China inflates its real estate

I have a Chinese friend who used to teach in a university in China. He reads news from home that doesn’t make it into the US media and tells me the more interesting stories. 

Lately he has been reading about real estate. He is a frustrated that many of his family members in China have become wealthy through real estate speculation while he missed out. They had tried to get him to invest with them years ago but he was certain at the time that prices would never rise as they have.

He told me recently the Chinese media reported that total value of real estate in the top three cities, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, is priced more than all of the real estate in the US. Apartments with a thousand square feet in those cities sell for several million dollars.

My friend told me that China doesn’t have a property tax and just recently added a deduction for mortgage interest in order to encourage more speculation. He said the government wants prices to continue to rise because the state owns most of the land, so it reaps huge rewards when prices rise.

Fed Inflates Capital Markets!

In an email newsletter sent out by the Wall Street Journal called Macro Horizons, Michael J. Casey appears to grasp a point about monetary policy that few other mainstream economists can get a grip on, while Austrian economists have taught it for decades: inflationary monetary policy benefits the rich. He wrote,

Easy money translates into gains for those who are rich in assets, especially financial assets, and that excludes a large swath of the population [italics in the original].

I assume Casey is a mainstream economist because the main point of his post was the need for central banks to maintain monetary “stimulus.” The quote above follows this:

The subject of disinflation is the focal point of Wednesday’s data, where we are being reminded of its nonexistence in the industrialized world and of the risk that it could morph into outright deflation. This is most evident in Wednesday’s CPI data out of Europe, which is why the notoriously stimulus-shy Deutsche Bundesbank insiders even came around to telling the Journal Tuesday that they were considering backing actions at the European Central Bank’s June meeting to attack the disinflationary trend. But we’re likely to see the same later in the U.S. producer price data and in the U.K., whose economy is otherwise growing strongly, the Bank of England indicated that it still sees no great impetus for inflation to breakout. There was a time when this scenario of growth, coupled with low inflation, was seen as a “Goldilocks” scenario, a perfect not-to-hot, not-too-cold combination where policy would stay accommodative but gains could be had in the economy and markets. But the longer we flirt with deflation – which translates most directly into near-zero wage growth – the more that the adoption of hyper-accommodative policies tends to exacerbate the other great scourge of our age: inequality.