How much longer can China keep building ghost cities?

Thursday, 16 August 2018

With the news yesterday confirming that Chinese property markets are again off to the races:

Let’s ask the trillion dollar question: how long can they keep building ghosts cities? The answer comes in two parts.

The first might upset a few readers because the answer is “forever”. Or, at least as long as they want to kill their dreams of empire via colossal capital mis-allocation and debt. Given government sponsorship of the scheme that could be a long time yet. They will of course run out of demand growth, indeed already have as peak urbanisation of peoples has passed:

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About the author

David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.