China Evergrande just missed a bond payment. Does it matter?

Troubled Chinese property giant Evergrande has just missed making an interest payment to some of its bondholders. That's not a surprise, says John Stepek, but it could still rattle the markets. Here's why.

Evergrande offices
Evergrande owes too much money to too many people
(Image credit: © HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)

The saga of China’s heavily indebted property market is not going away.

Evergrande – the one that’s most obviously in the firing line right now – failed to make a payment on a dollar bond that was due yesterday.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.