Tag Archives: China bubble

Bubble Proof: Chinese Maids Buying Houses

3 May

Unsure about the conflicting arguments in the ‘expert’ commentariat about whether China is in a massive real estate bubble?  Consider real-world anecdotes like those following, related by former Morgan Stanley chief economist and now independent Hong Kong-based economist Andy Xie, who has predicted that an overwhelming “get rich quick” mentality has doomed the Chinese economy.

From a must-read article in BusinessWeek:

“My maid just asked for leave,” a friend in Beijing told me recently. “She’s rushing home to buy property. I suggested she borrow 70 percent, so she could cap the loss.”

It wasn’t the first time I had heard such a story in China. Some friends in Shanghai have told me similar ones. It seems all the housemaids are rushing into the market at the same time.

There are benefits to housekeeping for fund managers. China’s housemaids may be Asia’s answer to the shoeshine boy whose stock tips prompted Joseph Kennedy to sell his shares before the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Another friend recently vacationed in the southern island- resort city of Sanya in Hainan province and felt compelled to visit a development sales office. Everyone she knew had bought there already. It’s either buy or be unsocial.

“You should buy two,” the sharp sales girl suggested. “In three years, the price will have doubled. You could sell one and get one free.”

How could anyone resist an offer like that?

The evidence in official-corruption cases no longer involves cash stashed in refrigerators or starlet mistresses in Versace clothing. The evidence is now apartments. One mid-level official in Shanghai was caught with 24 of them.

China is in the throes of a vast property mania. First, let me make it perfectly clear that calling China’s real-estate market a “bubble” isn’t denying China’s development success. As optimism is an essential ingredient in a bubble, economic success is a necessary condition. Nor am I saying that prices will drop tomorrow. A bubble evolves and bursts in its own time.

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China On ‘Treadmill To Hell’ Amid Bubble

9 Apr

From Bloomberg:

China’s property market is a bubble that may burst by as early as this year, according to hedge fund manager James Chanos.

The world’s third-biggest economy may need to keep up the pace of property investment because up to 60 percent of its gross domestic product relies on construction, said Chanos. The bubble may begin to “run its course” in late-2010 or 2011, he said in an interview on “The Charlie Rose Show” that will air on PBS and Bloomberg TV.

China is “on a treadmill to hell,” said Chanos, who said in January the nation is Dubai times a thousand. “They can’t afford to get off this heroin of property development. It is the only thing keeping the economic growth numbers growing.”

Property prices in China rose at the fastest pace in almost two years in February even after officials this year re-imposed a tax on homes sold within five years of their purchase to curb speculation and ordered banks to set aside more funds as reserves to cool lending. The boom in China’s real estate has fueled concern that China may face a collapse seen in Dubai that has hurt the ability of some of its companies to repay debt.

Since his January prediction, Chanos, the founder of Kynikos Associates Ltd, has been joined by Gloom, Doom & Boom publisher Marc Faber and Harvard University professor Kenneth Rogoff in warning of a potential crash in China’s property market.

Barnaby Joyce has been warning about the external threats to the Australian economy since October 2009.  With every passing month, more and more evidence coming from economies around the world – including those such as China that are vital to Australia’s economic interests – indicates that there is big trouble brewing.  While the Ken Henry-led Rudd Government slumbers on in La La Land, spending like drunken sailors, confident of an unending China boom to lift us out of debt, more and more economists abroad are predicting a China crash.

Barnaby is also the only Australian politician with the courage to publicly question the Rudd Government’s weakening of Foreign Investment laws, which have allowed foreign ‘investors’ to help spike Australia’s already unaffordable housing bubble, and put our ownership of vital national assets at risk.  Only Barnaby Joyce has had the courage to call out the Rudd Government for ‘selling the farm’, paddock by paddock.

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China Losing Control of Economy

8 Apr

From Bloomberg:

Failure to rein in local government spending could push inflation to 15 percent by 2012, said Victor Shih, a political economist at Northwestern University who spent months tallying government borrowing.

“Increasingly the choice facing the government is between inflation or bad loans,” said Shih, author of the book “Finance and Factions in China,” who teaches political science at the university in Evanston, Illinois. “The only mechanism for controlling inflation in China is credit restriction, but if they use that, this show is over — a gigantic wave of bad loans will appear on banks’ balance sheets.”

Attempts to curb borrowing by raising interest rates would boost debt-servicing costs for local governments. At the same time, tightening credit may stall projects, triggering “a build-up of bad loans,” the Basel, Switzerland-based Bank for International Settlements said in a quarterly report in December.

Sun Mingchun, an economist with Nomura in Hong Kong, estimates local governments have proposed projects with a value of more than 20 trillion yuan since the stimulus package was announced in November 2008.

Should the boom end in a property-market collapse, even those stocks tied to the local government projects will be affected along with most other industries, said Shanghai-based independent economist Andy Xie, formerly Morgan Stanley’s chief Asia economist.

“Corporate profits are very much driven by the property sector,” said Xie. “The largest sectors will be hit hard, especially banks and insurance companies.”

A gauge of property stocks has fallen more than 6 percent this year after more than doubling in 2009 as the government takes steps to cool rising prices, including raising the deposit requirement to 20 percent of the minimum price of auctioned land. Property sales were equivalent to 13 percent of gross domestic product last year.

“Policy makers may need to start thinking about how to handle the aftermath of the bust,” said Nomura’s Sun.

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China’s Debt Bubble: When Will The Ponzi Unravel?

6 Apr

From Naked Capitalism via Roubini Global Economics:

Independent Strategy’s latest report, “China’s credit bubble: the missing piece in the jigsaw” makes a persuasive case that China’s debt fueled growth model is due for a hard landing, but the timing is uncertain, since the debt is funded internally.

China is barely past an episode of dealing with banks chock full of bad loans (there were debates among Western analysts in 2002 and 2003 as to how bad the damage was and whether the remedies were sufficient). On a more fundamental level, China has copied the Japanese mercantilist development model pretty much wholesale. It arguably hit the wall with the 1985 Plaza accord, when the US found the continued trade deficits unacceptable and succeed in organizing a G5 intervention to drive up the yen (that succeeded too well, the yen overshot, leading to the Louvre accord to push up the greenback). Japan’s central bank lowered interest rates to stoke asset prices in the hopes that the wealth effect would produce higher domestic consumption and offset the effect of the fall in exports.

We all know how that movie ended…

The report forecasts a large decline in growth rates, as well as land and real estate prices, since LGFVs [Local Government Financing Vehicles] will need to liquidate holdings to try to pay off non-performing loans.

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Australia’s ‘Goldilocks’ Economy

31 Mar

From The Intelligent Investor:

Australia is the western world’s ‘Goldilocks economy’. My own particular concern is that the market now assumes this status to be a permanent state of affairs. Most domestic commentators, alive to the opportunities that stem from our increasing reliance on China, are asleep to the potential risks.

The consequences of a significant Chinese downturn will be enormous for us; the Goldilocks economy may start to look like other western nations; indebted, economically promiscuous and unable to spend less than we earn. The resources, banking and property sectors look particularly exposed.

While not all of our analysts are as concerned as I am about the potential dangers of a Chinese downturn, we all agree it’s important for Australian investors to consider the possibility that the Chinese miracle may sour for at least a few years.

A few questions should be asked of your portfolio and financial circumstances; Does your brand of diversification mean that the 15 stocks in your portfolio are all in the mining business? Do you own some genuinely defensive investments? Do you have some spare cash reserves or term deposits? Have you paid down your margin loan? Now’s the time to consider these questions.

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China’s Banks In Trouble

9 Mar

From Bloomberg:

China plans to nullify all guarantees local governments have provided for loans taken by their financing vehicles as concerns about credit risks on such debt surges.

China’s local governments are raising funds through investment vehicles to circumvent regulations that prevent them from borrowing directly. A crackdown on local-government borrowing, estimated at about 24 trillion yuan ($3.5 trillion) by Northwestern University Professor Victor Shih, could trigger a “gigantic wave” of bad loans as projects are left without funding, Shih said this month.

“Beijing’s fiscal situation probably isn’t as good as it looks at first glance,” said Brian Jackson, an emerging markets strategist at Royal Bank of Canada in Hong Kong. “Perhaps at some stage the central government is going to have to bail out the banks or the regional governments and take it on its own balance sheet.”

Premier Wen Jiabao recently warned of ‘latent risk’ in China’s banking system due to the massive speculative loans taken on by local governments in China.

Warnings of an inevitable crash in China’s real estate market have been growing louder, with former chief economist for the IMF, Ken Rogoff, predicting that China’s property market is in a speculative bubble that will burst ‘within 10 years’, triggering a regional recession.

In Australia, our economic authorities such as RBA Governor Glenn Stevens, and Treasury Secretary Ken Henry, are banking on a China-fueled multi-decade mining boom to carry Australia out of debt.

They both failed to predict the GFC.  It seems they still cannot see, or will not hear, the warning signals today.

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Stevens: ‘Risk of Serious Contraction’ Passed

2 Mar

The man who did not see trouble all around in 2008, continually raising interest rates right into the teeth of the GFC, has raised rates again today:

RBA governor Glenn Stevens said the “risk of serious economic contraction” had passed, and an economy that was growing faster than expected would warrant higher interest rates for the rest of the year.

Stevens clearly believes that the Australian economy is magically immune from the sovereign debt crises in the Eurozone, UK, USA, and Japan, and the massive speculative real estate bubble in China.

However, the Rudd Labor government no longer has a $20+ Billion budget buffer inherited from the previous government. Instead, they have put Australia into unprecedented debt that we can never pay back.

Stevens, allegedly a devout Baptist, had best start praying fervently that all the ongoing financial crises in the rest of the world somehow resolve themselves.  Else he will again be shown as a fool… at a terrible price to the Australian public.

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