- 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.