Bloomberg TV has a piece on what hedge fund manager Jim Chanos, who called the Enron bubble, calls "ghost cities" -- enormous towns, hundreds of thousands of housing units and hardly anybody living there. "People haven't wanted to think that he China growth miracle might not have as much to it as they thought," Chanos tells Bloomberg.

The Bloomberg reporter passes along some of the Chinese argument -- the government is building for the long term, the developer presold all the units etc etc. But nobody lives there. No matter how you spin it, those are unproductive assets representing poorly invested capital. Sooner or later that has to tell a macroeconomic tale -- no matter how much the Chinese government claims the paper backing the assets is valued at par.