How Chinese Real Estate Became the Biggest Bubble in History

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

News, Investing, Business, News Commentary, Business News

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Land is a weird asset. We need it to be affordable because everyone needs somewhere to live. But for many people, real estate is also their biggest store of wealth — a kind of national piggybank that fuels both personal fortunes and broader economies. Nowhere is that tension sharper than in China, where housing affordability remains a major challenge even as real estate has been a huge driver of wealth for households and companies alike. China's policymakers have now spent years trying to let the air out of China’s property bubble — without causing it to burst completely. In this episode, we speak with Mike Bird, The Economist’s Wall Street editor and author of the new book, The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset. We talk about how much of China's economic progress has been tied up in real estate, different models of land ownership around the world, and why this particular asset is unlike any other.

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1:28.2	Joe Wisenthal. Joe, we've talked before in reference to, I think it was the U.S. real estate
1:33.8	market. Yeah. There seems to be this weird thing going on with housing where it feels like
1:39.3	policymakers or maybe people even are not sure what exactly they want it to be, right? Is it supposed to be
1:46.3	this social good, this affordable thing, we all can live somewhere that we can, you know, preferably a
1:52.3	place we want to live in something that we can afford? Or is it effectively a giant piggy bank?
1:58.6	Yeah. An investment vehicle, in which case we would expect prices to
2:02.2	always keep going up. Yeah, right. I mean, my personal preference is for housing to be very
2:08.7	affordable very briefly. And then that time that I buy, accumulate more housing, and then it
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