THAT’S WHAT THEY ALL SAY: China’s Most Indebted Firm Is Too Big to Fail.

There’s a lot working against China’s most indebted property firm. China Evergrande Group is sitting on $113.7 billion in debt and its core profit fell 45% in the first half of the year. Real-estate growth is slowing, with banks under orders to curb home loans. President Xi Jinping’s refrain that houses are for living in, not speculation, has been cropping up more frequently.

Time to rein things in, right? Not Evergrande. The company, whose portfolio already includes theme parks and a football club, now wants to become the world’s biggest electric-vehicle maker in the next three to five years. It’s burning through precious cash – 160 billion yuan ($22 billion) – to build factories in Guangzhou.
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For anyone gawking at Evergrande’s improbably ballooning debt load, just waiting for the doomsday clock to strike midnight, there’s a valuable lesson: This firm is too big to fail. Evergrande is one of China’s biggest developers – with projects in 226 cities – and its billionaire founder, Hui Ka Yan, is the country’s third-richest man. With property accounting for about a quarter of China’s gross domestic product, any instability in the sector has proven too much for Beijing to stomach. Time and again, the government has reluctantly reopened the credit spigots to boost a flagging real-estate market. Just look at 2008, 2011 and 2014.

This will end well.