Dallas-based hedge fund manager Kyle Bass is predicting big economic issues for China throughout 2023, stemming from an overleveraged financial system, collapsing property market, and unsustainable birth rates.
China, a nation accustomed to greater than 7 percent real GDP growth for the past 10 years, is seeing signs of economic sluggishness. “The volume of exports could actually shrink by 6 percent on average in 2022 and 2023,” predicted the BlackRock Investment Institute in an October report.
Bass, founder of the asset management firm Hayman Capital and prominent China hawk, claimed the Chinese are in a financial conundrum of their own making. “They have architectural problems,” the fund manager said in a Dec. 17 interview on the podcast Forward Guidance.
Blaming the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) incentives and monetary policies for creating an environment of “riverboat gambling in their property sector,” Bass warned of real estate’s burgeoning share of Chinese GDP. Estimates of the property market’s share in the nation’s economy vary, but economist and Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff estimated it to be around 30 percent, as of September 2021.
The growth of the property sector has ushered in an unprecedented drop in housing affordability.
Last year, according to Bass, the median home price-to-income ratio in tier-one Chinese cities exceeded 36—meaning it would take more than three decades for the working class to accumulate the necessary income to purchase a home. The fund manager juxtaposed these figures to those of the U.S. housing bubble in 2008.
“Just to put these into perspective, in the United States, median home prices got to be just over six times median income when our subprime crisis collapsed.”
A commercial housing community is seen under construction in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China, on April 15, 2022. Since March, due to weakening market demand, banks in more than 100 cities