“There is enough empty property in China to house over 90m people, says Logan Wright, a Hong Kong-based director at Rhodium Group, a consultancy. To put that into perspective: there are five G7 countries — France, Germany, Italy, the UK and Canada — that could each fit their entire population into those empty Chinese apartments with room to spare…
The Chinese state owns almost all of the country’s large financial institutions, meaning that if Beijing orders them to bail out Evergrande or other distressed property companies, they will follow orders
“Unless China’s regulators seriously mismanage the situation, a systemic crisis in the country’s financial sector is not on the cards,” says He Wei, an analyst at Gavekal, a research company.
“The context of the Evergrande crisis is entirely different from Lehman Bros in 2008. Most obviously, Lehman operated in a free market; Evergrande does not. Lehman’s fate was sealed when banks would no longer lend to it. The bulk of Evergrande’s liabilities are with domestic financial institutions, though foreign funds are understood to have bought its offshore US dollar bonds. China’s almost entirely state-owned banking sector will withhold credit from Evergrande for only so long as Beijing wishes.
So while Evergrande’s US dollar bonds are trading at levels that suggest default, Beijing is unlikely to allow the company’s woes to proliferate to the point at which they risk creating a systemic crisis. The correct way to view the Evergrande meltdown is to see it as a controlled explosion.”
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