It’s been almost a year now since this whole affair started, I wonder how much they’ve managed to soften the blow to the Chinese economy since.
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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China is great at sweeping the trash under the rug so my guess the blow will be quite minimal. I do wonder how will this affect Chinese investment culture and real estate has been the investment strategy forever. Now people are slowly realizing that nobody wants to buy or rent their shitty investment and all of it is ghost money.
It's a two sided attack.
On one hand, their investment opportunities are limited. As a normal pleb the most they can do is buy an investment property. Stock market is pretty sketchy and limited to those with decent cash, so it leaves just real estate which is why so much gets pumped into it.
Then on the other side you have population decline. China is literally fucked from old age people and the preference to having a son. More women there also don't want to deal with the entitled little emperor, so they don't get married also. Population is on track to hit 500bill in 2100 (down from 1.4T at its peak). All those billions missing don't need apartments.
When it falls, it's going to be impressive.
Do you mean 500 million and 1.4 billion people?
Imagine trying to share this planet with 1.4 trillion other people 💀
I have a hard enough time seeing myself in the mirror
Hey guys, I found the vampire.
Will never fall too soon..
Sweeping trash under the rug doesn't make the trash disappear
Yeah but when you have a dictatorship you can make people who complain disappear.
So some poor dumdums will be left holding the bags, a few sent to organ harvesting prisons and then rince and repeat. As long as the peasants feel a bit richer every year and the local infra is getting built nobody dares to complain.
I bet the CCP is going to make the homeowners whole at a minimum to avoid the risk of social instability.
This graphic puts it into scale.
https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/us-bank-failures.png
I'm surprised Lehman Brothers isn't there. Is that expected?
Lehman was an investment bank, not commercial or retail which seems to be what's in the infographic. Unadjusted, WaMu had $328B total assets in 2007. Lehman had $680B in 2008- more than double.
What, no $300 billion bailout for the clown show?
Weirdos.
Pretty sure clown shows are just called circuses.
Nah, clowns are a part of a circus but not the whole deal.
Good. Nothing should be too big to fail.
They are on borrowed time. Chinese economic growth is investment based and now they've built enough condos to house their entire (huge) population twice. This will ruin the value of houses, which is where ordinary Chinese have their savings. Coupled with their poorly thought out demographic policy this will cause an insane crisis as the life savings of elderly Chinese evaporate while they don't have the working population to recover from this. There's this guy Peter Zeihan on YouTube who explains it better than I can. He expects China to be done within a decade.
I'm just wondering if they will attempt to invade Taiwan before that happens. They might not even be able to but with Xi completely out of touch with reality they might anyways
Everyone has been screaming China is donezo for over a decade. China is still the leading manufacturer of world goods.
Evergrande collapsing is going to be a massive hit but I don't think it will put China in the dumpster completely. Most nations have a similar debt mountain somewhere. Our own housing markets are in a similar bubble to China's.
The difference is that in western markets, (thanks to immigration) the population is still growing (for now) and the construction industry still hasn’t recovered from 2009 afaik. So you got the same number of houses for more people, therefore skyrocketing prices
It is not just more people for the same number of houses, but importantly also changed preferences.
If more people want to live in the city, then empty houses in the countryside don't help.
I'd have to look it up, but I also think the amount of living space used per person has increased. Especially for older people that keep on living in the same house (which they might own), even after the children have left.
No housing prices are skyrocketing because of cheap mortgages. Nobody would have the money to buy a house if loans weren't so ridiculously cheap.
The exact same thing that caused the crisis in 2008
Also China could accept immigration too if they were desperate. For now their focus seems to be robotics but if they fail to automate sufficiently immigration remains an option. I heard they have some empty housing complexes rotting away...
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Isn't the US trillions in debt, with a large part of it to China?
No, most of the debt is owned domestically by the people
Yeah you're right. One article says 29 trillion domestically and only 1 to China.
Most debt is owned by other Government institutions, the Federal Reserve, and the like. A lot of the US's public debt exists as ledger entries to mark which departments of the government owe which other departments. This allows extra money earmarked for one department to indirectly be used for other things instead of just being allowed to sit unused.
Besides, almost all of the debt is in dollars, so worst case scenario, money printer goes brrrrrr
If you stop thinking about the metadata (the financial part) of the system and instead you look at the real system in terms of resources available for ensuring a decent standard of living, you might possibly find that the working population can farm, manufacture and service its own and it's retired population's needs. China could make the reforms needed to adjust the meta to fit the real system that supports this standard of living. It might for example remove failed markets from parts of the economy such as retirement savings, replacing them with universal pensions. Of course this isn't unique to China, but such reforms depend on how firmly a nation has bought into the neoliberal ideology. My point is that in general, the financial part of the system never matches the real. There's always discrepancies (e.g. positive and negative externalities to name some) large or small. It's a model. It seems to me that we often make the mistake to consider just the model and drive real decisions and predictions based on it even when it drastically diverges from reality, sometimes with horrific consequences. E.g. the model says increasing extraction of fossil fuels is fine when we have scientific proof it isn't.
Peter Zeihan is full of shit. He’s been predicting China will collapse in a decade for well over a decade now. Here’s a video explaining some of the basic mistakes he makes in his analysis.
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Posting this source which goes through some of the methodology that came out to China potentially having enough vacant real estate to house possibly as high as 3 billion people. A lot of caveats with that estimate, there's no official data available, and it's on the high end of a range of estimates, but seems clear they have way too much real estate either built or paid for in advance but not built (and realistically much of that money gone as these companies go under).
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Evergrande, the world's most indebted developer with more than $300 billion of total liabilities, sent a struggling property sector into a tailspin when it defaulted on its debt in 2021.
That deepened a debt crisis in the sector and sparked many other company defaults in a damaging economic blow that to this day remains a drag on growth.
But it is expected to have little impact on the company's operations including home construction projects in the near term, as it could take months or years for the offshore liquidator appointed by the creditors to take control of subsidiaries across mainland China - a different jurisdiction from Hong Kong.
Its original plan was scuppered in late September when it said its billionaire founder Hui Ka Yan was under investigation for suspected crimes.
The liquidation petition was first filed in June 2022 by Top Shine, an investor in Evergrande unit Fangchebao which said the developer had failed to honour an agreement to repurchase shares it had bought in the subsidiary.
The proceedings had been adjourned multiple times and Hong Kong High Court Justice Linda Chan has said previously the December hearing would be the last before a decision was made whether to liquidate Evergrande in the absence of a "concrete" restructuring plan.
The original article contains 362 words, the summary contains 210 words. Saved 42%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So TL;DR it has no teeth really.