[LINK] "Yet Another Ghost Town in China Shows Extent of Regional Debt Crisis"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg warns of the Chinese debt bubble, grounded heavily in real estate investment.

China’s Ordos city, where towers that sprang from Inner Mongolian farmland now sit empty, is showing the hangover has just begun from a decade-long building boom.

Ordos City Huayan Investment Group Co., a developer whose chairman headed a group of livestock researchers, is at high risk of defaulting on 1.2 billion yuan ($194 million) of bonds if investors exercise an option to offload them in December, said Haitong Securities Co. and China Investment Securities Co. Also in the city, Inner Mongolia Hengda Highway Development Co. asked noteholders to defer rights to sell back private securities in April due to cash shortages, according to China International Capital Corp.

The city whose fortunes reversed as a coal boom turned to bust is grappling with China’s slumping property market that researcher SouFun Holdings Ltd. said led to more than 10 “ghost towns.” Five years after the first building was finished in the eastern city of Tianjin’s replica of Manhattan, the district remains almost deserted. Locals in the city of Handan, where a burst property bubble left half-constructed high-rises, have blocked streets to protest soured investments.

“Many small-city developers are running into financial trouble,” said Liu Yuan, a Shanghai-based research director for Centaline Group, China’s biggest property agency. “It’s the problem Ordos faces after its property bubble burst.”