Estate Market: Economy and American Analyst

estate market: An American analyst stationed in Beijing points to an extraordinary expansion of personal debt as a major risk to the nation's economy, according to The Japan Times. After the economy started showing signs of a slowdown in 2014, the government took every conceivable step to revitalize the real estate market by easing housing loan regulations. As if to refute such optimism, however, concerns are mounting in international financial circles that the present status of China's economy is getting ever closer to what had existed in the United States when it was hit by the crisis triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. As a result, housing prices in major cities have shot up by 78 percent in Beijing and 50 percent in Shanghai compared with 2010 levels. A Japanese correspondent in Beijing sums up the situation by saying that the government is trying to shift the burden of keeping up the economy's growth from the debt-laden public and corporate sectors to households, by getting people to cough up their savings and spend more because the state-driven stimulus policies are nearing their limits. Household debt meanwhile kept expanding to account for more than 30 percent of fresh lending in the latter half of last year, up sharply from around 15 percent previously. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.