A debt crunch involving China’s second largest properly developer has caught investors’ attention in the past week.
Evergrande, the Shenzhen-based company, is facing a default on its debt burden of roughly $300 billion. The crisis has echoes to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, which marked its 13-year anniversary last week, a development that at the time sent shockwaves through global markets.
Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, says it’s unlikely Evergrande will have a fallout quite as severe as the Lehman bankruptcy when the global economy and credit markets collapsed. Instead, he sees it as analogous to a different event a decade even earlier.
“If it’s similar to anything, it’s similar to Long-Term Capital Management, which is the calamity that occurred in 1998 but that was dealt with very quickly by the Federal Reserve and the major banks and it didn’t have any global implications,” Yardeni told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Friday.
Like with hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, Yardeni sees government intervention in Evergrande preventing any collapse and contagion.
“The reality is it is too big to fail, and I think the Chinese government is going to intervene big time. I don’t think they’re going to save management… but it will be restructured and in a way that won’t harm the economy too much over there and won’t affect the global economy or financial markets the way Lehman did,” said Yardeni.
Even if a crisis tied to Evergrande is avoided, Yardeni does not see Chinese markets rebounding anytime soon. He says Evergrande is just one reason for investors to avoid the region.
“If you’re invested in Chinese stocks, there have been lots of reasons to get out, quite honestly,” said Yardeni. “The Chinese Communist Party which runs the government over there has been meddling, intervening in the markets, interrupting corporate governance, telling companies how they should manage their businesses. And so I think it’s a good opportunity here just to lie low. I would not be buying on the dips in China.”
Beijing has tightened regulations on industries such as technology and private education in recent months. That increased scrutiny has taken their markets and U.S.-listed Chinese stocks lower.
Continued uncertainty in China could be a benefit for U.S. markets, he adds.
“There are lots of global investors that want to be invested in areas where they feel comfortable, where there’s corporate governance rules, where there’s contract laws that are obeyed. I think a lot of money that has gone global and might have been tempted to go to China may very well come to the U.S.,” he said.
Yardeni has a 5,000 price target on the S&P 500 for the end of 2022, though he says the benchmark index could reach that level sooner. The S&P 500 closed Friday at 4,433.
