IMF: your housing market is collapsing
China: yeah we know
IMF: so how about you bail out those poor housing investors
China: …no thanks
IMF: surprised Pikachu
Majority of those housing investors being the common people who are buying homes…
This isn’t about people getting a place to live, this is speculation, like Bitcoin, but with housing. There’s a mass of people buying housing to commodify it by selling it later at a huge price or by renting it out. This mass of people got scammed by housing developers who promised to deliver the apartment or house (at a good quality). Unfortunately, that didn’t happen; developers ran ponzi schemes. They used investors’ money to start new constructions and attract new investors, and stopped working on the old constructions or finished them poorly with bad materials.
This is how capitalism works unregulated. So the small investors fucked around trying to become petite bourgeoisie, and they’re finding out the beauty of capitalism.
I know this is hard to hear for Americans, but if you’re making money from being a landlord or flipping houses, you’re a piece of shit.
Bailing out these investors would be like bailing out Bitcoin “common people” investors when the “currency” crashes.
edit: grammar
If you buy a derelict house(that no human can possibly live in) and fix it up to a decent standard with the intent to sell it, are you still a piece of shit?
You add the repairs to the price.
If you’re creating a luxury house/apartment, well, the word “luxury” is already there.
I’m really confused… Did you answer my question?
I clarified how it depends. The answer was “it depends”, which is a very displeasing answer, so I skipped a step.
if they bought the houses to live and not speculate, it doesn’t matter
China rescues people, not investors. 😏
That’s quite a fantasy you’re telling yourself. A huge portion of China’s people’s wealth is wrapped up in real estate, and tens of millions of stalled residential units have already been purchased by the Chinese people, and that money is now gone, taken by the developers.
The IMF recommendation here was “to deploy ‘one-off’ fiscal resources to complete and deliver pre-sold properties or compensate homebuyers.” That would literally be rescuing the Chinese people who were burned by developers. Instead, the Chinese government is supporting the tech and manufacturing industries. Don’t pretend like China is some paradise where the common people aren’t getting fucked
Don’t pretend like China is some paradise where the common people aren’t getting fucked
- Reuters, 2018: China overtakes U.S. for healthy lifespan: WHO data
- United Nations, 2019: Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding
- The Economist, 2021: At 54, China’s average retirement age is too low For most men in China the age is 60, much lower than the average of 64.2 in the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries. For female civil servants the age is 55; for blue-collar women it is 50.
meanwhile in the real world
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&locations=CN&start=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Don’t pretend like the average person in China is a fucking real-estate investor. This investment money is from the middle class and up i.e. people who don’t need to be rescued. They’re going to be fine. Even if their investments all go up in smoke, they won’t be homeless. Common people just spend their paychecks and keep a little aside for savings, like everywhere else in the world.
China already bailed out the buyers. Don’t know where you’re getting your info from. THIS perhaps? https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/FY21 BILL HIGHLIGHTS_SFOPS_final.pdf
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/7937/text?format=txt
https://prospect.org/politics/congress-proposes-500-million-for-negative-news-coverage-of-china/
My info is from the article. Your info is from where?
Removed by mod
I have you tagged as “shit lib and running for imperialism”, it tracks that you have the same view as the US state department.
Removed by mod
Why subject your self and enslave yourself to the IMF?
IMF: Imperialist Monetary Fund
If it was my country’s government, they would have accepted it without a second thought and the people have no say about it.
Why did it crash like this though? Its really hard to find truthful information about this housing thing.
Because housing is for living in, not for speculation or asset price inflation*.
- Oct. 2017: China’s Xi says to maintain principle property is not for speculation China will maintain the principle that houses are for people to live in, not for speculation […]
- Mar. 2024: China’s housing minister says real estate developers must go bankrupt if necessary
.
*Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson Discuss the Causes and Politicization of InflationWhat has really been inflated, since 2008, has not been consumer prices, but asset prices — [that is,] real estate prices, stocks and bond prices, things that the 1% hold. Wealth has been inflated much more than goods and services. [This is especially true] for real estate.
This debt has been inflated not by government debt, not by government deficits, but by the Federal Reserve creating a $9 trillion subsidy to the banks to support real estate prices, and hence the value of bank-held mortgages and stock and bond prices.
This is not discussed, or even recognized, in the mainstream economic models. Instead, we have a kind of mythology by right-wing anti-labor financial lobbyists.
This mythology is about what I think most of the listeners are expecting us to discuss: the inflation of rising consumer prices. That’s the only kind of inflation that the Federal Reserve talks about. This is all blamed on increasing the money supply, as if somehow money is creating the inflation.
They are not talking about inflation as the result of monopoly pricing. They are not talking about inflation as a result of NATO’s sanctions against Russia. They are just talking about money [as if] somehow, if we [could] just stop money supply, if we could stop the government spending so much money on Social Security and Medicare, and other social spending (not military spending) then everything would be over.
We’re actually going to be talking about the relationship between, [on the one hand,] the inflation of housing and asset prices [and,] on the other hand, how this actually affects the inflation of consumer prices, and how debt and inflation all go together.
The quick answer is because the housing market was used for speculation and was causing real estate prices and rents to rise. China introduced “three red lines” policy to mitigate this and let the housing market crash and let the billionaire CEO Hui Ka Yan (and mostly foreign Investors) hold the bag
