Shares in crisis-hit Chinese property giant Evergrande have been suspended in Hong Kong amid reports its chairman has been placed under police surveillance.
It follows reports earlier this week that other current and former executives had also been detained.
Thursday’s market statement did not give a reason for the trading halt.
But it marks another low for the heavily indebted property giant which defaulted in 2021, triggering China’s current real estate market crisis.
In August, the firm filed for bankruptcy in New York, in a bid to protect its US assets as it worked on a multi-billion dollar deal with creditors.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Shares in crisis-hit Chinese property giant Evergrande have been suspended in Hong Kong amid reports its chairman has been placed under police surveillance.
When the firm defaulted on its huge debts in 2021, it sent shockwaves through global financial markets as the property sector contributes to roughly a quarter of China’s economy.
A credit crunch would be very bad news for the world’s second largest economy, because companies that can’t borrow find it difficult to grow, and in some cases are unable to continue operating.
Then on Wednesday, Bloomberg News reported the firm’s founder Hui Ka Yan, who is also known as Xu Jiayin, had been taken away by police this month and was being monitored at a designated location.
“China’s property-sector stress will continue to pose cross-sector credit risks in the near term,” wrote Lan Wang and Duncan Innes-Ker of Fitch Ratings.
“The government’s modest policy easing to date is unlikely to drive a sharp turnaround in homebuyers’ sentiment, even though it has led to some recent improvements in broader economic indicators,” their report said.
The original article contains 646 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Waiting for the tankards to twist themselves in knots explaining this one
Am I supposed to think a government holding the people running businesses (apparently very poorly in this case) accountable for their actions is a bad thing?
Yes, you are supposed to think that a government imprisoning a subject that has committed no crime is a bad thing
Where did you get this information that no crime has been committed and they are just being detained for shits and giggles?
I definitely can applaud their government for potentially holding them accountable. However they’re not arrested yet, and more importantly it’s not like this was a secret or fraud per se. We’ve been hearing about China’s “ghost cities” for a number of years now. Buildings built without people in them, buildings half built or only the shell to look complete, and that’s through media that’s allowed to escape their walled garden of information. To me there’s no way that even Xi himself didn’t know that Evergande or Country Garden wasn’t out defrauding the average Chinese citizen. So while good on them for putting them under surveillance today, it’s also terrible of them to have let this gone on.
I’m also an American though so my information may be limited on this subject matter since I’m not a focused person on one country or field.
The problem with using ghost cities as a metric is that China has a lot of pent up demand to urbanize and those cities would get filled within a few years. That pent up demand is what led to a generation of growth.
However, the plan works until it doesn’t.
China seems to have hit a limit on growth and that limit seems correlated to population growth instead of COVID. Worse, housing investment is a key way that people save for retirement. Even worse, municipalities and provinces can’t raise their own taxes, so they’ve been incentivized to keep building even as the national government has been trying to put the breaks on the economy.
There might have been some criminal malfeasance, but there is also a failure of public policy from the national level down. Part of it may be why Xi has become more autocratic in the past few years; the party is going through its first recession in a generation and this is new ground for them.
The question is are they being held accountable for doing something illegal, or are they being prosecuted for running a business poorly? One is good, the other is overreach.
Then again, considering how deeply involved the CCP is with large Chinese businesses this could be seen as a completely internal issue.
The company lost 99% evaluation and its shares lost most of its value. Soon this’s going to effect more than China’s economy
