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Prices in China are rising quickly for food and other commodities, increasing pressure for policymakers tasked with keeping growth stable.

A basket of 30 vegetables hit 5.99 yuan per kilogram ($2.06 a pound) in the week ended Oct. 31, up 6.6% from the prior week. In the week ended Sept. 26, the price per kilogram had been 4.39 yuan ($1.51 a pound).

The inflationary pressure and the tightening trajectory of other countries' monetary policy will limit the scope China has to ease its monetary policy, said Bruce Pang, head of macro and strategy research at China Renaissance.

Limited ability to ease monetary policy means China will require more support from fiscal and industrial policies to prevent stagflation, Pang said. He expects the economy can still grow by about 4% to 5% in the fourth quarter.

© Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesShoppers browse vegetables at a fresh food market in Shanghai, China, on Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2021.

Stagflation is an economic phenomenon in which prices rise but business activity stagnates, leading to high unemployment and reduced consumer spending power.

Overnight, the U.S. Federal Reserve said it would begin cutting back on asset purchases — a move away from pandemic-era stimulus and toward monetary policy tightening.

The People's Bank of China has not explicitly said whether its decisions are based on U.S. monetary policy.

Food inflation data deleted

The latest weekly report from China's Commerce Ministry confirmed a trend of rising food prices. But the data released Tuesday afternoon was deleted from the ministry's site as of Wednesday morning.

It had shown that the week ended Oct. 31 saw a food price increase of 3.7% from the prior week, with pork prices rising by 10.6% and that of chicken eggs up by 6.4%, according to a report of the data available on the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper People's Daily. The overall food price gains followed a 4.3% increase the prior week.

The commerce ministry did not respond to a CNBC request for comment. Official inflation data for October is due out Nov. 10.

Consumers under pressure

The consumer price index, which measures costs for consumers, likely doubled its pace of growth in October "largely due to a sharp rebound in food inflation, as vegetable prices surged on lower supply due to adverse weather, more than offsetting subdued pork prices," Morgan Stanley economist Robin Xing and his team said in a report distributed Thursday.

However, their prediction of a 1.5% year-on-year consumer price index increase in October remains relatively low. Xing noted "subdued" consumer demand, especially as authorities announce tighter travel restrictions to control a spike in coronavirus cases in the last several days.

In September, the consumer price index's muted gains of 0.7% from a year ago were dragged down by a 5.2% decline in food prices.

The producer price index, a measure of production costs for factories, rose by a record 10.7% in September from a year ago. Surging raw materials costs have cut into manufacturers' profits.

Rising production costs in China will mean rising costs for the West that relies on it for all sorts of goods.

The producer price index likely set a new record of between 11% to 12% year-on-year growth in October, Pang said. That's based on his calculations from data released over the weekend as part of the official Purchasing Managers' Index for October.

Sluggish real estate market

While prices for food climb, they have stagnated where the majority of Chinese household wealth is stored — in real estate. Property accounts for about 70% to 80% of household wealth in China, and drives about 10% of household income, according to Moody's.

One of Beijing's top regulatory campaigns in the last 18 months has been a crackdown on the massive real estate industry's heavy reliance on debt. Worries about fallout from a default by indebted developer Evergrande rattled global investors earlier this year.

Unlike the West which bailed out its banks with public funds and made no significant changes to regulations, one analyst thinks that China's real estate market will instead struggle through 'prolonged stagnation' and Evergrande will be managed in such a way that it suffers a 'slow, painful death': China's real estate crisis explained

The housing market has slumped, even though prices can vary widely by city and region.

An early look at October new home prices barely rose from the prior month, up 0.09% and marking a fourth-straight month of slowing growth, according to industry data from China Index Academy. Official new home price data for last month is due out Nov. 15.

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© Sean Krajacic/The Kenosha News via AP, PoolDominick Black looks at a photograph held by Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger, where he along with Kyle Rittenhouse and a group of others posed on Aug. 25, 2020, during Kyle Rittenhouse's trial at the Kenosha County Courthouse in Kenosha, Wis, on Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2021.

Dominick Black was the first person to testify in the trial, taking the stand as the prosecution's first witness. Black bought the rifle for Rittenhouse months before the shootings because he was not old enough to own one at the time.

Black faces his own trial for buying the 17-year-old Rittenhouse an AR-15-style rifle he wasn't old enough to legally possess. He testified on Tuesday that he was stunned when Rittenhouse called him seconds after the first shooting.

"I didn't believe the gunshots were actually his until I got a phone call, and I answered it, and he just said, 'I shot somebody, I shot somebody,'" Black recounted.

Black said he was on the rooftop when he heard gunshots but didn't know Rittenhouse was involved until Rittenhouse called and said, "I shot somebody, I shot somebody."

Afterward, Black said, Rittenhouse was "freaking out. He was really scared. He was pale, shaking a lot." Black said Rittenhouse told him that he acted in self-defense because "people were trying to hurt him."

Richie McGinniss, who witnessed the Kyle Rittenshouse shooting first-hand, has told the jury that one of the men killed was attempting to get hold of Rittenhouse's rifle at the very moment the teen pulled the trigger.

McGinniss, who works for online publication the Daily Caller, was among the group of people who drove Joseph Rosenbaum to hospital when he was shot by Rittenhouse during a night of violent protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 25, 2020.

Speaking from the witness stand on Thursday, McGinniss gave his account of that night's events, telling the jury that he was standing several feet away from the scene, and that his eyes were "fixing at the barrel of the weapon" in Rittenhouse's hands at all times as the incident unravelled.

McGinniss claimed he feared that "something with the weapon was about to happen" when he saw Rosenbaum "running and eventually lunging towards the front portion of the rifle."

Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger repeatedly grilled McGinniss as to the exact position of Rosenbaum at the moment of the shooting, asking him if Rittenhouse fired as the latter was "falling." McGinniss disagreed with this interpretation, saying: "No, not falling, lunging," doubling down on his testimony.

It was as if, you know, if you were to lunge at somebody, if anybody were to lunge, they would probably stop themselves, you know, from falling face down on the ground, but the shots were fired in the exact instant that his momentum was going forward and that continued until Mr. Rosenbaum landed on the ground

McGinniss' testimony supports the argument made by Rittenhouse's lawyers that the teen, then 17, was acting in self-defense when he shot and killed Rosenbaum. The prosecution has argued that Rosenbaum was unarmed, and therefore was not capable of harming Rittenhouse.

Rittenhouse has been charged with homicide and reckless endangerment for shooting and killing 36-year-old Rosenbaum and 26-year-old Anthony Huber, as well as injuring 23-year-old Gaige Grosskreutz. His much-anticipated trial kicked off earlier this week, and has already been mired in controversy. Liberal commentators have been up in arms over the composition of the jury, which reportedly features only one non-white member. On Thursday, one of the jurors was dismissed over a joke he told a sheriff's deputy about Jacob Blake's police shooting. Blake, a black man, was left paralyzed from the torso down after he was shot by police seven times on August 23, 2020. His shooting sparked the protests in Kenosha, but was later ruled justified.

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