Financial Times (March 17)
“A strange thing happened this week: calm.” U.S. data revealed higher than expected price inflation. “This time around, however, government bonds wobbled only slightly and both US and global stocks held it together around record highs.” The absence of drama indicates “interest rates are shedding their suffocating dominance over global markets, and that stocks are climbing not because they are huffing the speculative fumes of imminent and aggressive potential rate cuts but because they’re worth it.”
Tags: Calm, Dominance, Global, Government bonds, Inflation, Interest rates, Markets, Rate cuts, Record highs, Speculative, Stocks, Suffocating, U.S.
Reuters (September 23)
“China’s population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country,” according to a former official “in a rare public critique of the country’s crisis-hit property market.” Official data shows approximately 7.2 million homes, but that excludes “the numerous residential projects that have already been sold but not yet completed” and speculatively purchased homes that remain vacant. Estimates vary, but “He Keng, a former deputy head of the statistics bureau,” estimates there aren’t enough people to fill China’s available housing inventory.
Tags: 1.4 billion, Apartments, China, Completed, Crisis-hit, Empty, Keng, Official data, Population, Property market, Residential projects, Sold, Speculative, Statistics bureau
Bloomberg (October 13)
“The vital question for many investors has been whether the problems for speculative real estate will cause broader contagion, either through cascading losses in the financial system or through economic weakness.” The former remains unlikely, but “the second — an economic slowdown of which Evergrande is both a cause and a symptom — grows more likely with time.”
Tags: Cascading, Contagion, Economic weakness, Evergrande, Financial system, Investors, Losses, Real estate, Slowdown, Speculative, Vital
