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As in the U.S. and European real estate busts, Chanos says that China’s property bubble is infecting its banking system. The country has already had to cleanse and recapitalize its banks twice—in 1999 and 2003. Basically, it took non-performing loans off the banks’ books and put them into specially created asset management companies, which then issued long-term bonds for them. “And guess who bought the bonds?” says Chanos. “The banks.”

But there are several fundamental differences between China’s real estate boom and the property debacles in the United States and Europe, Mobius argues. First, the surge in commercial and residential demand in China is mostly real, not just a bidding-up of asset prices. “If it’s a bubble, why are so many people still living in substandard housing in China?” he asks. And he doesn’t buy that there’s the same toxic spillover to the financial system, either—China doesn’t have the credit default swaps and other ersatz real estate-linked securities that triggered the market collapses in the West in 2008. “The subprime crisis was a derivatives crisis,” Mobius says.