Things are going to get interesting soon - from BoingBoing:
Signs that China's real-estate bubble will burst and take the economy with it
China's real-estate bubble is the largest in human history, and despite years of warning signs, it has grown and grown, spilling over into the rest of the world.
It's hard to overstate just how crazy China's real-estate market is: 25% of the country's GDP comes from construction, and 80% of the nation's wealth is in domestic property holdings. That's $65T, nearly double the size of the economies of every G7 nation combined.
The market has been kept afloat through China's massive "shadow banking" system, itself such a systemic risk that the Chinese government has been forced to crack down on it. Now, China's massive, blue-chip property developers have had their debt downrated to CCC and are struggling to issue new bonds -- Moody's rates the debt of 51 out of 61 Chinese property companies as "junk."
Central planning is really working out for them. Capitalism would have limited the size of this bubble.
Leave a comment