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CommentaryA few months ago, when investors started to discuss the troubles of Evergrande, China’s largest real estate developer, many economists saw the problem as isolated and insignificant. The consensus message was that the real estate crisis was containable and that the Evergrande default would be a single case. However, Chinese defaults on local and overseas bonds rose to a record $43 billion in 2021, according to Bloomberg, led by widespread defaults in the real estate sector.Up until a week ago, the bonds of Zhenro Properties Group were seen as safe, and the company was widely perceived as a rare case...

Nothing is going right for Hangzhou at this moment. Walmart will be closing its Zhaohui store in that city on April 23 as a part of its overall plan to dump marginal locations—about 9% of the total—in China. Thanks to the world’s largest retailer, another large block of space in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, will go on the market at a time when there is generally too much supply. The problem is especially pronounced in the city’s premium office market. Hangzhou’s Grade A office buildings at the end of 2013 had, according to Jones Lang LaSalle, an average...

A new and extensive analysis of 2.4 million loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration in recent years shows a pattern of risky lending that could generate $20 billion in losses and harm thousands of the nation’s most vulnerable borrowers. By ignoring risks in loans it insured in 2009 and 2010, the study concludes, the F.H.A. is imperiling both borrowers and taxpayers who stand behind the agency. The analysis emerged less than a month after the F.H.A.’s auditor submitted a troubling report on the financial soundness of its insurance fund. In mid-November, the auditor estimated that the fund, which backs...

Chanos calls China syndrome John Daly Published Thursday, Sep. 29, 2011 2:56PM EDT Last updated Thursday, Sep. 29, 2011 5:30PM EDT China is in the midst of the biggest real estate bubble in human history—“Dubai in 2007 times 1,000.” And Sino-Forest, the less-than-meets-the-eye Canadian forestry play in China? That fits a pattern: Promoters “find a different investment hype, a story, to get people excited. In the 1990s, it was the Internet, and now it’s China. Unbridled growth.” More related to this story Why should we believe this prophecy of imminent calamity in the market that we were all counting on...

In a recent interview on CNBC with Ron Insana, one of the "old-timer" funds manager, Julian Robertson, predicted "utter global collapse" as a consequence of the bursting of the world-wide property bubble. Often called "Never Been Wrong Robertson", the former head of Tiger Management (once the largest hedge fund in the world), is extremely worried about the speculative bubble in real estate. Specifically, he is very worried about a world that is sustained by American consumer spending which is in turn 1/4 sustained by a property bubble. He predicts that 20 million people could lose their homes once the property...