The FT's Robert Armstrong seems to really enjoy his perch at the intersection-of-business-and-pretty-much-anything-else-that-he-finds-interesting.
From the Financial Times' Unhedged newsletter, January 7:
Good morning. US markets wobbled only a bit yesterday, after Wednesday’s oh-lordy-the-Fed-really-meant-it meltdown, so we thought we would take a breath too, and look at some more global stories. Email us: robert.armstrong@ft.com and ethan.wu@ft.com
China’s slow-motion financial crisis For much of last year the biggest story in finance was the real estate debt crisis in China — until Evergrande’s collapse was shoved off front pages by the global inflation panic. Yet Evergrande remains a huge, moving story.
The latest sub-chapter unfolded this week, when a unit of another major Chinese developer, Shimao Group Holdings, defaulted on a loan from a China Credit Trust Co. Shimao’s dollar bonds due this year went from $71 to $48:....*****.....Another developer, Guangzhou R&F Properties, said it might miss a repayment next week. Its bonds, already trading at a fraction of par, got hit hard again, too. If you thought all the bad news about China real estate was priced in, you were wrong. We’re still looking for the bottom.The repercussions of this slow-motion crisis are described beautifully in yesterday’s FT Big Read by Sun Yu and Tom Mitchell. But very schematically, what has happened is this:....
....MUCH MORE
