According to Bass, the debts of the local authorities in China are very high and the Chinese real estate industry, which used to be prosperous, is collapsing.

For comparison, US banks lost "only" about 700 billion dollars during the great financial crisis in 2008.

A former senior official at China's Bureau of Statistics said in September that the amount of empty apartments in the country today could be enough to house, according to various estimates, between 1.5 billion and 3 billion people.