The troubles of China Evergrande, one of the country’s largest developers, have focused the world’s attention on China’s housing market. A recent slowing of the real-estate sales in China appears to put Evergrande on the brink of insolvency. Without as much cash flow as in prior years, the company may be unable to meet a large payment due tomorrow. So far, the Chinese government has offered no signs that it would step in to save the company.

This week’s news sent stocks around the world falling, with investors worried that the failure of Evergrande could set off a cycle of defaults among banks and other companies. “Every once in a while a company grows so big and messy that governments fear what would happen to the broader economy if it were to fail,” my colleagues Alexandra Stevenson and Cao Li have written. Evergrande, they explained, “is that company.”

Some other Chinese developers may also be in trouble. And by almost any measure, Chinese real estate is suspiciously expensive…

Given all of this, it’s easy to see how the bubble warnings of a decade ago — like Chanos’s — may not have been wrong so much as they were early. A similar dynamic played out in the U.S. a decade and a half ago: Economists who looked like alarmists in 2005 turned into prophets by 2008.