Thirteen years of ultra-easy money (2009-2022) drove an epic malinvestment of resources on a global scale. Now, we are grappling with the weight of those choices. From here, there’s a lot of room to make wiser investments that will increase efficiency and free cash flow while reducing waste, especially around energy, housing, transportation and food.

China’s property crisis is expected to worsen as new home sales plummet and indebted developers struggle to find funds to complete projects. WSJ’s Jonathan Cheng traveled to an abandoned ‘ghost town’ to see the challenge China’s real estate slump poses for the government. Photo: Antoine Morel for The Wall Street Journal. Here is a direct video link.

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For decades, the property sector had been a major driver of China’s economic growth. Real estate and related sectors such as construction represented around a quarter of China’s gross domestic product in recent years, according to widely cited estimates by Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Yuanchen Yang of the International Monetary Fund.

That has made it an open question how far the pain of the real estate slowdown will spread.