Rabobank: As With Evergiven, Evergrande Is Just The Symtpom Of Far Larger Problems
It’s Ever Something
On 23 March, the giant cargo vessel Evergiven got stuck in the Suez Canal and blocked it for six days. Obviously, this dominated global headlines. Even Joe Shmoe could see global supply chains were not operating efficiently because of their gigantism. Six days, six months ago: yet today bullwhip supply-chain problems are still passing through the global system in escalating waves. Evergiven was just a symbol for those who had not been paying any attention to the underlying ‘too big to sail’ problems it represented. These were decades in the making, and will be years in the solving; will involve lots of money; and because they will also involve a different way of doing things, we haven’t even started yet in most places.
Evergrande, a giant Chinese property developer, has also run aground. Suddenly everyone in markets knows who it is, and is worrying about it. It is huge, and its debts are equally huge: $300bn, perhaps more. The whisper is that this could be China’s “Lehman moment”. Even with Chinese markets closed until Wednesday, we are seeing knock-on sell-offs around the world. Naturally, the upside specialists are also out there: Bloomberg today suggests market panic makes a bailout more likely: I think that dynamic only works on the US fiscal policy front.
Indeed, within China there is a spectrum of possible government approaches to the crisis. At one extreme, ‘the Austrian’, where the pieces fall where they may. I don’t think any economy anywhere would allow that to happen. At the other extreme, ‘socialism for the rich’, where everyone gets to carry on as if nothing happened, which is what we have seen in OECD since 2008…
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