China Factory-Gate Deflation Deepens on Commodity Price Fall

``China's factory-gate prices extended a record stretch of declines, with the sharpest drop in two years in December, suggesting room for further monetary easing. The producer-price index slumped 3.3 percent from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said in Beijing today, compared with the median projection for a 3.1 percent decline in a survey of analysts by Bloomberg News. ''