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Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

nytimes.com

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Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#341

Post by KaiserPro »

bArray wrote: post #266
KaiserPro wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which should still be under partial UK control and therefore an attractive entry for foreign investment. As a brit, much as my colonial arse would love this to be true, the lease expired and Britain never had any real control over HK post handover. The only power we had was economic, and we've well and truly fucked that. the UK of the 80/90s is not the UK of today. For better or worse.

Pretty sure there was an agreement in place [1]: > This blueprint would be elaborated on in the Hong Kong Basic Law (the post-handover regional constitution) and the central government's policies for the territory were to remain unchanged for a period of 50 years after 1997. We should have simply never have handed it back over to China and allowed Hong Kong to remain independent. From what I understand, it was some c…

point one is correct, there is theoretically a mechanism to make sure that HK is democratic. The problem is there is democratic, and "democratic". What china is doing is within the terms of the agreement.

However it's a lease, not freehold. a lease reverts to its original owner. There was no practical or legal way to make HK independent.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#342

Post by acdha »

argiopetech wrote: post #286
KaiserPro wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "west" and china have _very_ different demographic pressures. For example china famously had(has?) the one child rule. This meant a deliberate shift in how children were raised (all your eggs in one basket) > Now the default is single-no-children and you have to make an explicit choice to marry (you used to be nudged into it by society) and to have kids, by stopping to use contraceptives and to do all the things…

If you look at the historical birth rate through the 20th century (hard to find data before 1950, but not impossible), the birth rate hovered around 5 children/woman or 35 children/1000 population. These numbers drop immediately and precipitously starting in 1960, the year "the pill" became publicly available. Lots of people, young and old, take pills every day. People forget and unwanted pregnancies still happen, bu…

> Yes, but not much more

This is only true if you don’t think women having full personhood is “not much”. Cheap, effective contraception came on the market around the same time that women started gaining legal rights, which is also when women were no longer forced into marriage and started to have independent careers of their own, whereas before the main option was motherhood, especially prior to social welfare systems supporting the elderly. It’s not a coincidence that we’re seeing backlash “men’s rights” movements now that a non-trivial fraction of men are learning that they aren’t worth settling for now that social pressure isn’t doing most of the work for them.

> to the extent that we now end the lives of 73 million unborn per year

This is overstating it considerably: it’s about 900k in the United States and 13M globally.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#343

Post by sparrowInHand »

resolutebat wrote: post #193

In the long term, the bursting of China's property bubble is probably good news, affordable housing is in the interest of everybody except property developers. In the short term, though, this is likely to trigger a domino effect of other property developers defaulting and a lot of pain for everybody who (thought they had) bought property with them. The real tests are whether China will allow the Chinese entity to go…

This bubble makes up large parts of the world wide pension schemes. Without rents to enslave the younger generations, the wealth will be extracted by other means, aka prices rising or services getting ever more expensive. There is no escape from this.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#344

Post by faeriechangling »

sparrowInHand wrote: post #343
resolutebat wrote: post #193

In the long term, the bursting of China's property bubble is probably good news, affordable housing is in the interest of everybody except property developers. In the short term, though, this is likely to trigger a domino effect of other property developers defaulting and a lot of pain for everybody who (thought they had) bought property with them. The real tests are whether China will allow the Chinese entity to go…

This bubble makes up large parts of the world wide pension schemes. Without rents to enslave the younger generations, the wealth will be extracted by other means, aka prices rising or services getting ever more expensive. There is no escape from this.

You can always rob the pensions of the young

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#346

Post by throwaway4aday »

ilikerashers wrote: post #335
throwaway4aday wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the East better positioned when this article is about a massive failure due to property speculation? It just took a different and exaggerated form in China due to the rightly perceived shakiness of Chinese stocks and the limitations on land and property ownership. If this development cements in the minds of the Chinese populace that buying an extra apartment as an investment is no longer a safe place to store…

I don't think that the Chinese are forced to buy property because of the perceived shakiness of the stock market. Rather it's a cultural norm that's embedded itself in their psyche. Also, I disagree that using houses as your store of wealth to fund healthcare is a sane policy. People should be paid for work.

They're not compelled to but they don't want to invest in stocks due to bad experiences in the past. Now there is a bad experience with investing in real estate.

You have to store wealth somewhere otherwise you'll constantly be losing wealth. Ideally, one could simply bank their savings without it losing value while also investing in a variety of other assets rather than putting everything into stocks or real estate but that's not the world we live in at the moment.

If you believe people should be paid for their work then you should also believe that the money they are paid for their work should not be bled away from them.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#347

Post by Syntaf »

berserk1010 wrote: post #313
citrusybread wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is still urbanizing rapidly. Just like GP said, it won't be a ghost city for long. It depends though on how long the investor can hold out, and whether or not the new city is doomed from the start. CCP planning is just different. TBD if it's doomed to fail like the Soviet Union, or if it will make it through a crisis like this. It's also hard to tell what will ultimately call a crisis; just thinking back to 200…

> China is still urbanizing rapidly. Many things wrong with that statement. There is a reverse migration from cities back to countryside, since the wages in the city have fallen, jobs have disappeared, rent is still expensive, and it's harder to justify living in the city when you can only save a few hundred dollars a year from a job. Thus, empty retail stores in major tier 1 cities. Empty apartments in Dongguan and…

Anecdotally, there’s a great episode of the journal[1] that does not lend too much credence to the idea that the reverse migration movement is anything but a temporary stay away from home.

I think it’s much too early to really say the trend is sticking.

[1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/7s85fsvxULfVNGxUVQAMtT?si=g...

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#348

Post by argiopetech »

KaiserPro wrote: post #340
argiopetech wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the historical birth rate through the 20th century (hard to find data before 1950, but not impossible), the birth rate hovered around 5 children/woman or 35 children/1000 population. These numbers drop immediately and precipitously starting in 1960, the year "the pill" became publicly available. Lots of people, young and old, take pills every day. People forget and unwanted pregnancies still happen, bu…

> Birth control (of all types) is responsible the bulk of the reduction in birth rate. Birth control is a tool, which requires conscious thought. If you look at the UK: https://www.statista.com/statistics/281981/live-births-in-th... You can clearly see two peaks in the last 40 years. Given that the last peak comes after liberalisation of the morning after pill, it breaks the correlation between availability and birth…

Two peaks on a downward trend are still a downward trend. That trend is more obvious if you look at population-corrected rates. https://www.statista.com/statistics/281416/birth-rate-in-the...

73mil/yr is the world number. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-world...

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#349

Post by seanmcdirmid »

berserk1010 wrote: post #313
citrusybread wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is still urbanizing rapidly. Just like GP said, it won't be a ghost city for long. It depends though on how long the investor can hold out, and whether or not the new city is doomed from the start. CCP planning is just different. TBD if it's doomed to fail like the Soviet Union, or if it will make it through a crisis like this. It's also hard to tell what will ultimately call a crisis; just thinking back to 200…

> China is still urbanizing rapidly. Many things wrong with that statement. There is a reverse migration from cities back to countryside, since the wages in the city have fallen, jobs have disappeared, rent is still expensive, and it's harder to justify living in the city when you can only save a few hundred dollars a year from a job. Thus, empty retail stores in major tier 1 cities. Empty apartments in Dongguan and…

Empty retail stores in major tier 1 cities wasn't unusual even in good times. Nor were empty apartments in tier 1/2/3 cities as well as small crowds at malls. Actually, I would be hard pressed to use these signs as good or bad news, since they are so normal.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#350

Post by argiopetech »

acdha wrote: post #342
argiopetech wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the historical birth rate through the 20th century (hard to find data before 1950, but not impossible), the birth rate hovered around 5 children/woman or 35 children/1000 population. These numbers drop immediately and precipitously starting in 1960, the year "the pill" became publicly available. Lots of people, young and old, take pills every day. People forget and unwanted pregnancies still happen, bu…

> Yes, but not much more This is only true if you don’t think women having full personhood is “not much”. Cheap, effective contraception came on the market around the same time that women started gaining legal rights, which is also when women were no longer forced into marriage and started to have independent careers of their own, whereas before the main option was motherhood, especially prior to social welfare syste…

It's also not a coincidence that women's happiness has been falling for decades.

We won't be alive to see the final results of this experiment in societal change. I'm not sure I'm sad about this.

Ref for 73 mil: https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-world...

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