China's Country Garden reportedly misses final deadline for a $15.4 million bond payment

• China's Country Garden missed a final deadline to pay interest on a dollar bond, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
• The report said Country Garden hasn't made a $15.4 million interest payment on the bond.

A Wednesday report from The Wall Street Journal said China's Country Garden missed a critical final deadline to complete a $15.4 million interest payment on an outstanding dollar bond payment.

The Journal cited two bondholders, and said the struggling property giant was supposed to fulfill the payment by midnight EST on Tuesday. Missing that deadline could domino into a wave of cross-defaults for the company's other debt holdings.

Country Garden is among dozens of other Chinese property firms, including Evergrande, which filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection in August, that have been unable to fulfill debt obligations.

Earlier this month, Country Garden said in a filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that it did not pay a $60 million principal payment, and that it did not expect to meet all payment obligations outside China when due, or within allocated grace periods.

While China's economy showed some signs of relief in its third-quarter growth numbers this week, it has not enjoyed the post-pandemic rebound that many had forecasted. In particular, China's ailing property sector — within which Country Garden was once the top player — has strained consumers and poses the biggest risk in a nightmare cocktail of headwinds.

Chinese real estate accounts for 59% of household wealth and about three-quarters of household liabilities, a People's Bank of China survey found in 2020. Consumer confidence, as a result, is closely tied to the health of the property market.

"The boom that characterized the property sector of the last decade is over," Alfredo Montufar-Helu, the head of the China Center at the Conference Board, told Insider in a recent interview. "China is at a crucial moment where they cannot stop supporting the supply side, because economic growth would decelerate, but at the same time they need reforms on the demand side. Hopefully the intentions alone can generate more confidence in the market."