China ’s economy grew 6.9 percent in the third quarter from a year ago, as a deepening industrial rout and slumping stock market pushed growth to its slowest quarterly pace since the global financial crisis of 2009. The weak result in the July-to-September period compares with growth of 7 percent in each of the first two quarters of the year, but was slightly better than the 6.8 percent rate that economists had forecast. The government’s official target for the year is growth of around 7 percent. “ China was facing increasing downward pressure of domestic economic development” in the first nine months of the year, the official statistics agency said in a statement accompanying the data released Monday morning in Beijing. Still, it added, “the overall performance of the national economy was stable and moving in a […]