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China’s property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan

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151–160 of 395 posts

Re: China’s property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usa does have immigration to supplement the birth rate.

It does, but on a global scale this only works as long as there are enough countries with high birth rates. And birth rates are going down basically everywhere.

They are up in "undeveloped" countries.

Re: China’s property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan

#152

I’m never sure if news about China’s upcoming economic problems is written because such an event is actually coming or if the media writes it just for the clicks.

I see China in 2023 where Japan was in 1991. Real Estate is falling apart. But in the end, the are the workbench of the world. They have Billions of people that can potentially work. Some of them are well educated and highly industrious. Japan survived so will China.

In the 80s Americans were worried that Japan would leave them in the dust, yet they've had 30 years with almost no economic growth. Not exactly a great roadmap for China to follow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades

Re: China’s property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, human history shows us that money always wins. People have natural instinct to acquire wealth. No political regime has remained viable for a long time if it tried to go against this instinct. Authoritarianism works fine; in fact i am even in a bit of doubt about democracy being the better social order, in any case our empirical data to confirm that is insufficient - but even authoritarian society should exploi…

> Still, human history shows us that money always wins. Are you aware of what happened to the landlords in China or do you mean the landlords weren't human?

It only shows us that current Chinese regime is a civilisational dead end. Also, by that point, they didn't have the money. China was overpopulated and did not have marginal income to pay them, and the productivity was overall too low. No one in China had money, so force ruled.

Re: China’s property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better yet, sometimes that is what it is. For example, it's plausible that cost disease is largely a result of government regulation, but it's not a result of a specific government regulation, it's a result of the total number of regulations increasing over time like a ratchet when each one adds another tick to the cost of doing business.

> it's plausible that cost disease is largely a result of government regulation, but it's not a result of a specific government regulation Yes, but each individual regulation that is contributing to this aggregate cost disease has varying degrees of value. Even if a specific regulation contributes +1 to the overall cost disease, it may also contribute +2 of positive value elsewhere that makes it net worthwhile, all t…

> Even if a specific regulation contributes +1 to the overall cost disease, it may also contribute +2 of positive value elsewhere that makes it net worthwhile, all things considered.

That's assuming they're not in competition for scarce resources, which they are.

For example, it's more efficient to do something with fewer people than to do the same thing with more people. Not just for the directly proportional efficiency reason, but because larger teams have higher coordination costs and management overhead, and will tend to increase average entity size leading to market consolidation which is very bad.

So you get a certain regulatory budget before your regulations induce the regulated entity to increase the size of the team. At which point your regulation that was contributing +1 cost to achieve +2 benefit would then contribute +25001 cost to achieve +2 benefit. (This is especially true for regulations that apply to small entities, because the cost of increasing the number of workers from 1 to 2 is drastic, often to the point of destroying the business.)

Which means you have to start throwing out regulations that in isolation have +1 cost and +2 benefit so you have the budget left for the regulations that have +1 cost and +10 benefit.

Re: China’s property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan

#155
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, human history shows us that money always wins. People have natural instinct to acquire wealth. No political regime has remained viable for a long time if it tried to go against this instinct. Authoritarianism works fine; in fact i am even in a bit of doubt about democracy being the better social order, in any case our empirical data to confirm that is insufficient - but even authoritarian society should exploi…

> Still, human history shows us that money always wins. Human history has shown us that whomever controls the army usually wins.

Still, you need money to control the army and keep it interested. Then there comes a choice of either being unable to do it because of not raising enough cash from society to make a sufficiently big army to keep population in check, being able to have better income they can have in civilian life; or doing it and ruining the competitiveness of the overall economy - like the good old Soviet Union.

Now, in the post-industrial era, we have a third threat. Extinction. And China may actually combine all three.

Money is the force of reason, ignoring it comes at one's own peril regardless of the force one controls: it means going against common sense that established itself through the power of competition, in favour of some arbitrary political theory or just someone's wits. Even if it succeeds for a while, it always reduces overall quality of the system and increases it's vulnerability.

Re: China’s property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan

#156

Some real estate related news from China: - Country garden, China's second biggest property company after Evergrande, missed a mere 22.5M payments for dollar denominated bonds. It is trying to restructure a $340B debt owned. https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/chinas-government-... - Li Ka Shing, richest man in Hong Kong, just offered an immediate 30% off on his newest buildings for sale - One of China's bigges…

> China stopped reporting youth unemployment, estimated around 20-50%

youth unemployment data is just another toxic data that rarely used before in China and others just like "Total Debt" metrics that only used against China for some reason.

> China's economy slipped into deflation

Mainly caused by normalizing pork price, last year it went wild due to swine flu.

Re: China’s property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with these terms is not that they have no meaning, it's that they have no context-free virtue. Prohibiting leaded gasoline is good and prohibiting housing construction is bad, even if they're both government regulations. Competitive markets are good and concentrated markets are bad, even if they're both markets. But people want to assign a label to the category instead of the instance, and then they fight…

Indeed, or put another way, nuance doesn't exist on the internet. I've seen this time and time again, where one party will blame something on capitalism or government regulation as some blanket statement, without saying which policies they're even talking about. At that point, it's a tribal opinion that was arrived at through emotional means, not logical means.

I try to avoid terms like capitalism and socialism. Too many people think they mean too many different things. On top of that, they are pretty old terms by now, and a lot of the ideas contained need to be nuanced by all the history that's happened since.

I tend to agree with the other commenters who are saying we need to look at the individual policies.

Which of course is impossible on the internet forums.

Re: China’s property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan

#158
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US sure, where its blasphemous to slit the throats of the leisure classes for their excesses. In China they made Jack Ma disappear. Through out history when it gets time for the Kings & Queens to waive the debt of the plebs away, cause they have nothing left to pay, the Rentier classes take the haircut. In the US the rentiers have owned the Kings & Queens for a long time. To the point where any American instit…

Well, start with the first 10, then remaining ones will emigrate and simply assign bounty for any head of CCP member based on the rank - until the Party is eliminated. How about that? Don't underestimate the money - it goes the long way.

>until the Party is eliminated

The party has 98 million members

Re: China’s property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan

#159
post #2

Nice, creates corporation in tax havens to maximize tax dodging, files for bankruptcy in country that can actually put disgruntled debt owners to task. Good ol' capitalism.

* communist country is corrupt, falls apart *

Good ol' capitalism strikes again. Real communism has never been tried. Yet again

Re: China’s property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan

#160
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see China in 2023 where Japan was in 1991. Real Estate is falling apart. But in the end, the are the workbench of the world. They have Billions of people that can potentially work. Some of them are well educated and highly industrious. Japan survived so will China.

In the 80s Americans were worried that Japan would leave them in the dust, yet they've had 30 years with almost no economic growth. Not exactly a great roadmap for China to follow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades

In 1980, Japan had a huge population boom in the 35-45 age range, of energetic people who had grown up during a golden age of technological and economic development. Then they were hit by a demographic timebomb...

https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a01001/

By 2060 Japanese children will be in the low single-digit millions, maybe 1/3 of the number when the experienced workers of the 80s were kids in the 1960s. There is literally nothing that can prevent it except mass immigration on a scale that would totally transform Japanese society (and which consequently will never happen).

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