Juggling Dynamite

Different side of the world, but very familiar themes here:  real estate developers borrowed heavily in greenbacks and now face leaping service costs and defaults as the Yuan weakens against the US dollar.  Chinese households have doubled their mortgage debt in just the last 4 years (to $3.5 trillion outstanding at Q1 end).  Who would’ve thunk this would end badly, right?  See It’s all going wrong for China developers as bonds sink:

The Chinese property industry’s bad year keeps getting worse, sending bonds of some developers to record lows and triggering fresh concerns about a major pillar of the world’s second-largest economy.

Tighter financing constraints, a state campaign to rein in real estate prices and a tumbling yuan are battering the sector just as it faces an unprecedented wall of maturing offshore debt…

Developers’ dollar-denominated bonds are also getting more expensive because of a falling yuan. Evergrande and Country Garden are the most exposed by value, with at least 44 percent of their debt issued in the dollar, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. More than 90 percent of Kaisa Group Holdings’ bonds are denominated in the greenback.

Here is a direct video link.

 

Danielle was a guest with Jim Goddard on the Talk Digital Network, talking about recent developments in the world economy and markets.  You can listen to an audio clip of the segment here.

The starry night sky seems remarkably distant from the topic of air conditioning, but it’s revolutionizing the field in quite an unexpected way. In this episode of “The Spark,” watch how scientists from across the globe are harnessing natural phenomena to drastically redesign this century-old technology. Here is a direct video link.