[bobthepanda]

I think this really depends on how you define unfunded liabilities. China, for example, has mostly not established liabilities because the social systems for retiring are a joke. People instead save personally and shovel those savings into real estate, but the real estate market is collapsing/collapsed because it turns out all that retirement saving driving up the median-house to median-income ratio to 40+x was not sustainable.

To put in perspective how bad that is, cities the West considers expensive:

Paris is 17x

London is 12x

NYC is 9.7x

San Francisco is 9x

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Shanghai is down from peak but still at 33x, and that's a correction. Either people still can't afford to buy homes, or a large class of homeowners will become destitute elderly people and all that entails for social stability, or the government will have to make up the difference somehow.

[alecco]

Good point.

[bobthepanda]

I’d also add that China actually does have future pension liabilities. China’s past one child policy is causing the pyramid to quickly go from 4-2-1 to 1-2-4 in terms of ratio of working to dependents; and young people are already not participating in pensions because they think its highly likely the systems will go bust and they won’t see a cent of their contributions.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-07/why-milli...