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I guess the trick is to find the data that can tell us what the truth is. Anecdotes are fine, and only give us clues as to where to look.The WB claims that peotrrpy price increases are modest, and they cite a good history of 6-10% annual increases to support this (which itself is beyond 'modest' IMO). Yet this figure is averaged over the entire country - I would be far more interested in seeing separate graphs for Shanghai, Guangzhou, and a few other cities.The second piece that I am interested in are the banks and how many 'non-performing' loans they are carrying on their books. This information is not likely to be publicly available however.Yet lending rules are certainly different there as well - for example, the amount of money someone needs to put down as a down payment is going to be highly predictive of the chances of that loan going into default in the event of a downturn.It is probably true that they hadn't gotten around to emulating the worst practices of over leveraging and the securitization of debt.
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