China Evergrande contagion concerns rile global markets | Hacker News Reader

China Evergrande contagion concerns rile global markets

reuters.com

76 pointsgraderjs43 comments

This week on 4chan I learned of the volcano eruption and the Evergrande bankruptcy trouble before I found any mainstream coverage of either one. This is not an abnormal occurrence with news stories, with similar patterns occurring even for Covid in Dec 2019.

Same goes for ZeroHedge, which is maybe one rung above 4chan in the information laundry cycle. Most stories like this seem to progress clearly through a spectrum of speed vs. noise. They emerge in high-speed, high-noise sources like 4chan, then tumble toward low-speed, low-noise sources. There are many sequences, but one common progression is 4chan > ZeroHedge > Federalist > Fox > CNN.

Sometimes it feels like the only way to understand the truth of a story is to observe this cycle from end to end. But it’s exhausting, and requires too much time.

I wonder if anyone is working on a solution to this. I would love a news app where users curate the news into “stories” with automated scrapers finding every related article and comments section. I want to view the story and trace it back to its origin without needing to observe it in real time. Give me a timeline, with automatically archived pages and screenshots.

i think there's too much money to be made in such an aggragator to release it to the public.

if you can trace a tip back to 4chan and use that to beat the market...

Well that’s the thing. You can retrospectively trace the tip back after it’s become a story. But before then, you can’t really tell signal from the noise.

On the other hand, I've noticed some channels on Youtube have been talking about the Evergrande collapse for multiple weeks.

> This week on 4chan I learned of the volcano eruption and the Evergrande bankruptcy trouble before I found any mainstream coverage of either one

Perhaps that's true with generic mainstream media, but it's been on the news of business media for a while, for example this was on Bloomberg two weeks ago:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-05/clock-tic...

Youre just looking in the wrong place. Business and finance reporting has been covering the chinese property market, and commercial & consumer debt, for quite a while. The economist has had coverage of Evergrande every couple of weeks for months now https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aeconomist.com+evergrande

Evergrande has been in the "mainstream news" for weeks now; it's not something that you have to look hard for.

Moreover, how many false positives are there in something like 4chan?

There is a whole world of publications that fall in between the noisy online boards and big American news channels.

The Economist, FT, nakedcapitalism, Yahoo Finance reported this.

> I wonder if anyone is working on a solution to this

I think the solution is to read 4chan. Even if the conclusions are 100% wrong, the info is often raw in its form. No wonder media wants to kill that hacker.

Problem is how news orgs get paid for journalism and recency of news is extremely important for an attention economy.

"Cash-strapped developer China Evergrande Group has begun repaying investors in its wealth management products with real estate... The company said in a WeChat post dated Saturday that investors interested in redeeming wealth management products for physical assets should contact their investment consultants or visit local offices."

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/evergrande-begins-repayi...

Do they have $300+ billion in real estate assets?

In this case the risk of contagion of the whole sector is not negligible..

If they are flooding the real estate market with properties, the value of a building decreases for everyone.

> Do they have $300+ billion in real estate assets?

If you believe that, I have a bridge in Xiangcheng to give you.

The contagion can't spread to the rest of the sector... because the rest of the sector is already involved.

https://twitter.com/TheLastBearSta1/status/14357200360738078...

It helps that the government can set prices

This is going to tank Bitcoin also, because a large amount of Tether's backing assets are Evergrande paper.

Citation needed. They say they don't hold Evergrande paper. Is that true? Who knows. But we actually don't know who's paper Tether holds.

There is some beautiful irony in the fact that bitcoin got started partly as a protest against the banking crisis of 2008, which was due to falling real estate prices causing a wave of defaults spreading through the financial system.

Now, 13 years later, falling real estate prices may cause a wave of defaults spreading through the crypto-financial system. The wheel of time turns...

Any source?

It seems tether is denying it ( but I don't believe them much though, i just want a trust worthy source. Ugh )

This a game of telephone where you seem to be giving a 5th hand version of the initial news.

There was a lot of speculation that because tether is holding a lot of commercial paper they would have some exposure to Evergrande. No one ever proved that amount. Tether claims the exposure is 0. There is no particular reason that tether would have a large portion of it's portfolio in the paper of a single company.

So when you say "a large amount of Tether's backing assets" that statement is not only baseless but is just unlikely to be true.

Should be noted that Tether have publicly denied holding any Evergrande paper.

Fwiw, their lawyer sidestepped the question of whether they hold Chinese real estate paper by bringing up the ratings claimed in Tether's attestations.

https://twitter.com/bitcoinlawyer/status/1439261738067767297

Am I missing something? The link you posted directly links to a clear statement that they don’t and never will hold. Where’s the sidestepping?

They stated they've never held Evergrande paper. Evergrande isn't the only distressed real estate developer in China.

https://twitter.com/TheLastBearSta1/status/14357200360738078...

Tether denies: https://thedeepdive.ca/tether-denies-holding-commercial-pape.... But that said, who knows? Tether isn't exactly reputable. Could still be affected by contagion in general Chinese paper.

actually, it's going to make Bitcoin go to the Moon because Tether is shorting Evergrande paper!

Both the above and your statement have the same level of evidence behind them. We don't know what Tether's balance sheet is, and we don't know how that affects Bitcoin.

i'd say they're more likely to hold no paper than Evergrande paper

I would not live in any of their apartments - cutting corners i.e more sand than actual cement in the concrete mix.

Google tofu-dreg buildings and you will see.

> cutting corners i.e more sand than actual cement in the concrete mix

There's supposed to be more sand than cement in concrete. It's something like 1:2:4 of cement:sand:gravel.

I saw a video of somebody poking a stick into a wall and it just came apart like sand/rocks - so cement was too little.

The worst was the rebar that you could bend with your hand like toffee.

Localized defects like you're describing are generally a result of poor placement rather than an issue with the mix.

And I think you'd be surprised at how easy it is to bend rebar anchored in concrete. Pretty much anything below a #8 (roughly a 25M in metric; 1 inch diameter) can be bent by hand or, worst case, with a pipe.

Right, and when doing such a large job, at least in the USA, the concrete would be getting delivered by a third-party material services company.

From what I recall (my dad had a concrete construction company back in the day) the material services co. played a significant role in selecting appropriate mix ratios and additives for the application and conditions. They're not going to be deliberately sending out a mix with insufficient binders, especially not on such a massive order.

The whole system runs on credit; the material services company doesn't get paid for the concrete they delivered until the whole job gets paid, sometimes years later. So they're incentivized to be quite involved and engaged in the whole process and ensuring success to the maximum extent available to them. The last thing they want is some finger-pointing lawsuits over a faulty mix getting in the way of collecting payment, or worse, get stuck with the bill of demolishing and disposing it all for a redo on top of it.

Rebar is supposed to help with compression/stretching, not lateral forces, right? Does being able to bend it tell you anything about it's quality?

> Rebar is supposed to help with compression/stretching, not lateral forces, right?

Negative, at least WRT compression.

Concrete is always stellar in the compression department, that's its strength.

Rebar alone is mostly about improving shear strength. I'm not sure how much it really improves tension, maybe when it's a mesh. I think when tension is a priority there's simply steel reinforcement added spanning the same points, unlike rebar which is simply encapsulated in the concrete.

I was (very) badly remembering this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZINeaDjisY

Still, does being able to bend rebar tell you anything about it's quality as a reinforcement?

This isn't my area of expertise, so it's not something I feel qualified to speak authoritatively about.

Considering how flimsy stucco reinforcement is (it's basically chickenwire) I doubt it's a red flag. They even used to consider exterior stucco walls structural enough to entirely omit sheathing, though that's not code compliant anymore.

I had a very long post typed out responding to this thread but I pressed back and it got deleted. The short version:

1. The layperson explanation for how reinforced concrete works is that concrete holds compression and steel holds tension. This isn't really true - steel also contributes to compression. Why not just use steel for everything? Because concrete is easier to work with and cheaper.

2. Shear failures are actually usually either crushing failures (compression) or tension failures. This is because any shear stress state can be transformed into pure tension/compression by a simple rotational transformation (because any given stress state can be represented by a tensor in a chosen basis).

3. Welded wire fabric (or mesh, depending on your supplier) is more robust than chickenwire but you'll find that most crews actually call it chickenwire.

4. Bending rebar by hand means nothing. You can bend anything by hand given a long enough length beyond an anchor point because the moment arm is a function of the distance from the point of fixity. See my other post for sizes that I would not be surprised could be bent "by hand" in the field.

5. It's unclear what's meant by "lateral forces" in the GP post. Lateral forces can be taken at the structure level or the member level. When someone talks about "lateral forces" in the structure context they're usually talking about forces that are not in the direction that gravity works. For buildings this means wind and earthquakes. Lateral forces result in bending and shear (aka tension failures), both of which require rebar to resist for significant structures. From this perspective, lateral forces are usually a primary reason to include rebar in designs.

You mean like this one in Surfside [1]? I wouldn't live there either. "Don't throw stones at your neighbors if your own windows are glass".

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cause-miami-condo-colla...

Bit of a hot take. While there are some buildings in the US where substandard construction are going to catch up to the building and the owners, shoddy construction is endemic in China (or buildings are left unfinished and eventually need to be retired before completion).

https://www.google.com/search?q=chinese+construction+quality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epn3bp/china-demolition-buil...

> While there are some buildings in the US where substandard construction are going to catch up to the building and the owners. LOL sources? Has anyone being sent to jail because of the collapse of Surfside? or the bridge at FIU in 2016? How do you know that the same doesn't happen in China, or any other countries?

>” Don't throw stones at your neighbors if your own windows are glass"

Is that misplaced nationalistic defensiveness?

you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks surf side isn’t a scandal.

One scandal doesn’t make it impossible or hypocritical to call out other scandals.

It doesn't makes it impossible but it makes it morally wrong. You can't go around criticizing people and then do worst. You are just biased. And that's what I'm calling out. Also is not only Surfside, this is one that I remember as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_International_Universi...), obviously no one went to jail for that. I live in Miami, I know first hand the pain of the people in this community, but hey, I'm probably just some chinese asset pointing out facts over here.

That logic doesn’t follow. If one nation ever has an issue it’s suddenly immoral for them to call out that issue elsewhere ?

I mean given how painful surfside, I’d much rather people speak up on the danger of shoddy construction so in a few decades there aren’t surfsides occurring in China or Guam or Canada or Florida. But I guess making loud noises about bad construction is immoral.

There is a joke from the late Soviet era that sounds like this:

A high-rise building has collapsed. The authorities started investigating all the elements of the panels to find the culprit.

First they come to water and water says: "Oh, I cannot hold a house together. Don't blame me. Ask sand instead."

So they come to sand and sand says: "Well, I cannot stick together, not my fault. Ask cement."

So the police goes to cement and cement shouts from afar: "Not me, I have an alibi! I wasn't there at all."

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