The former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia says the conventional wisdom about China’s slowing economy is wrong. Growth may be slowing but there’s no crisis or hard landing looming, says Stephen Roach now a senior fellow at the Yale School of Management.

He tells The Daily Ticker that China’s economy had been growing at an “unsustainable blistering 10% annual rate for over 10 years” and is now in transition from an economy led by exports to one targeting domestic consumption and services, and that’s a good thing.

“Services generate about 35% more jobs per unit of GDP than manufacturing and construction,” says Roach, adding that China can grow a lot slower pace, 7% or 8% for example, and still achieve the same employment, labor absorption, poverty reduction goals.

Related: Plenty of Things to Worry About in China, Bird Flu is Not One

Perhaps, but a private survey on Monday showed that China’s services economy in April grew at its slowest rate in almost two years. The HSBC China Services

T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire founder, chairman and CEO of hedge fund BP Capital, may be one of the most outspoken insiders in the energy industry. Never one to shy away from controversy, Pickens eagerly discussed “fracking,” Oklahoma earthquakes and his decision to get out of wind energy in an interview at the Milken Institute Global Conference 2013. Last year the business magnate and entrepreneur said Charles and David Koch were the “biggest deterrent” to a national energy policy.

Here’s what he told us this year at the Beverly Hilton:

“Fracking”

Pickens refutes charges that hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” has damaged the environment and caused earthquakes in Oklahoma, Ohio and Pennsylvsania. Pickens, who went on his first “frack” job in 1952, says he’s “had no environmental issues” with the more than 2,000 wells he’s fracked over the years.

“You’re not damaging anything,” he declares. “Nobody gives any evidence you’re damaging anything.”

Fracking involves injecting millions

By Michael Santoli

The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped above 15,000 for the first time in its long history Friday morning on the strength of a thousand fears going unrealized.

The employment report for April — showing a greater-than-forecast 165,000 new jobs and an unemployment rate slipping down to 7.5% — was just the latest bit of economic news that looked merely OK but was good enough to allay widespread anxiety that the U.S. economic recovery was buckling.

Traders were clearly leaning in the direction of a weaker result following a subpar estimate of April private-sector job gains by ADP on Wednesday. This has been the abiding pattern of the 2013 rally – a steep wall of worry about government- spending cuts, weak corporate revenue growth, tax increases and sluggish overseas economies that is scaled with the help of strong corporate balance sheets, sturdy credit markets, cheap money furnished by central banks and investors’ replenished risk appetite.

Splashy round index levels