Free Republic

Chinese property developer Country Garden warned Tuesday that it cannot repay on time a 470 million Hong Kong dollar ($60 million) loan in the latest sign of distress after Beijing clamped down on mounting debts in the industry. The company said in a filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that it “expects that it will not be able to meet all of its offshore payment obligations when due or within the relevant grace periods,” including U.S. dollar notes the firm has issued. The company said its sales were under “remarkable pressure.” Country Garden earlier had been hailed as a...

One of China’s leading property developers, Sunac, has filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States, shortly after winning approval from its creditors to restructure nearly $10 billion worth of debt. The company filed a petition for Chapter 15 protection with the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on Tuesday. It’s the second big distressed Chinese developer in weeks to seek such protection: Evergrande made a Chapter 15 filing in the United States a month ago, after posting losses of $81 billion in the last two years. The process allows the court to step in when...

Heavily indebted property giant China Evergrande said on Thursday (Sep 28) its boss was suspected of "illegal crimes" after trading of its shares was suspended earlier in the day. The company announcement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange comes a day after media reports that Xu Jiayin was being held by police. No specific reason was given for the decision to suspend share trading, which also affected the company's property services and electric vehicle units. But late Thursday, the company said it had "received notification from relevant authorities" that Xu "has been subject to mandatory measures in accordance with the...

Shares in China Evergrande, the massively indebted property developer, fell back to all-time lows on reports that its chairman and founder has been arrested. Hui Ka Yan, who started the company in 1996, was taken away by police earlier this month and is being monitored at a designated location, Bloomberg reported.

Over the past ten years, China’s Communist Party (CCP) has strategically relied on its $4 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to boost its image and influence with at least 149 countries to date. But success has eluded its efforts, and the BRI strategy may be doomed as a result. Consider for example the CCP’s stalled attempts at pushing the BRI strategy across countries in Europe. Not anticipated were the barriers and delays created by sanctions imposed on Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. Before the sanctions, China used Russia as a convenient transit point for the shipment of BRI...

Hu Wei is the vice-chairman of the Public Policy Research Center of the Counselor’s Office of the State Council, the chairman of Shanghai Public Policy Research Association, the chairman of the Academic Committee of the Chahar Institute, a professor, and a doctoral supervisor. To read more by Hu, click here to read his article on “How did Deng Xiaoping coordinate domestic and international affairs?” Written on March 5, 2022. Translated by Jiaqi Liu on March 12, 2022. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the most severe geopolitical conflict since World War II and will result in far greater global consequences than...

High-tech new weapons are useful, but current military reform shortfalls hinder the PLA’s ability to employ such hardware.On March 3, Ryan Haas published an article in Foreign Affairs cautioning analysts and policymakers against adopting an exclusively alarmist attitude toward China. Such an alarmist attitude leads to increased anxiety among analysts and policymakers but is not based on the totality of the evidence. Haas speaks directly to how successful authoritarian regimes project strength while concealing weakness by controlling information leaving their borders. He argues that “policymakers in Washington must be able to distinguish between the image Beijing presents and the realities...

One day after warning Russian President Vladimir Putin he would face "severe" economic sanctions, "like ones he's never seen," should Russia invade Ukraine, resident Joe Biden assured Americans that sending U.S. combat troops to Ukraine is "not on the table." America is not going to fight Russia over Ukraine. "The idea that the United States is going to unilaterally use force to confront Russia invading Ukraine is not in the cards," said Biden. "We have a moral obligation and a legal obligation to our NATO allies," but "that obligation does not extend to ... Ukraine." Anti-interventionists who have opposed bringing...

Dobbs's DisciplesBy Donald Boudreaux | 17 Apr 2006 Economist Paul Craig Roberts has joined recently with the likes of Lou Dobbs and Sen. Charles Schumer to denounce so-called "outsourcing" -- that is, the importation of services. Roberts is aware that, throughout history, free trade has raised the living standards of ordinary people. But, he says, this historical record is irrelevant to today's world. He explained the reasons in a January 6, 2004, New York Times op-ed written with Sen. Schumer and entitled "Second Thoughts on Free Trade": "First, new political stability is allowing capital and technology to flow far more...

Chaos will reign as the future upends the past. Chaos doesn’t lend itself to prediction.Stupidity, arrogance, and evil ultimately destroy themselves, but their rampage was unabated in 2021. A group of stupid, arrogant, and evil people are using a virus and its variants to shepherd the world into a scheme of totalitarian global governance. This was conspiracy theory when the virus first surfaced; now it’s nakedly obvious reality. The one redeeming feature of the year was that more people saw the light. The self-impressed and self-anointed rule not by claim of divine right, but by claim of superior intelligence and...

The End of Russian Oil This newsletter is an adapted excerpt from Peter’s upcoming book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning. Think the Europeans will need to get by without Russian crude? You are 100% correct. But you are not thinking anywhere near big enough. Most of Russia’s oil fields are both old and extraordinarily remote from Russia’s customers. Fields in the North Caucasus are either tapped out or were never refurbished in the aftermath of the Chechen Wars, those of Russia’s Tatarstan and Bashkortostan provinces are well past their peak, and even western Siberian fields have...

This month, as the dollar surged to levels last seen nearly 20 years ago, analysts invoked the old Tina (there is no alternative) argument to predict more gains ahead for the mighty greenback. What happened two decades ago suggests the dollar is closer to peaking than rallying further. Even as US stocks fell in the dotcom bust, the dollar continued rising, before entering a decline that started in 2002 and lasted six years. A similar turning point may be near. And this time, the US currency’s decline could last even longer. Adjusted for inflation or not, the value of the...

The so-called "referendums" of 4 Ukrainian regions are coming to an end. Information has already appeared in the official Russian media that laws on the admission of new territories to the Russian Federation will be adopted within the next few days after the announcement of the results. But what will happen next? Naturally, in any situation there are several options for development. 1. The most likely one is that Putin will start waving a "nuclear club" and demand the withdrawal of the Armed Forces from the territory of these regions. First of all - Donetsk and Lugansk. Parts of the...

The latest issue of a journal entitled Turkistan al-Muslimah (Muslim Turkistan) was recently published by a jihadi web forum (muslm.net, March 26). The journal is identified as the work of al-Hizb al-Islami al-Turkistani (Turkistan Islamic Party - TIP). The first issue of the journal was originally published on July 2008 by al-Fajr Institute for Islamic Media, which usually publishes materials on the activities of al-Qaeda affiliated groups in regions such as Afghanistan, North Africa and “East Turkistan” (China’s Xinjiang province). The first issue was republished on jihadi websites in January, with the second issue following in February (almedad.com, January 26;...

It seems that Putin's visit to China at the end of May has brought the two countries closer. Russia will not only sell natural gas to China but provide certain military technology support. Meanwhile, China is going to invest in Russia Ironically, last autumn husbands of Chinese vegetable farmers were brutally expelled from southern Russia. Scholars pointed out that a series of anti-Chinese incidents that took place in Russia have reflected the real relationship between China and Russia. After Putin's visit to China, Russians seem very enthusiastic about China. The media keep tracking whether or not China will invest in...

For better or worse, phrases such "the Cold War" and "the clash of civilizations" matter. In a similar way, so do maps. The right map can stimulate foresight by providing a spatial view of critical trends in world politics. Understanding the map of Europe was essential to understanding the twentieth century. Although recent technological advances and economic integration have encouraged global thinking, some places continue to count more than others. And in some of those, such as Iraq and Pakistan, two countries with inherently artificial contours, politics is still at the mercy of geography.So in what quarter of the earth...

NEW YORK—An economic slowdown in China could ripple through the global economy and weigh on commodity prices and growth, star stock picker Cathie Wood of ARK Invest warned in a webinar on Tuesday.Wood, whose flagship $19.7 billion Ark Innovation fund was the top-performing U.S. equity fund in 2020, said that China’s recent steps to crack down on sectors ranging from gaming to education to financial firms are increasing the likelihood of a policy mistake that leads to a sharp slowdown.“I really do think that the policy makers in China are beginning to play with fire,” she said, adding “We will...

In the anatomy of an economic crisis, a bank run is the point of no return. Bank runs occur when people scramble to withdraw cash from banks in fear of collapse. In the worst cases, banks’ liquid cash reserves are exhausted, not everyone gets their money and the bank defaults. It’s a grim scenario which, fortunately, has occurred rarely in history. The most significant bank runs in the United States took place during the 1930’s Great Depression. More recently, there were runs on numerous U.S. banks during the Financial Crisis in 2008. In Asia, bank runs have also been rare....

No matter how the Evergrande drama plays out – whether it culminates with an uncontrolled, chaotic default and/or distressed asset sale liquidation, a controlled restructuring where bondholders get some compensation, or with Beijing blinking and bailing out the core pillar of China’s housing market – remember that Evergrande is just a symptom of the trends that have whipsawed China’s property market in the past year, which has seen significant contraction as a result of Beijing policies seeking to tighten financial conditions as part of Xi’s new “common prosperity” drive which among other things, seeks to make housing much more affordable...

CommentaryA few months ago, when investors started to discuss the troubles of Evergrande, China’s largest real estate developer, many economists saw the problem as isolated and insignificant. The consensus message was that the real estate crisis was containable and that the Evergrande default would be a single case. However, Chinese defaults on local and overseas bonds rose to a record $43 billion in 2021, according to Bloomberg, led by widespread defaults in the real estate sector.Up until a week ago, the bonds of Zhenro Properties Group were seen as safe, and the company was widely perceived as a rare case...