectations and up from the second quarter's 4.3%. Over the first nine months of the year, the economy grew by 4.6%, putting it on track to hit the government's 2026 target of 4.5% to 5% growth without extra stimulus measures. In other words, the factory floor is doing the heavy lifting while households, property, and investment are still somewhere behind looking for their shoes.

Industrial production rose 5.5% in September, up from 5.2%, while retail sales increased just 1.1%, up from 0.4%. Fixed-asset investment fell 7.2% over the first nine months, property investment tumbled by 20.6%, and infrastructure spending remained weak. The headline GDP number tells you the economy is still moving forward; the internals tell you it's mostly running on one leg.

The semiconductor boom is increasingly a price story rather than a volume story, which is a polite way of saying things are getting more expensive rather than more plentiful. Beijing now has less urgency to ease aggressively, but unless local demand catches up, China remains dependent on the rest of the world absorbing what its factories produce - bringing the trade imbalance increasingly into view.

In Asian stock markets, Japan's Nikkei fell 0.6%, while China's CSI 300 rose 0.2%, Hong Kong's Hang Seng climbed 0.5%, and South Korea's Kospi added 1.5%. Meanwhile, increasingly violent street protests in France have put pressure on the euro, while French bonds sold off, pushing yields higher ahead of a bond auction later in the day. The yield on the 10-year French government bond rose more than 6 basis points to 4.842%, and the European single currency dipped 0.2% to $1.1218 versus the dollar. The spread between 10-year German and French government bonds widened by 6.5 basis points, indicating the premium investors pay for French debt over what is considered ultra-safe German debt.

Coming up at 1.30pm BST: Canada inflation for September.