Those banks effectively issued sub-prime mortgages, in part due to obvious fraud. Will Canadians let them fail?
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"Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks
211–220 of 417 posts
Re: "Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
USA population has increased ~10% in the last 20 years. Why has that small increase in population caused a humongous lack of housing? It feels like something else is going on other than "we need to increase supply by 10% but can't"
Housing supply and demand isn’t uniformly distributed across the United States. When we say “housing shortage” we only mean in popular places to live.
So where have housing prices fallen?
Re: "Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
New Zealander here: much the same. New Zealanders definitely hate entrepreneurship - one political party wanted to introduce a wealth tax if you had more than $1 million equity. Median house price in Auckland is just over $1 million! Auckland has about 30% of the population, and house affordability (price compared to income) is similar as bad as Sydney or San Francisco. I have done okay for myself founding a software…
Guardian, December 2023: > The wealth tax contemplated by New Zealand Labour would have required couples to pay an annual levy of 1.5% on any assets they held over a $10m threshold. The estimated $3.8bn in revenue would have funded income-tax cuts for the vast majority of Kiwis. Labour’s potential coalition partners, the Greens and the indigenous-led Te Pāti Māori, ran on similar platforms. > Plus the relentless atta…
What leads to is no willingness to invest in anything other than bonds to ensure you have enough money to pay the tax.
Re: "Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks
#214I have said this over and over again: Canada is the most overrated of all the developed countries. The whole country is a gigantic house of cards propped up by real estate, with horrible service quality, terrible healthcare, no jobs, ZERO innovation, risk taking and entrepreneurship. Having lived and travelled extensively, most Canadians want a house somewhere in the woods instead of doing something meaningful with t…
As a Canadian, living in Southern Ontario, I couldn't agree more with your assessment. Somehow we are ranking #1 on so many charts for quality of life etc. I'm starting to believe these sites and reviews of Canada are paid for. We were an incredible country before Trudeau took office. His aggressive immigration policy, no economic policy or plan, and creation of infighting on social issues, not tackling any of the co…
Look at sites that don't take QoL based on neoliberal metrics?
Re: "Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
>most Canadians want a house somewhere in the woods instead of doing something meaningful with their lives or try and innovate to build something. to be fair most Canadians were promised this as part of their countries stratospheric growth under neoliberalist policies. that they are not capable of it is no fault of their own. that they want this is at all is not a bane. > Where US got the best talent from India, Cana…
> > Where US got the best talent from India, Canada got the worst, In India when we graduated our professors would say - you are really good, you should go to the usa. you are quite mediocre, go try your luck in canada. and you, you are a C student, even canada won't take you in. go get married to some indian lady, get a nice fat dowry, raise two kids and send them to college here, maybe they will get better grades t…
> the heroine's father generally wants to make sure he is a good student & not a scamster from canada.
That sounds hilarious, do you have some example films that I can check out?
Re: "Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of it doesn’t even sound like money laundering, just fraud. You say you have a job paying you lots of money from China, verification is loose, you get the loans, and then try to make mortgage payments via Airbnb. The risk is mostly with the bank, and if it doesn’t blow up you make all the money.
There used to be a thing called a “down payment” that was supposed to cover things like this. It would force you to have a modicum of equity in the house and give the bank a 20% buffer on the price to break even after a short sale.
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Re: "Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks
#217Re: "Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> treating homes purely as shelter ignores the reality that property is also an investment But that's the problem, isn't it? The basic necessities of life shouldn't become a vehicle for speculation. FTR, all of my wealth is in two homes.
Asserting that housing—or any basic necessity—shouldn’t be an investment is a dangerously naive stance that flies in the face of economic reality and human history. Consider food, water, healthcare—all necessities, yet all benefit from private investment and innovation. The collectivist dream to strip away the investment aspect of housing is a recipe for disaster, leading to shortages, degradation, and inefficiency.…
> Consider food, water, healthcare—all necessities, yet all benefit from private investment and innovation.
I live beside the river Thames, which private "investment" has transformed into a sewer. My access to food has shrunk; I used to have access to butchers, greengrocers and so on. Now all my food comes from supermarkets. The health system I depend on has been gradually privatized, and it is now at breaking point.
> the lessons of history
History is squishy stuff; we mould it to support the conclusions we want to draw.
[Edit] I'm interested that you didn't challenge my equating of investment with speculation, because I didn't mention investment. Obviously, without capital investment, you don't get capital assets like houses. But my neighbourhood is blighted by absentee landlords; one neighbour is an AirBnB, the other has been empty for 5 years. Both are owned by absentee landlords, one living 2,000Km away. That's not investment; that's speculation.
Re: "Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks
#219I have said this over and over again: Canada is the most overrated of all the developed countries. The whole country is a gigantic house of cards propped up by real estate, with horrible service quality, terrible healthcare, no jobs, ZERO innovation, risk taking and entrepreneurship. Having lived and travelled extensively, most Canadians want a house somewhere in the woods instead of doing something meaningful with t…
> Where US got the best talent from India, Canada got the worst, the ones who scam their way here and take the lowest level jobs.
Source?
I haven't heard this claim before.
Re: "Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Canada is the most overrated of all the developed countries You're also a politically stable energy and resource exporter bang next to a global economic superpower and security guarantor. Oh, and access to two oceans and soon a third. Canada has plenty of problems. But it's also tremendously blessed.
What's funny is that if we substitute Canada with Russia in your comment, every word of it still holds true. I suppose "stable" and "stagnant" are two sides of the same coin.
That is the tragic part about Russia. They don't need to be Chinas Canada. They have all the protentional in the world play nice in the world sandbox and prosper.