Archinect - News

China Evergrande ordered into liquidation after $300 billion debt spiral

2024-01-30T19:15:00-05:00

A court in Hong Kong has ordered the winding up of Evergrande Group, the world’s most indebted property developer, dealing another blow to investor confidence as China’s ailing real estate sector continues to weigh on its economy. The liquidation order, made by the city’s High Court on Monday, comes after the embattled Chinese real estate giant and its overseas creditors failed to agree on how to restructure the company’s massive debt during talks that lasted for 19 months.

Evergrande’s liquidation could also set the stage for an unprecedented political showdown between Hong Kong and the mainland, as Reuters speculated on Monday.

The company had amassed over $300 billion in public and private debts since being ordered into negotiations in 2021. Overseas creditors are currently owed a reported $25 billion. Dexter Roberts, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, was one of several experts to compare its collapse to the failure of Lehman Brothers in the American market in 2008.

US economy is now in a recession as economic activity, including construction, grinds to a halt

2020-03-16T15:44:00-04:00

As society necessarily repositions itself in order to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), economic analysts are forecasting that the American economy has already entered into a near-term recession.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Anderson School of Management issued a revised economic forecast today stating that the US economy has already stopped growing and will "remain in recession through the end of September," The Los Angeles Times reports.

The report indicates that economic activity will fall by 0.4% for the first quarter, which ends March 31st. Further, the report estimates that economic activity will contract by 6.5% in the second quarter and by an additional 1.9% in the third. If the pandemic is handled sometime this summer, the analysts predict, the economy could see 4% growth in the fourth quarter of 2020.

The report comes on the heels of a revised economic analysis from banking giant Goldman Sachs that also anticipates a recess...

Housing markets around the world are increasingly synchronized

2020-01-29T14:06:00-05:00

Even though homes aren’t tradable, like soybeans or car parts, home prices across the world have become increasingly synchronized. This reflects a variety of factors, according to the [International Monetary Fund], including the increasing tendency for economic growth and interest rates to move in parallel across nations.

An interesting report from Sarah Chaney of The Wall Street Journal illuminates some of the ways in which housing markets across the globe—which are currently showing signs of a slowdown—are increasingly falling into line with one another as the power of the global economy continues apace following the Great Recession.

One reason, according to the report, is that following 2008, many major economies took to reducing interest rates as a way of spurring new investment. Chaney writes, "In the period of low interest rates following the global financial crisis, wealthy investors in the hunt for better yields swooped in to buy properties in major financial hubs. In effect, residential prices in those cities have become globally synchronized much as stocks and bonds are."

Commercial real estate is in trouble around the world

2019-09-19T19:59:00-04:00

Commercial-property prices in major cities around the world tumbled in the second quarter, amid signs of slower global growth and heightened trade tension between China and the U.S. Average property prices fell in the second quarter from the first quarter in Hong Kong and Seoul to London and Washington, D.C., according to data from Real Capital Analytics.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Melbourne, central Sydney, Seoul, Singapore, Paris, London, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. all saw a retreat in commercial real estate property values during the second quarter of 2019. The trend applies to struggling sectors like office buildings and malls.

Connectivity matters most in global urban economic growth

2016-04-22T13:57:00-04:00

Cities are mankind’s most enduring and stable mode of social organization, outlasting all empires and nations over which they have presided...it is not population or territorial size that drives world-city status, but economic weight, proximity to zones of growth, political stability, and attractiveness for foreign capital. In other words, connectivity matters more than size. Cities thus deserve more nuanced treatment on our maps than simply as homogeneous black dots.

Global strategist Parag Khanna gives his outlook on the economic future of the world's megacities.

The Panama Canal Gets "Supersized"

2015-03-25T11:10:00-04:00

Over a hundred years ago, the first ships passed from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Panama Canal. One of the greatest engineering feats ever, the Panama Canal is entering a new stage in its history in order to stave off the threat of obsolescence presented by “post-Panamax” ships, or vessels larger than the size constraints of the Canal. An engaging episode of the History Channel’s Modern Marvels series, “Panama Canal Supersized” documents the herculean efforts of engineers and thousands of workers to construct a new passage through the Americas that will radically change the global economy.

Considered one of the seven wonders of the modern world by the American Society of Civil Engineers, the original Panama Canal took over a decade to complete. Since the early 16th century, there were several attempts to cut through the American continent in order to facilitate faster trade, eventually leading to a failed effort by the French in the late 19th century. The United States p...