property

Our brains are not calibrated to deal with the unexpected. Most of us believe we are good risk managers but in reality we are not. Most of us trust that risk can always be quantified and expressed through some fancy modelling whereas,…

Ireland dealt fairly quickly with its property market bubble by effectively and forcefully nationalizing and recapitalizing its banking sector. They clearly still have a serious problem on their hands, but the nation has been aggressive in…

I am glad to say that the overinvestment thesis is much more widely acknowledged today than it was even two or three years ago, but one myth, I think, is that most of the overinvestment excesses in China are concentrated in the real estate…

The “smart money” has been buying up farmland hand over fist for the past few years and you can see how they helped drive up land prices in the U.S. heartland. Some think this is the place to be if the shit really hits the fan. Not gold,…

Famous shortseller Jim Chanos was in Hong Kong and Australia and reported back on what he saw to Bloomberg Television. Copy provided below including a link to the video.

A lot of Chinese SOEs are involved in a very wide variety of business activities, and are especially fond of activities in which cheap capital is the comparative advantage, or in which there is political advantage to be gained. That makes…

You have seen a few of these videos on ghost malls and ghost cities in China. This one from an Australian broadcast is quite good. It reinforces what I have been saying about the magnitude of non-performing loans and how this constrains…

So the dialling for dollars campaign is under way in U.S. municipalities. I'm talking about the use of eminent domain laws to dispossess property owners of property in order to make way for luxury facilities. This is an ongoing process I…

This is what the biggest mall in the world looks like on a typical Saturday, very reminiscent of this Hugh Hendry video of China's empty skyscrapers and this video of China's empty city.

Commercial real estate has been regressively “freed” from debt – leaving the rental value to be pledged to banks as interest. This un-taxing of land rent has been a major factor inflating the real estate bubble on credit, much as…