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"There is this mythology surrounding the war on terrorism, and the FBI, that has given agents the power to ruin the lives of completely innocent people based solely on what part of the world they came from, or what religion they practice, or the color of their skin. And I did that. I helped destroy people, for 17 years."Albury was the only Black agent in the regional office for most of the time that he worked for the FBI's terrorism squad in Minnesota. He was a special agent in the FBI's Minneapolis Field Office from 2012 to August 28, 2017.
Embattled Chinese property giant Evergrande on Tuesday conceded it is under "tremendous pressure", a day after insisting it will avoid a bankruptcy that many fear could have a huge impact on the world's number-two economy.See also: Chinese regulators summon Evergrande property developer execs, warn debt poses systemic risk
The group was downgraded by two credit rating agencies last week while its shares tumbled below their 2009 listing price, as a battery of bad headlines and speculation of its imminent collapse ran out across Chinese social media.
Shares in the firm fell nine percent Tuesday, and are down almost 80 percent since the start of the year.
An estimate by Capital Economics says that Evergrande has some 1.4 million properties that it has committed to complete — around 1.3 trillion yuan (US$200 billion) in pre-sale liabilities, as of the end of June.
Its plight has raised fears of a contagion across the debt-laden Chinese property sector — which accounts for more than a quarter of the economy — with a knock on for banks and investors.
Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital economics, offered comment:"Evergrande's collapse would be the biggest test that China's financial system has faced in years, yet markets don't seem concerned about the potential for financial contagion at the moment. That would change in the event of large-scale default. The most likely endgame is now a managed restructuring in which other developers take over Evergrande's uncompleted projects in exchange for a share of its land bank."Evergrande has already sold stakes in some of its wide-ranging assets and offered steep discounts to offload apartments, but still reported a 29 percent slide in profit for the first half of the year.
The developer was founded in 1996 by Xu Jiayin, who went on to become China's richest man during the country's property boom of the 1990s. He poured money into mass developments in new cities, raising US$9 billion in its 2009 IPO in Hong Kong.
Evergrande started to falter under the new "three red lines" imposed on developers in a state crackdown in August 2020 — forcing the group to offload properties at increasingly steep discounts.

Comment: Perhaps this could be an attempt to distract from the terrible press the General is currently getting on the botched Afghanistan withdrawal - virtue signalling to the "Resistance".
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