The economic troubles in the West should be hurting Asia's manufacturing economies, right?  With buyers having to scale back?  The news out of China this morning then might come as a bit of a surprise: China's exports were up 48.5% in May over the same month last year.  It is the highest jump in exports in six years, according to Bloomberg/Business Week.  

But, as Bloomberg points out, one big reason for the startling figure is that May of 2009 was a a particularly bad month for exports from China.  The question now is whether the impact of the problems in Europe are simply on hold, and we'll see lower numbers next month.  As Jacob Greber writes, the Asian/Pacific economies (China, South Korea, Australia) that seem to be great places to "weather the European Crisis" right now, will feel the pain of Europe in some form:

East Asia wouldn’t be unscathed by a return to recession in the advanced economies, Burns said. “That’s going to have important knock-on effects in East Asia, particularly because it is a very heavy trading region.”

The Bank of Korea cited the European situation in keeping its benchmark interest rate at a record-low 2 percent today.

“There is a considerable degree of uncertainty over the actual growth path, caused by the fiscal problems of European countries,” Governor Kim Choong Soo and his policy board said in a statement today.

At the same time, Asia will continue to lead the global rebound, International Monetary Fund Deputy Managing Director Naoyuki Shinohara said June 9. That brings its own challenges, with increasing capital inflows and the risk of overheating if policy makers fail to take “appropriate” action, he said in a speech in Singapore.

Read the full article here.