Evergrande; Mixed signals on regulatory crackdown; AUKUS; Xi on space

Thanks for your patience last week. The PRC is on holiday today and tomorrow for the Mid-Autumn Festival. The newsletter will be off tomorrow unless there is something interesting going on. Evergrande executives and its regulators are unlikely to be enjoying this holiday.

Evergrande the grande grey rhino stampeded over global markets. It is interesting how a mess people paying attention knew was coming for weeks if not longer suddenly explodes across markets.

I do not think it is China’s “Lehman moment”, but it is ugly and going to get uglier. There will be workouts (just don’t call it a bailout) but the lack of guidance from regulators seems to be spooking investors. As this newsletter has discussed several times, I would not be confident that the regulators have a full understanding of all the Evergrande liabilities and interconnections with other firms. Xu Jiayin has been masterful, at least until now, at obfuscating the full extent of Evergrande’s debts.

Xi set out three tough ba…