Episode Details

In 2021, Evergrande was the most indebted real estate company in the world. Three hundred billion dollars in liabilities. One point two million apartments sold to buyers who had paid in full. Construction stopped on hundreds of sites across China. The buyers had the receipts. The apartments did not exist. This is the financial autopsy of Evergrande: the pre-sale Ponzi mechanism that turned China's largest property developer into the largest real estate collapse in history — by selling homes that hadn't been built to finance the construction of homes that hadn't been sold, for twenty years, until the math stopped working. The mechanism was visible in the accounts for years. Nobody stopped the cycle while the market was rising. Evergrande sold apartments before building them. Buyers paid in full — sometimes their entire life savings — for homes that had not yet been constructed. The company used those pre-sale proceeds to fund new projects, service existing debt, and pay dividends. By 2021, Evergrande had $300 billion in liabilities, 1.2 million buyers waiting for homes, and no cash to build them.

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The largest real estate developer in history had turned homebuyers into unsecured creditors. This episode dissects the Evergrande collapse, the pre-sale Ponzi structure, and the local government fiscal transmission that made the Chinese property sector the largest source of systemic risk in the global economy. Evergrande. Hui Ka Yan. China real estate crisis. Pre-sale housing fraud. Property developer collapse. Chinese debt crisis. Systemic risk. Financial Forensics Labs — Every collapse has a pattern. We dissect it. Layer by layer.