zephyreks @ zephyreks @lemmy.ml

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Shenyang in north-east China is offering 100 yuan (£11) a sqmetre subsidies for some homebuyers. Kaifeng in central Henan province is offering an income tax refund to anyone who buys a new property within a year of selling their old one. Changhsa, the capital of Hunan province, is encouraging developers to offer no-questions-asked refunds of housing deposits if a buyer changes their mind within seven days.

Local stimulus, which differs from Central government policy because contrary to popular belief the Chinese government is not a monolith. Different provinces want to get investment at the cost of other provinces, but this does not change the fact that in aggregate China's bubble is actively being deflated by the actions of the central government. The prevailing trajectory of the market, and the actions which the central government have taken in this regard, are very clear. In modern terms, this is "picking up pennies in front of a freight train."

Last month, the state-owned People’s Bank of China (PBOC) unveiled a 300bn yuan relending fund to support local governments and state-owned enterprises to buy up unsold stock and turn it into affordable housing. The central bank also lowered the minimum downpayment required for prospective buyers.

sigh do you know what the minimum down payment for a home in central Beijing is? 50%.

Give me an action that indicates the central government is not trying to institute a controlled collapse ("soft landing") of the real estate market. The numbers don't lie, but apparently you do.

First of all, the Saudi Arabia-US petrodollar deal was signed in 1974. 2024-1974 < 80. I'm locking this post.

The Guardian doesn't speak Chinese (or rather, they don't understand it). Their reporting on China is consistently incompetent for that single fact. They refuse to dig through Chinese reports and Chinese data because they can't understand it. The data is right there, plainly published for the world to see.

If they did, they would know that real estate's contribution to GDP has fell off a cliff ever since Xi Jinping declared "housing is for living, not for speculation." If they did, they would know that investment into real estate has pretty much entirely collapsed and shifted into manufacturing (clean energy, EVs, nuclear, robotics, etc.) If they did, they would know that their stories about "ghost cities" a few years back... Ended up being, well, cities. If they did, they would know that the prevailing thought on Chinese social media is that the government is allowing real estate developers to fall... And they're definitely falling.

That's what the data tells us. The bubble is actively deflating as we speak, and many estimate it to have been in excess of a 1% headwind on GDP growth in 2023... Citi just revised their projections of full-year GDP growth to 5%, and so have Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas.

You should maybe read up on Haitian independence...

Developers losing money and consolidating property assets in the government? What, exactly, does this threaten?

GDP growth? It's been a 1.5% headwind, and China is still blowing through GDP projections.

Climate change? The collapse of the construction industry has been a huge net positive for emissions reductions.

Housing prices? Those have been going down.

Savings? Only insomuch as if you intended to own multiple homes (that is, you're the landlord class). Otherwise, you still own a single home that you need to live in.

All Haiti has to do was send it's slaves back to France, I really don't see the problem.

I'm not claiming that navigation for military vessels is limited. Like I mentioned, FONOPs are valid under UNCLOS.

Potato, potato

Someone should tell the US, then, because they sure as hell didn't limit sanctions to networking equipment.

How many new builds have collapsed in <5 years? If you're claiming many many, you should be able to cite at least 5, right?

fair enough

Still, I thought the Houthis were mostly targeting ships that turned off their AIS and tried to run the Strait?

thank you

Yeah, German houses are so nice man. Like I don't think I could get a US builder to build me a German house if I tripled their budget. They just don't know how.

Everyone has the appetite for the secrets of everyone.

Surprisingly, China publishes a lot of it. Like, a lot a lot. As in, pretty much all the work done at CAS and similar institutions is published, which is the equivalent to US national labs or Lincoln Lab or what have you.

At the same time, Huawei itself publishes an obscene amount of work and is incredibly proactive in academic research - they open-source code, fund top-tier conferences, and publish basically every result they get. It's actually stupid how much money they dump on conferences.

Now, you might ask yourself, what secrets does the West have? Well, China already leads in 80% of critical technology fields, so unless you're working in integrated circuit design/fabrication, quantum computing, high performance computing, natural language processing, vaccines, small satellites, or space launch systems... You probably don't have much to hide. Plus, if you're working in a field where secrets are important, you already likely have security clearance.

As a Canadian I'm pissed off about Nortel too, but a bunch of Canadian companies got fucked by the dotcom crash and the 08 crisis and Nortel was unfortunately one of them. I'm more pissed off about Bombardier, which is an issue I'm actually affected by. Fuck the hyenas at the DOJ that killed Bombardier and the CSeries to protect their golden goose. How's 737 Max sales going, Boeing? Getting outcompeted by the A220 that Bombardier was forced to sell to AirBus for $1? Yeah...

Plus, Nortel outsourced their entire manufacturing and product design teams to Huawei in the 90s, so I don't have too much sympathy for Nortel.

The big powers bully us because we have no choice. That's the repercussions of Trudeau's foreign policy.

If you work at McDonald's or Wendy's, it really doesn't matter what phone you use lmao

Palauan-flagged, Ukrainian-owned and Polish-operated bulk cargo carrier that had docked in Malaysia and was on its way to Italy carrying wood.

Maybe this was an attack on Palau? Poland? Malaysia? Italy? No, using Ukraine will generate more clicks.

Not sure uninvolved parties (ASEAN, African Union, Arab League, ex-UNASUR) are going to be too keen to store significant foreign reserves in USD/Euro given that the seizing of interest payments is apparently something that's in the cards.

I guess there's a reason Saudi Arabia is looking at mBridge... Surely the West can't be happy with what they've been doing in Yemen.

If the war is important, the US and Europe should actually fund it instead of looking for pennies behind couch cushions.

Counterexample: Haiti's independence debts from France for daring to free slaves

The people who invested knew that they were buying investment properties. The developers sold based on urbanization projections that did not follow through, the investors bought it up, and now the developers lose money and the investors who could afford to buy multiple homes lose money.

How terrible.

(As an aside, I think China's reported urbanization rate is below reality because a lot of places that would be considered urban in Europe or North America are listed as rural in China). Under China's definition, living a 15 minute drive from the center of a 200k-population city could be a "rural home." I think that China's urbanization numbers sent a false signal to developers that more development was needed, when in fact China was much further along the urbanization curve than the numbers indicated.

I think I prefaced the statement with it depended on what you consider a subsidy. I admit it isn't semantic, but I really consider any government assistance to private equity a subsidy. Mainly because it in truth and investment in which the government is hoping for a return.

Fair enough. I think then it's important to distinguish between what subsidies are worth tariffing and what subsidies are not. If Germany rezones an area to allow car factories to be built, is that a subsidy worth tariffing?

Right, but this is a reclamation action. It's not what the original investment was meant for, and surely they aren't getting the same monetary return they originally hoped for.

I support governments subsidizing affordable housing, this is another thing I think western states need to realize. However, it doesn't seem like they needed to focus on that much housing at the moment, and it doesn't seem like that was their original intention.

I mean, in this case it's more that the developers lost money and the government gained assets sold below book value... That's pretty good return imo. The developers' investors got fucked, yes, but have you looked at, say, Evergrande's ownership? Not all Chinese developers are state-owned. In fact, the distressed ones are not.

I think the government's entire existence should evolve around fulfilling their public's needs, including adequate public transportation. The key word there is need. The Chinese government didn't need to throw billions of dollars to private equity to build more homes than necessary. They did it because they wanted to maintain their gdp, so they could flaunt their economic vanity alongside the US on the international stage.

Except... Do you know how China imputes rent for their GDP calculations? It's the construction cost depreciated linearly over the life of the building. Think about that for a second, then come back to me. I can explain it to you, but when I realized what it meant it shook me to the core so maybe it'll have the same effect on you lol. For reference, the US imputes rent by asking "what would the homeowner have paid if they had to rent."