China

[FlyerInHi]

[quote=ocrenter]
sorry, not in English.
[/quote]

You’re so lucky to read Chinese because you know first hand what’s going on over there. I wish I knew Chinese. I took classes but it’s hard to learn.

As far as RE devaluation, it will be interesting to see. My friend is saying that relatives in China report that people who work for state enterprises are having passports held by HR to make it hard to travel abroad. It’s also harder to transfer money out.

My friend sold a house in a second tier city and transfering the money to USA. There are currency controls but you can spend as much as you want on credit cards so she remodeled her house here in Cali on her Chinese CC.

Assets owners are now complaining that values are not increasing so many want to sell and invest abroad where they can get higher rents.

China is in dire need to move another tranche of the population into the middle class and into home ownership. That’s part of their policy of continuing economic growth so lower RE might be just that opportunity. Will local governments seize failing projects and dole out the condos to state workers? Let’s see how they manage it.

Is the China crash finally coming after 30 years of predictions? And what would a crash mean? 2% GDP growth for a while or an actual recession?

[The-Shoveler]

In general Dictators are tolerated as long as they produce results (perceived as good by the population they serve).

What the Chinese Gov fears most is instability.

[FlyerInHi]

[quote=The-Shoveler]In general Dictators are tolerated as long as they produce results (perceived as good by the population they serve).

What the Chinese Gov fears most is instability.[/quote]

That’s why I believe the state will give “free” condos to the newly educated class (children of peasants) to move them into the middle class. Free housing is a lever that China has used many times before for different classes of people. We will see.

[ucodegen]

[quote=ocrenter]
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/chinas-property-bubble-is-bigger-than-subprime-2016-10

Business Insider had the ratio at 3.7:1 at end of 2016.

http://m.ltn.com.tw/news/focus/paper/1239502
[/quote]

Direct link on Business Insider article:
https://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-property-bubble-is-bigger-than-subprime-2016-10

The link you had posted seemed to get lost in the ‘ether’-net/Web.

Interesting quote from article:

Analysts at HSBC have been crunching the figures, and they believe that during the first eight months of 2016, property prices in urban areas rose by 18.13% year-on-year. Back at the end of February 2010, the national average price per square metre of property within China was RMB5,508 for urban areas and RMB473 for rural areas. Today these figures have risen to RMB9,570 for urban areas and RMB822 for rural areas.

RMB 822/sq ft = $119/sq ft.
RMB 9570/sq ft = $1,385/sq ft.

This on median chinese wages of approx $14k/yr, per capita GDP below $10k/person/year.
Beijing average annual salary about $16,117.66/yr(111,390yuan), Henan province is about $6,569.15/yr(45,403yuan) – ref statistica.com
NOTE: St Louis fed give different numbers, but still not very good to support their housing costs. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/january/income-living-standards-china

[Rich Toscano]

Wow… those are some crazy stats, especially the price/sq ft vs. median wage…

[Myriad]

[quote=ucodegen]
Interesting quote from article:

Back at the end of February 2010, the national average price per square metre of property within China was RMB5,508 for urban areas and RMB473 for rural areas. Today these figures have risen to RMB9,570 for urban areas and RMB822 for rural areas.

RMB 822/sq ft = $119/sq ft.
RMB 9570/sq ft = $1,385/sq ft.
[/quote]

That’s in sq meters. have to divide by 10.7639
So $11.05/sq ft and $128.67

https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/hong-kong-sydney-and-vancouver-lead-world-s-least-affordable-markets-52017
City Median Home Price Median Annual Household Income Median Multiple
Hong Kong $5,422,000 $300,000 18.1
Sydney, Australia $1,077,000 $88,000 12.2
Vancouver, Cananda $830,100 $70,500 11.8

[ltsddd]

Wait, did I read that correctly? HK’s annual hh income is $300K?

[Myriad]

I think it’s all in local currency, otherwise it doesn’t make sense

[ucodegen]

[quote=Myriad]
That’s in sq meters. have to divide by 10.7639
So $11.05/sq ft and $128.67
[/quote]
Sorry, my mistake. But also consider that I was not taking Hong Kong as highest income city in China, but Beijing. Hong Kong is an outlier. It has a median income that has more than 2x a chance of supporting the prices – for whatever good that can be considering that Hong Kong is priced a bit extreme (recent correction – not a 2x chance, they are both in a bad condition).
Similar ratios for Beijing:
Beijing $580,598(4.02mil RMB)$16,117.66/yr(111,390yuan) 36.1

I have seen other numbers for price to income ration that look worse (44:1).
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/in/Beijing

other link:

Beijing Host to China’s Highest Median Home Prices

NOTE: on ” Myriad’s” post – it looks like it might be local currency.
See: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Hong+Kong&country2=Australia&city1=Hong+Kong&city2=Sydney

Beijing, New York comparison:
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/compare_cities.jsp?country1=China&city1=Beijing&country2=United+States&city2=New+York%2C+NY

Though this shows the price to income ratio as being worse.

Note to Rich: Is it possible to add the codes for tables to the allowed HTML tags? ie; ‘table’, ‘/table’, ‘tr’, ‘/tr’, ‘td’ – just make sure to have the filter program spit out closing ‘/tr’ and ‘/table’ if a poster has not closed it at the end of the post – as it should be doing with ‘/b’, ‘/i’ etc.

[ocrenter]

[quote=FlyerInHi]

You’re so lucky to read Chinese because you know first hand what’s going on over there. I wish I knew Chinese. I took classes but it’s hard to learn.

[/quote]

we are lucky there exists a free and democratic and independent country WITHIN the Greater Sinosphere that is OUTSIDE of control by China.

I did a news search this morning in Chinese with the key words “Chinese real estate.” Nothing from within China. Bunch of stuff from Taiwan, some articles in simplified Chinese, but they turned out to be based in N.America, receiving their source info likely from the same Taiwanese sources.

Taiwan gets annexed as you have always wished, and this type of information ceases to exist.

[FlyerInHi]

[quote=ocrenter]

Taiwan gets annexed as you have always wished, and this type of information ceases to exist.[/quote]

I don’t want China to annex Taiwan. Taiwan now has de-facto independence but there are a lot of legal issues. I don’t think it’s for us, Americans, to get too deeply involved.

I think we need to accept the rise of China. But we should contain China by providing a moral and business alternative to Chinese authoritarianism, otherwise the countries who do business with China will follow their model. China is all business and development while US foreign policy is still Cold War thinking. Moral preaching is not enough… there needs to be wealth and development.

The peaceful reunification of Germany is a good model. Angela Merkel is East German and East German politician are well integrated in running the country.

[ocrenter]

[quote=FlyerInHi]
I don’t want China to annex Taiwan. Taiwan now has de-facto independence but there are a lot of legal issues. I don’t think it’s for us, Americans, to get too deeply involved.

I think we need to accept the rise of China. But we should contain China by providing a moral and business alternative to Chinese authoritarianism, otherwise the countries who do business with China will follow their model. China is all business and development while US foreign policy is still Cold War thinking. Moral preaching is not enough… there needs to be wealth and development.

The peaceful reunification of Germany is a good model. Angela Merkel is East German and East German politician are well integrated in running the country.[/quote]

Not really a comparable model at all. More comparable model would be Austria and Germany prior to WWII, and the West allowed Hitler to annex Austria based on Hitler’s desire to unify all Germanic people.

[Myriad]

[quote=FlyerInHi] I don’t want China to annex Taiwan. Taiwan now has de-facto independence but there are a lot of legal issues. I don’t think it’s for us, Americans, to get too deeply involved. [/quote]

I disagree that the US should not be involved. The strategic interest of the US is that any reunification should be the choice of the people in Taiwan. Not because the country is politically and economically strangled and forced to.

[quote=FlyerInHi] I think we need to accept the rise of China. But we should contain China by providing a moral and business alternative to Chinese authoritarianism, otherwise the countries who do business with China will follow their model. China is all business and development while US foreign policy is still Cold War thinking. Moral preaching is not enough… there needs to be wealth and development. [/quote]
That dosen’t seem correct – in fact, it’s the reverse. The US has promoted economic development in the majority of countries, especially in Asia. They allowed China to open up for investment and growth and allowed entry to WTO.
China has followed a 18/19th century mercantilism system which primary purpose is economic benefit to the home country. China’s investment in other countries is very little about business and development and more about changing the economic system of global trade back to regional mercantilism system.
Let this be clear, China is the aggressor here. While the US has been occupied in the SW Asia and ME, China has taken strategic moves to remove the current global geopolitical and economic order.
Why should the US not take a Cold War path after the open trade model has failed. On almost every strategic interest, China is challenging the US.
North Korea, Taiwan, South China Sea, Senkaku Islands, A2AD weapon systems, cyberattacks, economic espionage, trade imbalance, China 2025 (technology dev, tech handover, state backed investments and loans), Belt & Road, AIIB, etc. There’s a reason why every major country in Asia is expanding their military and it’s not because of the US. Japan had 500 air defense scrambles against PLAAF in 2017. THere will 300 submarines in the Pacific by 2030.

[quote=FlyerInHi] The peaceful reuniication of Germany is a good model. Angela Merkel is East German and East German politician are well integrated in running the country.[/quote]
Except that the a large portion of the population doesn’t want to be part of China, especially the younger population who don’t have any affinity or history with China. For that matter, neither does Hong Kong, but China has an economic stranglehold on the city.

[FlyerInHi]

Myriad, just watch one of Kishore Mabubahni’s talk on Youtube. He makes a convincing argument that the West’s position is declining and business as usual won’t work.

And what do you make of Kai Fu Lee optimism about China? He was born in Taiwan, educated and thrived in USA. He could have retired in a McMansion, but he’s putting his money in China. He said that because of CFIUS, he’s not even looking at investing in USA.

And Richard Hass of the Council on Foreign Relations said our moral high ground is gone. We are now like any ordinary country.

But if what we are doing now is working, then no need to worry about the above.

[The-Shoveler]

A different view point

https://www.scmp.com/news/article/2108442/my-prediction-coming-collapse-chinas-ponzi-scheme-economy

[Author]

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