The trade war between Washington and Beijing tends to obscure the darkest manifestation of a looming economic danger for China. Though in past years much commentary has been offered on China’s “ghost cities,” the implications been largely glossed over. But they shouldn’t be.
In China’s major urban centers there are currently 65 million unoccupied apartments. This reflects more than 20 percent of all homes in China. Taking into account that housing construction and its related industrial activity are responsible for one third of all recent GDP growth in China, building zombie residential apartments are not only a non-viable long-term economic policy; this unsustainable development model will eventually have to come to an end.
When that occurs, the ramifications for President Xi Jinping and the leadership in Beijing will be inevitably dire.
The core supporters of President Donald Trump maintain that despite the at times troublesome tweets and verbal coarseness, this is trivial compared to the tangible economic results achieved during the first year-and-a-half of his administration. The relatively high GDP growth rates and low official unemployment rates are heralded by his adherents as signposts on the road of making America “great again.”
I am not as sanguine. In the first place, based on the pattern of economic cycles in the last hundred years, the American economy is overdue for a severe recession. It has not happened yet due to the monetary alchemy of the U.S. Federal Reserve, in lockstep with other central banks across the globe.
Secondly, and more importantly, Trump has now unleashed a trade war. It is the economic equivalent of an economic world war, as President Trump is targeting friend and foe alike; China, Canada and the European Union have been hit with sizeable tariffs; these countries have responded with retaliatory tariffs, matching America’s in scope and severity.
Many scholars of the Great Depression have argued that this worldwide economic calamity was not driven by the Wall Street crash of 1929, buy by a massive wave of protectionism in the early 1930s, characterized by a wave of tariffs and quotas.
Has President Donald Trump opened a Pandora’s box that may unleash a massive global economic crisis?