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Comment by FLUX-YOU | Hacker News Reader

>There are also 60,000 Chinese people worth at least $200 million—another line of demarcation between being wealthy and being a photon cannon of currency.

Jesus christ, spend your minerals and gas.

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That's $12 trillion dollars. 71% of USA GDP. Although I imagine much of that is tied up in speculative real estate which is on its way down in value.

The $200M figure is a typo. The article's source lists 64500 people with >= 100M RMB ($16M) in 2013.

http://up.hurun.net/Humaz/201312/20131218145315550.pdf [Page 9]

As long as China continues producing more rich people, it isn't going down in value any time soon. It has no mortgage, and is completely detached from the American market.

Until China introduces a property tax to get all that unused property [1] in use working for the economy. And a lot of people have borrowed from banks, family, and loan sharks to speculate in real estate; the landing won't be as soft as the wumao want you to believe.

[1] 3-40% of all apartments in Beijing aren't even renovated, and that is supposed to be a first tier hot market.

Too much of the economy relies on the already shaky real estatemarket for this to happen in the near future imo. A sales tax on third properties and beyond was introduced in Shanghai to curb speculation and couples simply divorced or used straw men to avoid having to pay it.

The straight up property tax (per property, no exceptions) will be added at some point. Municipalities can't make so much money by selling land anymore, and the central government doesn't kick back enough tax revenue. Not only that, but they have committed to eventually providing social services to migrants, like you know, schooling for their kids. That has to be paid for someway.

But they will definitely hold off for now, a property tax would cause huge devaluations in property prices inflated by the lack of one. But if we get a crash anyways, it will be easy just to add it at the bottom. The question is what is next, with transaction reaching a very low bottom to keep prices from falling, we seem to be in for a long bout of stagnation which will drag down the larger economy even more than if a crash would just happen and we could be over with it.

Local government and companies have borrowed way too much based on real estate value that a crash would be allowed to happen based on what I have read, as it would have much broader implications than in the US.

Rents in Shanghai have remained mostly stagnant from what I've seen for the last 2 years, so it's good for tenants.

Rents at the high end are completely stagnant, which is why those new apartments aren't being renovated. Not having a property tax leads to hoarding and not putting property to productive use, which screws everyone but the princelings.

They've already announced plans to roll out the tax "as early as this year":

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/internatio...

We might mean different things. I meant Chinese money in US real estate.

Thankfully the US has a property tax, so they have to put the property to use, which is good for the economy, at least.

wat? china is all borrowed money after 2008

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102066916

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