It looks like the economic recovery is being officially confirmed globally and not just here in the US as China Trade Rebound Aids Global Economic Recovery:

China’s exports surged in December and imports rose to a record in a stronger-than-forecast trade rebound that may lessen the case for governments to sustain stimulus programs this year.

Exports climbed 17.7 percent from a year earlier, the first increase in 14 months, and imports jumped 55.9 percent, the customs bureau said on its Web site yesterday. Year-on-year comparisons are affected by the tumble that began in late 2008, when the global credit crisis deepened.

It’s not that we don’t want a recovery to happen, it’s just that we’re not sure if we can believe the Chinese customs bureau. We may be biased in our assessment, of course, because we are very much anti-communists here at SHTF Plan, but it seems to us that China has blown a huge bubble, and in order to keep it from collapsing they may need to pump some of their numbers a little bit.

Considering the US Government recently revised 2009’s 3rd quarter GDP growth by about 38% (to the down side), our suspicions about China are probably well founded.

We’re not the only ones that have misgivings about China’s numbers. James Chanos, the hedge fund investor who made a pretty penny when Enron collapsed because he didn’t believe their numbers either, sees an economic crash in China:

As most of the world bets on China to help lift the global economy out of recession, Mr. Chanos is warning that China’s hyperstimulated economy is headed for a crash, rather than the sustained boom that most economists predict. Its surging real estate sector, buoyed by a flood of speculative capital, looks like “Dubai times 1,000 — or worse,” he frets. He even suspects that Beijing is cooking its books, faking, among other things, its eye-popping growth rates of more than 8 percent.

“Bubbles are best identified by credit excesses, not valuation excesses,” he said in a recent appearance on CNBC. “And there’s no bigger credit excess than in China.” He is planning a speech later this month at the University of Oxford to drive home his point.

Central planners around the world can only play these games for so long before the effects of nature take hold.

The global economy remains very much intertwined, so any bubbles that burst, whether in the US or China or Europe, will detonate the entire Superbubble.

Chanos article hat tip Tom of the North