this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago

Don’t pretend like China is some paradise where the common people aren’t getting fucked

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Oh no! The millionaire is now not a billionaire... And the developer was sentenced to life in prison.

Anyway...

[–] [email protected] -5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How is a family spending their money on an apartment they now won’t receive “a millionaire that is not a billionaire”? Not to mention, China loves billionaires. They have more of them than the US. It’s a fascistic shithole.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Why are you lying? They bailed out buyers. And no it's not. Are you a fed? https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

I don't know enough about this specific situation. But the history of the IMF and World Bank is such that, if they were to put out a statement saying that the sky is blue, I would immediately go and check if it had somehow changed colour.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (3 children)

My understanding is many everyday Chinese people bought real estate that wasn't yet built because demand was so high. Supposedly many of them sunk their whole life savings into units that developers had promised to build at some future point. That point seems unlikely to come if those developers go bankrupt, meaning that some decently large number of everyday people are going to lose their life savings.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

My understanding is middle class Chinese people bought real estate because they wanted passive income from investing in real-estate. China shouldn't have allowed them to do that but the solution isn't to bail out these developers. The actual solution is to make sure these people do not end up destitute because they wasted their money on gambling.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

it was basically the only kind of investment allowed in china.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That's call investnent risk that investors bears why should their losses be subsidized via loans on entire taxpayers?

Ironic how China is more less interventionist than US now where we bail out the owner class every single time

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Sorry, so the people who saved up to buy a home that couldn't be built until later due to demand are now investors?

I don't think they owned any stock in a company.

They had contracts for homes, right?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Real estate is an asset class just like any other asset that is traded.

With respect to them giving money unfront for building, they got scammed. It is a criminal matter. But why should other people socialize their bad choices.

Bail out mechinsm done in the west is the most retarded way to deal with these issues and it creates incentives for owner class to scam taxpayers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

So you are saying anyone who has a mortgage is the "investor class."

Got it. Think we are done here.