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This is going to get real ugly, in my opinion. My friends who are in China say that the problems are much worse than what is being reported in the news here in the west, from their perspective on the ground anyway.
Unfortunately there's a lot of American and European funds, pension plans, companies, even government entities which through their greed and incompetence decided to invest in some of these truly scammy Chinese companies like Evergrande. I know that there were also some murmurs about Tether/USDT having some of their "collateral" holdings denominated in commercial paper which included a large amount of toxic assets - Evergrande being among them. Some people who would prefer to downplay these risks have attempted to discourage this kind of discussion online and claim that it is no longer an issue but who knows for sure?
All of those "ghost cities" that they built in China, along with the cultural tendency of Chinese to see real estate purchases/home ownership (along with some more unique aspects of Chinese culture insofar as how home ownership is dealt with on a governmental/legal basis) and their desire to constantly have increasing GDP numbers and a "growing economy" with statistics that people like Xi can point to and say "look at our success", all of that is going to lead to one real nasty downturn when it inevitably happens.
If you're not familiar with the ghost cities thing -- take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ8JBTIVUVw -- these things are all over China
I'm also in the process of uploading it as it's not available anywhere on YouTube in it's entirety - I will post a link here when it's done (my upload is kinda slow so it will take a bit), but if you have not already seen this fantastic documentary called "The China Hustle" (trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55892jT06aI) you really should watch it, it's incredibly eye-opening. It came out about 4 or 5 years ago and I think we are just now starting to see this fraud unravel, this amount of financial crime is unprecedented, it makes stuff like Enron or FTX look like child's play in comparison.
Awesome context, thank you. I'd be interested to hear more of what your friends are seeing / noticing that doesn't get much play in the West.
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Thanks for Your insights. Yes, they need to inflate the RE bubble asap now. Let's see how this plays out.
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