It's important to recognize that the story is, first and foremost, bullshit. They're lying liars who lie.

Chinese folks in the upper classes are living high on the hog in every sense. They're traveling. They're eating out lavishly. They're driving big imported SUVs. They're blowing fat stacks at casinos and resorts. They are having wild sex and doing tons of drugs.

What they aren't doing is maxing their scores out on the USD leaders board. We don't have a handful of aspiring trillionaires demanding that the Hansang Index double every five years. Major media centers and industrial hubs aren't being collected and traded like baseball cards. Housing is not for speculation, it is for living in.

That's what The Economist is agitating over. Not that Chinese elites are suffering, but that they're failing to ante up into the Blackjack table that is American Capitalism.