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February 2000:

David: If your not a media stock, dot-com stock or a telecom stock, valuations are very low.

BBC: So what you’re saying David is that it’s really the result of this asset bubble. In other words, the actual stock market value of these companies was way out of line, compared to their potential to earn money.

David: Right, and I think that was fairly widely known. In our consciousness, it was just way out of whack. But, every day you heeded it, or you got left behind. These things were going up by the day, they were going up by the rate of warp seed, regardless of whether they had earnings or not.

BBC: Though you though it was all a bit ridiculous, you still felt you had to keep recommending these dot-com shares to your clients.

David: Looks, this seems kinda ridiculous, maybe we should look at pulling back on the aggressiveness of your styles, because they had all of the proof they needed – in their track record. It was fabulous. And it was very difficult to convince them of any other type of approach to what they were doing. I think it was quite difficult to tell clients to pull back, when every month they were making another 5-10%.

The Internet stock bubble was a classic stock market speculative bubble. The 2007 subprime crisis is a bubble in credit and the price of money. The discussions people were having about Internet Stocks in February 2000 sure sound a lot like discussions about the Chinese Real-Estate market.

They had all of the proof they needed – in their track record.

His invocations of the “power of the Chinese people,” or of an imaginary individual who will one day “end the Chinese state as it now exists,” read more like political soap opera than judicious analyses.

One of the Amazon commenters summarized Mr Chang’s POV as:

“The Coming Collapse of China” is an angry book written by the son of a man who “left China before the end of the Second World War and [the son] grew up hearing him say that Mao Zedong’s regime would have to fall.” The son returned to China to work as a lawyer in Shanghai. When he wrote this book – his first – it was a polemic in which he pounded away at the evils of Communism and predicted that Jiang Zemin’s regime would have to fall.

The Christian Science Monitor published Mr Chang’s “China: the world’s next great economic crash” article in the Opinion section this week. The truth is probably somewhere in between the current China Euphoria (rise of China is story of decade) and Mr. Chang’s China Collapse POV. For the record, I’m optimistic that China will be in a very strong position by 2050, with living standards in the largest cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou) at parity with Taipei and Hong Kong. However there is a massive asset bubble in China that is hurting all but the wealthiest 0.5% (85% of families can’t afford basic housing). 40% of local gov’t revenues come from land sales (Professor Chovanec) and current GDP growth is fueled by real estate development.

The following is an [objective?] look at the current China situation:

Beijing, ignoring advice from Washington and other capitals, did not in the boom times try to restructure its economy to favor consumption. Instead, the Chinese government sought to take maximum advantage of then-surging foreign demand. The role of consumption, therefore declined – falling from a historical average of 60 percent of the economy to about 30 percent last year. No country has a lower rate.

To make up for slumping demand abroad and sluggish consumer spending at home, the State Council, the central government’s cabinet, announced a stimulus plan in November 2008. Beijing originally said it would spend $586 billion through 2010. In the first full year of the program however, it has directly and through state banks disbursed about $1.1 trillion in stimulus funds.

The plan, not surprisingly, is creating gross domestic product, but growth is an artificial “sugar high.” For one thing, Beijing’s stimulus spending last year was around a quarter of the total economy. Now, perhaps as much as 95 percent of China’s growth is attributable to state investment, as a Chinese analyst noted recently.

Despite the massive state spending, the country’s economy is not particularly robust. Power consumption statistics, a crucial indicator of economic activity, show the economy expanding at only two-thirds the announced rate.

Moreover, essentially flat consumer prices last year belie official reports of roaring retail sales. So does the full-year 11.2 percent decline in imports, another sign of sluggish domestic demand. And if the economy is really growing by double digits, why is Beijing insisting on continuing its stimulus?

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, however, thinks none of this will be a problem. Arguing that China is not the next Enron, he gives this advice to Mr. Chanos: “Never short a country with $2 trillion in foreign currency reserves.”

Yet Beijing’s record-setting reserves – now $2.4 trillion – are essentially unusable for this purpose. Why? China’s leaders need local currency, the renminbi, to deal with domestic needs. If they convert reserves into renminbi, they will cause the currency to zoom up in value and choke off the critical export sector. Foreign reserves have only limited uses in domestic crises.

Second, the state’s stimulus plan is taking the nation in the wrong direction. It is favoring large state enterprises over small and medium-sized private firms, and state financial institutions are diverting credit to state-sponsored infrastructure. Over the past three decades, China’s economy has expanded at an average annual rate of 9.9 percent because of the private sector, but now Beijing is renationalizing the economy with state cash.

Third, Beijing’s flooding of state enterprises with government cash will undermine their competitiveness, as a similar tide of money severely damaged Japan’s corporations during the bubble years.

Japanese managers discovered they could make more money managing cash than from anything else, and they therefore neglected their underlying businesses. Essentially the same thing is happening in China.

We have already mentioned that a balance of payments surplus implies that the reserve component of the monetary base is increasing. Some expansion in the monetary policy may be entirely appropriate, especially in an economy with strong long-term growth. But in an economy that is in danger of overheating, the central bank may wish to sterilize the inflow, so as to prevent expansion in the overall money supply.

If the money supply expands, you will create inflation and may also create asset bubbles which [mis]allocate resources from productive efficient. Recently these misallocations have expanded global housing markets and propped up global stock markets.

Sterilization can be a good response to an inflow, for a period of time. It can help the country maintain its exchange rate target without abandoning a target for the money supply or interest rate. But it can become increasingly difficult over time, especially if traditional barriers to capital flows have been gradually eroded. One problem is that it just prolongs the balance of payments disequilibrium, because it by-passes the automatic mechanism of adjustment that reserve flows provide under the monetary approach to the balance of payments. Another potential problem is the quasi-fiscal deficit: if the central bank has to pay high interest rates to get domestic residents voluntarily to absorb “sterilization bonds,” while receiving low interest rates on its reserves of US treasury securities, then it is running a deficit.

Under normal circumstances, Sterilization Bonds would require chinese state banks to purchase bonds from the government, reducing the size of the money supply (because money is handed back to the government). However, in China all foreign currencies collected at state banks are immediately surrendered to the central bank. I believe this policy removes the typical need for “Sterilization”.

Some governments are able to force their bonds down the throats of their banks without paying market interest rates, a form of financial repression; but this just weakens the balance sheets of banks and raises the odds of a banking crisis somewhere down the road.

With the banks all being owned by the Gov’t, this is the case here…

One disadvantage of a balance of payments surplus, on the other hand, is that the reserves, which are typically held in the form of US Treasury bills and bonds and other dollar securities, pay a low rate of return. Interest rates on US treasury bills are low because the market is so liquid and because default is assumed to be very unlikely — and also, during the period 2001-2004, because the Federal Reserve has held short-term interest rates well below normal historical levels. The Chinese authorities have evidently already diversified out of Treasury bills, into agency bonds and other longer term securities, which will probably help the yield somewhat. But it is more likely than not that the dollar will depreciate over the next ten years (not necessarily in the short run), in light of the large US trade deficit, which would reduce even further the return to holding dollar securities. (Diversification into the euro or other currencies has evidently not yet gone far.)

The low interest rates associated with this giant pool of money helped sow the seeds for the global financial crisis. Basically, there is too much money in RMB and not enough good USD investments, yet the Fed set interest rates too low. The result was Chinese bankers buying Fannie, Freddie and boatloads of mortgaged backed securities.

These points are drawn largely from the experience of emerging markets such as Colombia and Korea in the early 1990s. Those countries were able to sterilize capital inflows only for a year or two, before it became too difficult, due to high interest rates on the sterilization bonds and the prolongation of strong capital inflows (as in standard macro models). Chinese officials may be correct that their case is somewhat different, due to a financial system that is less open and less market-oriented.

See the “surrender” policy for dealing with foreign currency.

The capital inflow has consisted largely of Chinese citizens bringing capital flight money back home, speculating on a revaluation, and so far the authorities have not had to pay high interest rates locally to sterilize it. But they may find it increasingly difficult to sterilize further inflows.

The “inflows” are all the Chinese expatriate class returning home story was probably true when this story started, however the size of the bubble today and “Rise of China” being the most read story of the decade indicate the story has been stretched quite a ways now. Interesting that speculators always have a million reasons why it’s different this time and how other people are speculating, but not them and it’s not widespread.

Either way, if this gap is real, better to address it through appreciation than inflation.

But I doubt this is the policy that the CCP will peruse, despite how logical it may be and how much it may benefit the average citizen.

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

In Mainland Chinese culture, the person with slightly more authority in a situation routinely strong-arms the weaker party, and the weaker party generally goes along with the situation, saying “没办法 – No [other] method”. Google is another recent example 1st worlders of saying “No, are civilized and don’t agree with mafia negociation tactics”. Great job guys! Hope to see an explosion of cases like this in 2010!

The CCP has been using 8% annual GDP growth as the metric of success for years, but has lost sight of WHY 8% GDP growth has been the objective – and the bureaucrats have figured out how to manipulate GDP growth during the bubble years, the same way managers in American firms figured out how to manipulate stock prices in the 60s/70s. The resulting american conglomerate boom didn’t create long term shareholder value any more than the central planners focus on unproductive GDP will create long term financial benefit.

Deng Xiaoping made massive steps forward in Chinese reform by simply getting the gov’t out of the way, and with his support Zhao Ziyang and Zhu Rongji were able to go further. Chinese reform has been in exercise in gradualism, and this gradualism has avoid many undoable mistakes. However, we are left asking who are the reformers today? Wen Jiabao seems to generally came deeply about the welfare of the people, but without a free press and an independent judiciary, I think corruption will eat away at the efficiency of the Chinese economy and prevent mainlanders from reaching living standards of their brethren in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Rogers’ partner George Soros got famous shorting sterling. Meanwhile, Jim Chanos got famous shorting Enron. Chanos noticed that Enron had a very low return on Capital Investment (only 6-7%/year) and is seeing the same low return on invested capital here in China.

The first day I ever came to Shanghai, it was for a lunch invitation with Rogers. I fell in love with the place, and though it took a few months to get here, I plan to stay in Shanghai. Bubble or not. That first day in Shanghai, standing with Rogers on top of the Ritz Carlton, he explained to me the madness of the Shanghai real-estate bubble, and moreover, the world wide real-estate bubble. So there you go: “Rogers, China real-estate Bubble: Yes”.

Listen, Rogers is saying that “There is no commodities bubble”. Rogers has a huge amount invested in this, and if central banks keep printing money, they keep proving Rogers right. When China’s real-estate bubble pops, some commodities will take a short term hit, but the macro trend is that the USD is being devalued.

Chanos isn’t saying that he doesn’t think that China has a bright future, he is said the GDP numbers are “massively inflated by under-depreciating a very, very, very shaky capital asset base.” Chanos’ critics say that China’s different because there’s no leverage here, but that’s not true. The market is leverage by multiple layers of ownership each using existing property as collateral. Not unlike the structured leverage in Dubai, but completely different from the leveraging the the US property market.

Most interesting is that many in the US are vehemently opposed to government involvement in the economy, yet those same people are bullish on the China market because the Chinese Technocrats can “fine tune” the economy at their will. These are the same all powerful technocrats that drop dead regularly bingeing with the hostesses at KTV.

Here’s the relevant China situation, as it stands today, summed up quickly: 1. Everybody in China was dirt poor from 1949-1977 because the gov’t prevented private enterprise (basically the same as North Korea today) 2. In 1977, Deng Xiaoping created the first Special Economic Zone in Shenzhen, beginning the growth of China. 3. In the late 90s, Clinton arranged for China to enter the WTO, speeding up foreign direct investment 4. More investment more, higher efficiency factories and foreign exchange reserves soared 5. The gov’t invested (25%?) these foreign exchange reserves into infrastructure, creating hopes of a modern, industrialized, first world China at some point in the future. 6. The owners of the factories, the beneficiaries of the infrastructure projects earned private profits, and had to invest these profits – due to lack of investment options, most chose to invest in luxury real-estate, pushing up prices to current levels. 7. In ‘07, the Global Economic Crisis came and China still had enough foreign reserves to weather the crisis, not only offsetting the drop in exports, but preserving the lucky “8%” GDP “growth”. 8. Throughout ‘08/’09, Due to high real-estate prices and weakened global trade and investment options, even more money has been poured into Chinese Real-Estate

Things to remember. The Technocrat “Central Planners” have never had a good track record. We’re all aware of the disasters of Communist Central Planning of Russia, Cuba and the Closed China. In the 80s though, American’s talked about the magic of the METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) explaining how America couldn’t compete with Japan’s centrally planned capitalism. That infatuation ended around when American’s bought Rockefeller Center back from Japanese investors for half the price.

Personally, I’m very long on the Chinese entrepreneurs and the Chinese people. In the next 50 years, I hope that most of them are able to join us Americans, and our allies in Japan and Europe in first world living standards – they’ve already done so in Hong Kong and Taiwan and it seems to be a great thing for all of us. Meanwhile, I’m very bearish on bureaucrats everywhere, and nowhere more so than where the bureaucrats are living in a giant bubble – and feeding the bubble for their own benefit.

In September last year, Hu Shuli started stepping away from Caijing due to editorial constraints that were starting to impact the magazine. The scope of coverage started tightening in July, not due to editorial, but due to the magazine’s chief investor (Wang Boming 王波明) calling for caution. The All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce/中华全国工商业联合会, the party-led organization of businessmen that holds the magazine’s publishing license. Desk editors told reporters they wouldn’t be running any politically controversial stories — indefinitely. The move was related to the general restrictions of all forms surrounding the Oct 1st, 60 year anniversary of the CCP.

There are some things that even Caijing would have never been able to report on…

The untouchables are known among foreign media as “the three T’s and one F”: Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwan, and the Falun Gong. Jeremy Goldkorn, who runs a Web site about Chinese media called Danwei.org, adds, “You don’t directly criticize central government and top leaders, and you don’t question their legitimacy. You can criticize lower-down officials, specific actions, and talk about local problems.”

Our worries seem to be over. This wasn’t a long term crackdown on transparency. It was only only an admission of frailty in preparation for the 60th anniversary military parade.

Hu Shuli 胡舒立 is back in action at Caing 新世纪周刊! Here’s the post at Caing: 胡舒立的团队和新闻职业共同体

A “bubble” is a sustained but temporary major misalignment between perceptions of value (momentarily reflected in market prices) and actual underlying value (eventually reflected in actual cash flows over time). In this sense, it is primarily a psychological phenomenon, caused by unrealistically high expectations of profit and/or underestimation of risk. I stress the words “sustained” and “major” because minor misalignments are taking place — and being corrected — constantly, which is what markets are all about. If all of us knew what returns would actually be over time, we wouldn’t even need markets — or entrepreneurs — in the first place. But there are times — we call them bubbles — when these misalignments persist and feed on themselves until, somewhere down the road, the market loses faith and valuations suddenly come crashing back to reality in one fell blow.

Some economic bubbles that we’ve experienced:

• Tulip Mania, Netherlands, 1637
• South Sea Company Bubble, UK, 1720
• Compagnie d’Occident / Mississippi Company, France, 1720. (Leveraged)
• Railway Mania, UK, 1840s
• Canal Mania, UK, 1790s
• Stock Market Bubble, US, 1920s (Leveraged)
• Japan Real-Estate and Stock Bubble, Japan, 1986-1990 (Leveraged)
• Internet – Dot Com Bubble, US, 1998-2000
• Housing Bubble, Worldwide, 2000-2006 (Leveraged)

Non-leveraged bubbles are still bubbles, but fortunately their ends are not as dramatic and there effects are not as long lasting as leveraged (credit boom) bubbles. Frederic Mishkin pointed out this distinction in the Financial Times (Not all bubbles present a risk to the economy [FT subscription required]).

Like the start of the Internet Industry, there were also bubbles at the start of the Automotive, Radio and Television revolutions. Each one changed our life. Each time, too much speculative capital chases too few good assets. Additionally, the excess supply of capital creates an excess supply of assets that can be purchased.

The common thread in these three bubbles is over-excited investors putting money into a relatively new product, financial scheme, or industry that seems, given its limited track record, to offer a sure-fire path to riches but whose real risks and rewards they do not yet fully comprehend. Funding those investments via debt is not a necessary ingredient.

I have not yet been able to find a lot of 3rd party sources covering real-estate leverage in China, for now I’ll quote Prof. Chovanec on the subject (Leverage and China’s Property Market).

According to current rules, Chinese developers must use their own capital to secure land. Once they do so, banks will lend them 65% of the money they need for construction and related development costs, with the land pledged as collateral. But saying developers must use “their own capital” to buy the land is a bit misleading.

Residential Sector: Developers build and offload projects rapidly to buyers, half of whom are paying cash.

• Many developers do raise such funds by listing on the domestic or Hong Kong stock exchanges
• Many bring in private equity investors.
• I’ve also seem them raise it in the form of debt
  • Parent company take out loans and then inject the funds as capital into a real estate subsidiary. (most common)
  • Issuing high-yield bonds (if they’re listed)
  • By taking on loans at multiple layers of holding companies, a developer can leverage up considerably to cover his “capital” commitment to the banks.
  • It’s very hard to quantify the extent of this exposure, due to the indirect way many of these loans were raised and channeled into real estate.
• Approximately 50% of all residential purchases in China today are financed with mortgages
• China’s mortgage market is relatively small — about 10% of GDP, compared to 48% for Hong Kong.

Commercial sector, developers are building properties mainly to hold and lease. That means they are raising debt — both from banks and subordinated creditors — and they are not deleveraging.

• Many commercial buildings sit nearly or completely empty
• Where does the cashflow to pay the loans on the property come from?
  • Does the bank care, or is it happy rolling over the loan because the (supposed) value of the collateral has risen?
• This is the Dubai story all over again — multiple layers of leverage, no tenants, no cash flow.

Credit vs Collateral

• In the West, banks usually make commercial loans to businesses based on an evaluation of their expected profits and cash flows — will they earn enough to repay?
• In China, as in many developing markets where banks’ technical skills are not so sophisticated, most business loans are made on the basis of collateral — are there assets the bank can seize if the loan goes bad?
  • Asset Chinese banks like most as collateral is real estate
  • Therefore SOEs enjoy both preferential access to land AND lion’s share of bank loans in China
• Nobody is really arguing that Chinese banks are over-leveraged.
• It’s their clients, the developers and SOEs, that are leveraged up on real estate.
• It’s loans to those clients, should property take a tumble, that would hit the banks as losses.

The National Audit Office data shows that 25 central ministries are involved in real estate violations, worth billions of yuan. Among them, unlisted assets of 51.6917 million yuan from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have gone into purchasing real estate. The Ministry of Agriculture has developed commercial housing, acting beyond its authority, and has submitted false reports on housing subsidies. In 2008, a real estate rental service center under the Ministry of Finance took in rental income of 5.3193 million yuan. The Ministry of Public Security has approved construction projects worth 422 million yuan, utterly exceeding its authority. Other data show that among 136 central enterprises under the State-owned Assets Supervision Administration Commission, about 70% of the companies are involved in real estate, among which 16 firms are primarily based in the property industry, including Poly, Sino-Ocean, and China Resources, while more than 80 outside firms have business in real estate. Among the top ten highest priced land purchases in major cities in the first half of this year, 60% were gobbled up by SOEs.

Yes, that is 25 central ministries that have been caught speculating in the real-estate market.

• What is the Ministry of Agriculture doing building houses?
• And the Police Department (called “Public Security” here) is in the construction business too?

The government here is just as “asleep at the wheel” as the OFHEO was when regulating Fannie-May and Freedie-Mac.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) was an agency within the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It was charged with ensuring the capital adequacy and financial safety and soundness of two government sponsored enterprises — the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac).

Another 19 real estate companies also showed interest in the land bought by Sino Ocean, among them Gemdale Group, a private real estate company. It didn’t bother to bid, though, as prices were too high and a huge challenge for a private company. In the current environment, SOEs are able to take significantly greater risks than private enterprises.

My closest friend in Shanghai is also a land developer (房地产开发商) and I’ve heard the exact same story from him. Every time they try to bid on a project, some SOE backed business comes in at a higher price. No matter how much you are willing to offer, the SOE backed group raise the bid until they get the property.

Do SOE’s have a secret for generating better ROI than experienced, well managed, privately held developers? If they do, they should start a training academy teaching their “post-market economics efficiency”. Most likely this will be a lesson in buying high and selling low.

Zhang Shuguang, chairman of Unirule Institute of Economics, says, “Real estate policy next year is a choice among contradictions and big changes may not take place. Tightening policies will cause the real estate bubble to burst, resulting in economic problems, while excessive stimulus will bring a bigger bubble and greater risks.”

You’ve got a bubble on your hands. Choices I’m aware of are a) soft landing or b) hard landing. Sounds like the Chinese plan is to “manage the bubble”. Good luck with that.

The dilemma is more obvious for local governments. Zhang Shuguang says that half of local government income is real estate-related, and local real estate policies will not see big changes. Preferential policies may be fine-tuned instead of cancelled.

In case you want to know “why” the bureaucrats what to “manage the bubble” instead of fixing the economy? Because the bubble is putting money in their budgets. The bigger the budget, the bigger the kickback.

Can we bring Zhu Rongji back the way Deng Xiaoping was brought back? He’s ceased to exist as a public figure since 2003 – just about the time the economy started going way off track.

Zhu tackled the problems of an excessive money supply, rising prices, and a chaotic financial market stemming, in large measure, from runaway investments in fixed assets. After four years of successful macro-economic controls with curbing inflation as the primary task, an overheated Chinese economy cooled down to a “soft landing”.

Unfortunately, he’s not likely to be restored because:

Zhu has a reputation for being a strong, strict administrator, intolerant of flunkeyism, nepotism, and a dilatory style of work. For his hard work ethic and general truthful and transparent attitude, he is generally considered one of the most popular Communist officials in mainland China.

The company that bought the land that included her restaurant for $700 million — a huge parcel a few minutes from the Olympic stadium — was already busily clearing the block for another glittering mega-development. The sooner it broke ground, the sooner it could capitalize on property values that spiked more than 30 percent this year in Beijing and a handful of other cities.

The only thing in the company’s way was a squat row of buildings that included the Fish Castle Restaurant, a decidedly modest Sichuan-style seafood joint that Ms. Qin and her boyfriend opened just before the 2008 Summer Olympics. The couple, the very picture of modern Chinese entrepreneurial bravado, had signed a three-year lease, poured their extended families’ life savings into fixing up the space, and then learned in August that they had only two months to get out.

Chinese newspapers are filled with stories of battles involving so-called nail houses, the properties whose owners and occupants are like deeply embedded spikes that refuse to give way to redevelopment juggernauts. As an unceasing real-estate boom has swept the nation, much of it orchestrated by the local governments that benefit from soaring land values, property owners and occupants often protest unfair compensation.

SOEs are becoming an ever larger portion of the Chinese economy, bidding up prices and pushing out private entrepreneurs. Long term, I have zero faith that the “central planners” in any country can create long term growth better than innovative entrepreneurs.

Although parallels with other bubble markets, the China bubble is not quite so easy to understand. In some places, demand for upper middle class housing is so hot it can’t be satisfied. In others, speculators keep driving up prices for land, luxury apartments, and villas even though local rents are actually dropping because tenants are scarce. What’s clear is that the bubble is inflating at the rich end, while little low- cost housing gets built for middle and low-income Chinese.

Koyo Ozeki, an analyst at U.S. investment manager Pimco, estimates that only 10 percent of residential sales in China are for the mass market. Developers find the margins in high-end housing much fatter than returns from building ordinary homes.

The central government now faces two dangers. One is the anger of ordinary Chinese. In a recent survey by the People’s Bank of China, two-thirds of respondents said real estate prices were too high.

The second danger is that Beijing will try, and fail, to let the air out of the bubble. Pulling off a soft landing means slowly calming the markets, stabilizing prices, and building more affordable housing.

One difficulty in handicapping the likelihood of a nasty pullback is the opacity of the data. As long as property prices stay high, the balance sheets of the developers look strong.

The 234-room Pangu Plaza, which opened in December, charges as much as $17,750 a night for a suite. The sushi bar, where the cheapest lunch special is $265, cooks its rice in mineral water flown in from Japan.

Confidence, however, is belied by the cavernous, empty lobby where the only sound is the tapping of the high heels of the crisply attired staff. No paying customers were evident during a weekday afternoon visit, although Seng said that occupancy has reached “up to 30%.”

This is an extreme example, but this sort of scene is EVERYWHERE in China. Weather you’re in the showcase cities of Shanghai and Beijing, in the 2nd tier provincial capitals, or any of the smaller cities. EVERYWHERE you go there is construction and everywhere you go the buildings are UNUSED.

Glad to see the western media is finally opening their eyes to this one. Nice job to the LA Times for this article “Global financial crisis hits Beijing luxury hotels hard“.

Not sure if Fox News in the US is this bad, but Prof Chovanec does an excellent job being respectful of the bureaucrats, in spite of their naiveté. Enjoy the propaganda.

According to Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), 85 percent of Chinese families can not afford housing expenditure, and house prices are much higher than their incomes. The situation was pointed out in the Blue Paper on Analysis and Prediction of Chinese Economics in 2010 issued by CASS Dec. 7, 2009. The Blue Paper says that house prices are 3 to 6 times greater than people’s incomes; therefore it will be very difficult to buy a house for citizens. Furthermore, the average ratio of house prices to incomes in China, 2009 will be 8.3, well beyond the scope of reasonable affordability. In fact, it will be 22.08 for migrant workers and 29.44 for farmers in 2009. Because of this, 85 percent of Chinese families do not have the ability to buy their own future houses.

This is a very important fact. Chinese real-estate runs a big spectrum. Of the 15% of people that actually can afford a “house”, this means a 40 sqm condo in an hour commute from the city.

So, how many people can afford the huge inventory of 150-300 sqm luxury condos that are being stock piled like bricks of gold? Beyond the people that own them already, my guess is pretty close to nobody.