257
submitted 9 months ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/world@lemmy.world
  • A Hong Kong court on Monday ordered the liquidation of real-estate developer China Evergrande Group.
  • Evergrande is the world's most indebted developer with more than $300 billion of total liabilities.
  • It defaulted on its debt in 2021, sending China's struggling property sector into a tailspin.

———

A Hong Kong court on Monday ordered the liquidation of China Evergrande Group, a move likely to send ripples through China's crumbling financial markets as policymakers scramble to contain the deepening crisis.

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.

A liquidation ruling of the developer which has $240 billion of assets will likely jolt already fragile Chinese capital and property markets.

Beijing is now grappling with an underperforming economy, its worst property market in nine years and a stock market wallowing near five-year lows, so any fresh hit to markets could further undermine policymakers' efforts to rejuvenate growth.

top 30 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] Deceptichum@kbin.social 31 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] drmoose@lemmy.world 20 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] 50MYT@aussie.zone 5 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] kiku123@feddit.de 15 points 9 months ago

Do you mean 500 million and 1.4 billion people?

[-] NateNate60@lemmy.world 14 points 9 months ago

Imagine trying to share this planet with 1.4 trillion other people 💀

[-] SuckMyWang@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

I have a hard enough time seeing myself in the mirror

[-] jaybone@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Hey guys, I found the vampire.

[-] ShroOmeric@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

Will never fall too soon..

[-] rbesfe@lemmy.ca 3 points 9 months ago

Sweeping trash under the rug doesn't make the trash disappear

[-] drmoose@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe 22 points 9 months ago

What, no $300 billion bailout for the clown show?

Weirdos.

[-] Rodeo@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 months ago

Pretty sure clown shows are just called circuses.

[-] rimu@piefed.social 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)
[-] idefix@sh.itjust.works 7 points 9 months ago

I'm surprised Lehman Brothers isn't there. Is that expected?

[-] PanArab@lemmy.world 16 points 9 months ago

Good. Nothing should be too big to fail.

[-] autotldr 7 points 9 months ago

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!

[-] CanadaPlus@futurology.today 7 points 9 months ago

So TL;DR it has no teeth really.

[-] ConfusedPossum@kbin.social 4 points 9 months ago

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

[-] Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 16 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee 2 points 9 months ago

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

[-] Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

[-] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 1 points 9 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

the crisis in 2008

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[-] Lath@kbin.social 0 points 9 months ago

Isn't the US trillions in debt, with a large part of it to China?

[-] AmberPrince@kbin.social 10 points 9 months ago

No, most of the debt is owned domestically by the people

[-] Lath@kbin.social 5 points 9 months ago

Yeah you're right. One article says 29 trillion domestically and only 1 to China.

[-] NateNate60@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee 3 points 9 months ago

Besides, almost all of the debt is in dollars, so worst case scenario, money printer goes brrrrrr

[-] Ranvier@sopuli.xyz 2 points 9 months ago

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).

https://www.businessinsider.com/china-vacant-homes-3-billion-people-housing-crisis-ex-official-2023-9?op=1

[-] SailorMoss@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[-] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 1 points 9 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Here’s a video

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
257 points (98.5% liked)

World News

38969 readers
2013 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS