Chinese borrowers default in record numbers as economic crisis deepens
Chinese borrowers default in record numbers as economic crisis deepens
More than 8mn people blacklisted by authorities after missed payments on mortgages and business loans
"Defaults by Chinese borrowers have surged to a record high since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, highlighting the depth of the country’s economic downturn and the obstacles to a full recovery,” the Financial Times reports.
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The blacklisting is interesting, but a 1% default rate doesn't seem particularly high. E.g. the US default rate has possiblity never been that low (graph only goes back to 1991): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRSFRMACBS
Comparing numbers between drasticly different countries rarely makes sense. Americas rates work for America, china's rates work for China.
What is important is that its changing from what it has historically been comfortable at.
China’s system has a potential duality:
Everyone from the top to the bottom plays along when the pie is expanding, and endemic corruption can be treated as a predictable cost of doing business.
However, when the pie stops growing, there isn’t the level of contract assurance that other rich countries offer. The Pareto optimal competition between powerful interests once growth fully stalls will be very interesting to watch. Xi will have his hands full, picking winners and losers, and lots of billionaires and centimillionaires will head for the door, taking significant capital with them. Worse, foreign investment will tail off, and decreased predictability will cause foreign companies to look hard at production in other places. At the bottom of the economic ladder, corruption will be much more apparent and challenging.
Xi’s bet seems to be that he can use technological repression tools to manage discontent in a downturn. We’ll see; he may be right. If the Stasi had had access to Palantir, Israeli spy software, and Chinese hardware, Checkpoint Charlie might still be in place.
if their accounting was trustworthy they wouldnt be in this situation.
China reminds me of people who cheat at video games and forget how much that makes up their playstyle when they go over to someone else's house and can't cheat.