Take Vancouver, Canada real-estate market, for example. It's the closest Canadian city to Hong-Kong / China, it's friendly to foreigners buying properties and it has a sizable Chinese population that can act as a proxy if needed. The house prices were inflating from late 90s. In mid '00s it became a common understanding that there's a bubble. A modest 500 sqft flat in downtown Vancouver was going for close to 500K and proper houses in decent areas were in 2-3 million range. Our place appreciated over 100% in a matter of 4 years. Tons of apartments in downtown and new condo developments sat empty, which was especially easy to tell at night. But the bubble wasn't bursting. Nor was it deflating. Moreover, tour buses driving mainland Chinese suits around open houses on their 2-3 day "buy all!" flash visits transformed from a one-off exotic thing to the routine. Local government doesn't do a shit about this. They are happy as this feeds the construction industry, creates jobs and they also get to tax all these new developments. Their hand is stuck in a cookie jar. In the end all these buildings are just a way to park the foreign money and so the Vancouver housing bubble is tied directly to the state of Chinese economy. The only way for it to subside is for China to have an economic crisis.

It is a greater fool situation indeed, but regrettably it unfolds at a state level.

The 2014-era housing bubble is driven not by runaway money-printing as in 2008, but by foreign corruption. Silicon Valley is expensive because every thieving Chinese official has a house out there in case things go seriously wrong (corruption is a death-penalty offense in China). As it turns out, rich people will pay a nearly-infinite amount of money to not die.

We're not talking about tulip bulbs. We're talking about personal safety for some seriously bad people who are at risk of being killed by their own people (who they've been robbing for decades) and who, quite frankly, deserve to die.