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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

#351

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dathinab wrote: post #320
berserk1010 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

From what I heard that is a somewhat "recent" trend while most ghost city cases I heard of outdate that trend by month potential over a year. I think a lot of people living in the west without ties to china haven't realized that there are many huge but sometimes subtle changes in China in the last view years.

> while most ghost city cases I heard of outdate that trend by month potential over a year.

Isn't that like the people who claim that huge sky scraper in Tianjin will be finished any day now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldin_Finance_117

Kangbashi is up to 100k now, at least, but they designed for a million, so it is still pretty empty. As soon as coal becomes big again, maybe it will fill up.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#352

Post by throwaway2037 »

ernst_klim wrote: post #334
throwaway2037 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> overloaded with debt As I understand, most of the debt issued by local gov'ts is RMB-denominated. The PBoC can easily assume (large) parts of this debt without large negative economic impacts. Other countries have done similar in the past by creating "bad banks" that are financed by the central gov't or central bank.

> without large negative economic impacts How could central bank finance such a debt without igniting the inflation? Especially in a country with already expensive money and pretty large interest rates.

> How could central bank finance such a debt

Central banks can print money. And most countries, even developing ones, can support more money printing than people understand. I am not advocating for crazy money printing, but printing 5-10% of GDP for a single year to clean-up a big financial mess isn't so bad.

Did you know that Indonesia has an explicit monetary policy to monetize a certain portion of their national debt each year? The finance minister (Sri Mulyani) is well respected, so foreign bond buyers were not upset by it. It did not "ignite" inflation. Also, look at quantitative easing by US, UK, EU, and Japan.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#353

Post by ernst_klim »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #352
ernst_klim wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without large negative economic impacts How could central bank finance such a debt without igniting the inflation? Especially in a country with already expensive money and pretty large interest rates.

> How could central bank finance such a debt Central banks can print money. And most countries, even developing ones, can support more money printing than people understand. I am not advocating for crazy money printing, but printing 5-10% of GDP for a single year to clean-up a big financial mess isn't so bad. Did you know that Indonesia has an explicit monetary policy to monetize a certain portion of their national d…

> Also, look at quantitative easing

Quantitative easing in US, UK, EU, and Japan happened during the economy balancing on the brink of deflation. I.e. when capital from the developing world was actively escaping into the developed world, when the developed economies were bathing in cheap capital and firms could borrow at zero or even negative percent, and the economy grew massively and required quantitative easing for simply avoid inflation.

We can see how money printing works when the economy isn't growing respectively, the inflation hits as it happened in EU, US and Japan now.

> Did you know that Indonesia has an explicit monetary policy to monetize a certain portion of their national debt each year?

No, I don't. The only sources I found tell the opposite.

https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/05/06/no-need-for-u...

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#354

Post by bakuninsbart »

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…

A slow down in the rate of urbanisation isn't a reversal. I think you'll be hard pressed finding data to support your argument.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#355

Post by hakfoo »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #296
dathinab wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> affordable housing is in the interest of everybody except property developers. it is, but it's also complicated as the problems are quite a bit different in China then in the US the reason there was a bubble in China was because they sold (barely) affordable (apartment owned, not rented) housing to a huge amount of people while not producing it. Like they financed it similar to a snowball system. Group B buys housi…

Ghost cities are a good example of how simply building housing is not a perfect solution. If the housing is somewhere where people don't want to be then it is worthless and also useless since no one can make use of it if they can't make a living there.

The Ghost City concept is actually a great one, but it has the "you opened the bedroom door while someone is dressing" visuals problem.

If you can plan and work on a longer term, you can do things like staging multiple phases of development.

They can build the subway station that opens up into a dismal swamp today, and watch the YouTubers laugh. But in 3 years the swamp is scheduled to be paved, in 6 years there will be 10,000 housing units in walking radius, and in 10 years, the Work Factory will have opened nearby and you have a sprawling community of 60,000 people surrounding a subway station that would be logistically difficult and expensive if you tried to build it in after the fact.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#356

Post by rekttrader »

rekttrader wrote: post #47
dheera wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was suspected that a lot of USDT is backed by Evergrande notes, though they have denied it. Evergrande liquidation may cause a USDT liquidation and cause USDT to lose peg. There are often idiots that will drag the rest of crypto including bitcoin with it, though.

USDT is the 25th largest holder of T-bills. This is a bit of bullshit fud.

Less than 24 hours later.... USDT posts 2b in profit.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#357

Post by Jochim »

everforward wrote: post #281
leoedin wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I was little it was still married-with-children by default, probably at relatively young age, and people had to decide not to have children. Don't ignore selection bias. When you're a kid, almost everyone you know is a child, and so almost every adult you know is a parent. I don't know how old you are, but most of those societal changes - no need to marry and contraception - have been in place for decades. I'm…

My feeling is that it's heavily friend-group or clique dependent, or potentially geography-dependent (metropolitan vs rural). I'm also in my early 30s, but the majority of people I know are not married. I know about the same number of people who are polyamorous as married despite not running in those circles. I know I'm an outlier because the stats don't hear anything close to that. I will say that in the major metro…

The taboo of living together as a couple before marriage has largely disappeared. As a result, there's less incentive to get married as a matter of "moving forward" with your life.

Prior generations experienced marriage as a transformative event, whereas for my wife and I, it was a nice day, but our lives went back to normal afterwards.

Add in the fact that even a small ceremony is expensive, and it's no surprise that many people are putting it off or foregoing it entirely.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#358

Post by Jochim »

argiopetech wrote: post #348
KaiserPro wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

The peak in the 60s occurs a while after the pill was made available in the UK and begins to trend downward before it was made more easily accessible.

Contraceptive measures are not an explanation in and of themselves. They provide no information regarding the "why".

I'd argue that the reduction is more specifically reflective of people's willingness to have children in times of economic hardship or declining living conditions; perceived or otherwise.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#359

Post by Jochim »

argiopetech wrote: post #350
acdha wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

The answer isn't to go back to women requiring a husband.

The problem is that companies were allowed to capture all of the value of women's emancipation, to the detriment of everyone.

Women joining the workforce should have meant two people working 20 hours per week instead of one person working 40. Instead, two person households are working 80 hours and one person households are struggling to get by.

Re: Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated

#360

Post by filoleg »

badpun wrote: post #317
mrjin wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that's going to help. The decades of property bubble has changed the mindset of the people. Just look at Japan, it's property bubble burst was decades ago, but till now, are there any signs of turnaround? Young people have enough trouble just to get a shelter and feed themselves, and now you want them to have kids which add more pressure onto what they are already struggling to coup with. How likely is that?

People live incomparably harder lives in Nigeria than in Japan, and yet they have plenty of children. It's about values, not circumstances.

Well yeah, once you go down in standards of living low enough, the math flips over in favor of having children again. Because at that point, the mortality rate of children is high enough, you need extras just in case. And then someone’s gotta work your fields just to survive, after all. So the more the better just from the financial and survival standpoint alone.

To greatly simplify, it basically makes it so that it makes sense to have children on the far ends of wealth and poverty, and much less sense to do so in the middle.

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