A Hong Kong court ordered the liquidation of China Evergrande, the world’s most indebted property developer.
Evergrande has assets of about $245 billion, but owes about $300 billion.
Its demise is a “controlled collapse,” but still raises systemic risk and will hurt investors, says an analyst.
I am somewhat concerned about the global implications of this. Evergrande is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the Chinese real estate market.
Its even worse than that because retail investors in China use real estate as their primary investment vehicle. Where as someone in the USA might put money in a 401k for retirement or a brokerage account for investing, those don’t exist (in the reliable way) in China. So many regular people’s nest egg is tied up in real estate. So this isn’t just the real estate market getting wiped out, its millions of working class people’s life savings just evaporated.
Goddamn. Thanks for the perspective. This is much more horrible than I thought. It sounds like vulnerable working class people are going to be hurt the worst.
Not just a China thing. Canada is absolutely fucked with the government floundering to try and keep house prices from falling
Correct me if I’m wrong. I know that Canadian home prices are bonkers, especially in large cities like Vancouver or anywhere in the GTA (are the Quebecois also having this trouble?). However, the problem with Evergrande isn’t just failure of this company reduces home prices (which is where lots of Canadian savings resides), but Evergrande had taken deposits for tens of thousands of homes it never built or never completed.
So while the value/sale price of a home in Canada may be falling. At the end of the day it still does have value monetarily, and still serves a vital function of housing a family.
China’s situation with Evergrande means the money paid for the house by the owner simply evaporated with no possibility of a refund and the house doesn’t exist because it was never built (or never completed). So to me the China situation looks significantly more dire.
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It’s mental. A rundown shoebox in my neighborhood is upward of 600k even with interest rates as they are now.
We are holding on our apartment as long as possible, wishing that we don’t have to move until kindergarten is done for our youngest. The moment we are forced to move, it will cost us easily 1k$/month more for a lot less space.
Nah, they way things are, if the canadian housing market falls, the whole economy will shit the bed. The GDP is currently driven by the housing market, the nations finances are literally built on a house of cards.
Is that specific to rural areas? I’d be surprising to see urban prices dropping.
That sounds like potentially violent “protests” in the future.
How did it get so bad? Is there a tl;Dr anywhere that explains it fully?
This is from Economics Explained two years ago. It basically explains the whole thing, but it isn’t really a TLDR.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbH_8Nj51HU
If that’s too long, Peter Zeihan recently gave a fair summary in a six-minute video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD3m6U6g53k
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=lbH_8Nj51HU
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=JD3m6U6g53k
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I think it’s something like: CCP controls what investments citizens make. CCP wants to expand infrastructure and build up a lot of properties. The company gets overfunded. CCP also implements one child policy for like, idk four decades. Not enough people to live in all the properties they built that never relied on market demand.
It’s a ponzi sceme with extra steps
Maybe they bought too many houses in the US and can’t rent them for 5000/m