UK

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-10-13/china-s-lead-on-evs-has-been-a-long-time-coming

i imagine job will be done by this or similar agency: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-12/china-said-to-expand-anti-monopoly-bureau-as-crackdown-widens https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/exclusive-china-readies-plan-to-elevate-status-of-antitrust-unit--sources-2642157 Learning from the best: "Beijing has looked to European antitrust authorities as a model as it seeks to upgrade its antitrust capabilities, one of the people said. In August, SAMR's antitrust office said on its website that it had invited experts from the EU and United States to hold online courses for Chinese "antitrust talents". "Compared to other major anti-monopoly enforcement authorities in the world, the authorities in China currently have fewer staff, which needs to be changed in the future," Wu Zhenguo, head of SAMR's anti-monopoly bureau, told industrial online journal The Antitrust Source in a July interview" However: "The State Administration for Market Regulation will boost staffing at its anti-monopoly bureau, which will be split into three separate divisions focusing on antitrust investigations, market competition and mergers oversight, according to people with knowledge of the matter, asking not to be identified as the information hasn’t been made public. It’s planning to increase the number of antitrust officials from over 40 currently to 100, before reaching 150 within five years, two of the people said. " Seems like really small number, FTC gave like 1000+ people, but perhaps it is not comparable/different.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/algorithms-vs-regulators-battle-royale-kicks-off-in-china-11634125270 China is taking a first step toward regulating algorithms. How that experiment goes could help Western regulators understand what to embrace—and what to avoid—as they ponder tougher controls on Western social-media giants too. China launched a sweeping three-year plan last month to regulate the use of algorithms, setting itself up as a potential trailblazer as governments around the world step up regulation of Big Tech. According to draft rules released in August, companies can’t use algorithms which lead to addiction or excessive spending. Users should also have the right to opt out. The broad-based regulations, if implemented strictly, could fundamentally shake up the business models of many successful internet companies. For example ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, has succeeded largely by recommending catchy content with the help of its powerful algorithm. To be sure, some aspects of China’s proposals are clearly targeted at maintaining government control. Guidelines from the internet watchdog say algorithms should uphold core socialist values and promote positive energy. Democratic societies are unlikely to accept such strictures, and even more benign rules would likely face court challenges. But watching how China’s moves work out—and how large any collateral economic damage ultimately is—could still prove useful to other countries which also are grappling with the enormous societal impact of internet companies. The European Union proposed a bill in April to regulate artificial intelligence systems in some so-called high-risk uses like critical infrastructure, college admissions and loan applications. In the U.S., Congress recently conducted a hearing on Facebook after The Wall Street Journal’s investigations into the social-media giant. The biggest problem for regulating algorithms is how opaque they are. That is becoming a bigger issue as more decisions are made by machines which learn through crunching a vast amount of data. It isn’t easy, sometimes even for the creators of algorithms, to pinpoint the exact reason why an artificial intelligence makes a particular decision. Biases embedded in the training data could unknowingly seep into the decision-making process. And algorithms can also narrowly focus on some objectives, like amplifying viral content, without considering other impacts. Moreover, they are also continually updating, which makes regulation even harder.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-13/turkey-s-erdogan-meets-central-bank-governor-after-lira-rout "Erdogan has described himself as an “enemy” of interest rates, and espouses an unconventional theory that lowering interest rates will lead to lower inflation. The inflation rate was 19.6% in September, when Kavcioglu lowered the benchmark interest rate by 100 basis points to 18%."

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4302938/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubo_and_the_Two_Strings "Kubo premiered at Melbourne International Film Festival and was released by Focus Features in the United States on August 19 to critical acclaim, but was considered a box office failure, grossing $77 million worldwide against a budget of $60 million." After watching cannot believe it was considered a failure:)

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-06/fantasia-opens-a-nasty-new-chapter-in-the-china-evergrande-saga Btw, nice name for a developer:)

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/06/is-the-chinese-stock-market-a-smarter-buy-than-dow-sp-right-now.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/walk-in-cryptocurrency-exchanges-emerge-amid-bitcoin-boom-11633107697 Cryptocurrency storefront operators say in-person advice and a physical presence instill trust among those unlikely to invest online “We allow individuals from all walks of life to be able to participate in this digital asset ecosystem, without the hurdles of attempting to onboard with self-service online exchanges, not to mention the technological barriers that people of a certain age might perceive,” said Adam Hack, the chief executive and founder of Coin Nerds. The exchanges charge fees ranging from 0.99% to 5% for each transaction, slightly more than those charged by large online exchanges. “We’re not going to have a digital revolution, for lack of a better term, without everybody participating in the ecosystem,” he said. “A lot of people are still grasping the concept and they still want to learn how to use it.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-27/danish-artist-takes-museum-s-money-and-runs-calls-it-artwork

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-undo-rail-success-amtrak-canadian-pacific-deregulation-competition-11632511941 "One thing remains unchanged: Railroads and their biggest customers (such as coal shippers, agriculture processors and chemical plants) are condemned to live in angry tension because neither can exist without the other. Their ancient fights were recently reprised at length in the Washington Monthly by think tanker Phillip Longman, who portrays today’s freight railroads as abusive monopolists. These companies, he says, are operated by modern-day “robber barons” who perversely want to shrink the industry “to the point of non-viability” for “short-term economic gain” (this will be news to one of those robber barons, Warren Buffett, who praises his Burlington Northern Santa Fe as a source of long-term profits). When this argument doesn’t get him far, Mr. Longman rolls out an alternate clincher: climate change. Because railroads use less fuel per ton-mile than trucks, railroads should be forced to change their practices and pricing to subsidize more freight to switch from trucks to rail. The blessed result will be a “cooler planet” via “huge reductions in carbon emissions.” Echoing this argument has been Mr. Biden’s newly installed head of the Surface Transportation Board, Martin Oberman. In a speech he claimed that “123 million tons of global warming CO2 has been pumped into our atmosphere just because the railroads chose not to maintain their market share as compared to trucks (emphasis added).” The wording is slippery. Railroads and their customers both choose to maximize their efficiency and profitability. Messrs. Oberman and Longman also fail to mention that any emissions reductions would be infinitesimal in relation to the atmosphere."

At least they have a decent sense of humor: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-23/xi-s-u-s-envoy-invokes-lincoln-in-declaring-china-a-democracy Meantime: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-19/xi-s-celebrity-crackdown-no-match-for-universal-studios-in-china "As President Xi Jinping’s government looks to tame China’s celebrities, the popularity of a new Universal Studios theme park in Beijing shows Hollywood’s enduring soft power among the nation’s 1.4 billion people. Tickets for the grand opening on Monday, priced at 638 yuan ($99), sold out within 30 minutes of going online last week -- as did rooms costing as much as 20,000 yuan at the resort’s two hotels, according to state-run media. Fliggy, an online travel site operated by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., last week apologized for overselling the 500 yuan Universal Express Pass that lets visitor skip lines. The park became the most-searched topic on China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo on Monday morning, as hundreds of visitors queued for entrance in the rain while those inside posted videos of “Harry Potter” experiences. A grand opening ceremony was attended by top officials, including Beijing party chief Cai Qi, according to state-backed news outlet The Paper. The surging demand underscores the challenge Xi faces in dampening the appetite for celebrities among the general public, as the Communist Party looks to curtail foreign influences and promote the concept of “common prosperity.” A commentary published widely in state-run media last month warned against “fan culture” and “worshiping Western culture.” The popularity of the Universal Studios theme park shows resistance to the Communist Party’s tightening of cultural standards after decades of allowing Western influences, according to Adam Ni, co-editor of China Neican, a newsletter on Chinese public policy issues. “As powerful as the party is, it will have to contend with countless everyday decisions by the Chinese, which would together make up the moral fabric of the People’s Republic,” he said. In the lead-up to the park’s public opening, dozens of Chinese celebrities -- including “Crouching Tiger” actress Zhang Ziyi and supermodel Liu Wen -- visited attractions related to “Jurassic Park,” “Transformers” and “Harry Potter.” Photos of other guests dressed in Hogwarts cloaks, and posing with “Minions” and “Megatron” characters, became trending topics on China’s Twitter-like Weibo. “Universal Beijing Resort is popular with the Chinese because there is part of the global culture that the Chinese thirst for,” Ni added. “Beijing is trying to reinforce this dichotomy between ‘Chinese’ and ‘foreign,’ but there is still much admiration and curiosity for foreign cultures in China. So the public attitude towards Western culture is two-faced.” The project, which is expected to attract 30 million visitors a year, is a joint venture between the state-owned Beijing Shouhuan Cultural Tourism Investment Co. and Comcast NBCUniversal. It has been in the works since 2001. China’s newly appointed ambassador to the U.S. last week compared one of the attraction’s roller coasters to bumpy diplomatic ties between Washington and Beijing. “After all tumbling and shakes, the roller coaster came to a soft landing in the end,” Qin Gang, who visited the park before moving to the U.S. in July, wrote on his official Twitter account, signaling a note of optimism. "

https://www.wsj.com/articles/evergrande-is-chinas-economy-in-a-nutshell-11632233862 "The long-term impact could be even more disruptive. China has tried repeatedly to rebalance its economy away from debt-driven construction toward consumption and service industries. It has had some success, but every time there is a slowdown, it returns to the tried-and-tested model of jacking up debt and investment to boost growth. This time might be different, as President Xi Jinping has secured all the levers of state power; perhaps he is ready to accept slower economic growth as the price of it being more sustainable. Capital flight is hard too, after a clampdown on routes previously used to get money out of the country, and with Covid-19 restricting travel. If China really is pushing back against unsustainable debt-driven growth, it faces a series of tricky problems as it remakes its economy. It will have to wean the population off the idea that empty apartments are a good vehicle to save money, without destroying everyone’s savings. It will have to persuade people that they should save less and spend more. It will have to reallocate vast numbers of workers and capital from real estate and the broader construction industry, which together make up about one-eighth of the economy, and together with suppliers probably account for more than a quarter of gross domestic product. And it will have to raise taxes to substitute for land sales as a source of finance. Worse, it will have to do all this while adding less debt and accepting a lower growth rate. The model needs rebalancing, because it is unsustainable. China adopted the same if-you-build-it-they-will-come mantra as Kevin Costner in “Field of Dreams,” but aging demographics and slowing urbanization mean “they” no longer come in such numbers. Debt absolutely can’t keep rising at the rate of the past decade, either. China is one of only three countries to add nonfinancial debt amounting to more than 100% of GDP since 2011, according to the Bank for International Settlements (alongside Greece and Singapore, while Chinese territory Hong Kong has, too). It now has about the same level of debt-to-GDP as the U.S., despite a significantly less well developed financial system. If China succeeds, it will mean less demand for the raw materials it has been importing, more demand for consumer goods, and, probably, a better balance of trade. For the rest of the world, that means lower prices for steel, copper and the energy that was going into cement, and less need for China to recycle dollars into Treasurys and other overseas holdings. But if China succeeds it also means less cheap Chinese labor and more Chinese consumption pushing up global demand, both of which are broadly inflationary. History suggests it is exceptionally hard to navigate such shifts without mistakes, and China is so big that the shifts will need to be global, not merely domestic. It could be a bumpy few years. China’s stop-start rebalancing hasn’t made much progress in the past few years, but it seems to me that Mr. Xi is more and more serious about it, quite apart from wanting to reassert control over the private sector. As that rebalancing filters out into the rest of the world it will matter to all of us. Evergrande is a wake-up call."

This article includes very interesting part on historical transport inovations: "Taxi companies using radical new technologies and promising to transform transportation have arisen before. In 1897, what became known as the Electric Vehicle Co. began operating battery-powered taxicabs in New York City. In the U.K., the London Electrical Cab Co. also began service that year. In 1899, the Compagnie Française des Voitures Électromobiles got underway in Paris. The electric taxis offered some great advantages over the horse-drawn cabs they sought to replace. They were clean and quiet and, because they were so innovative, they appealed to the wealthy and fashionable. In New York, the electric-taxi business boomed. In June 1898 alone, nearly 1,600 customers traveled a total of 4,400 miles, according to business historian and management professor David Kirsch of the University of Maryland. They paid 30 cents a mile, more than $9.75 in today’s money. (Horse-drawn cabs charged 50 cents a mile.). In 1899, the Electric Vehicle Co. had about 45 cabs in service, averaging 27 miles of trips per day, and a financing rush was on. A rival, the General Carriage Co., sought to raise $20 million in capital (about $650 million today). The New York Central railroad said it would launch a service with 100 electric taxis based at Grand Central Terminal. That year, estimates of demand for electric taxis quickly ratcheted up from 1,600 to 2,000 to 12,000. To shuttle passengers to New York’s booming Metropolitan Street Railway trolley system, which covered 232 miles in Manhattan, 1,500 battery-powered taxis would be needed. The Electric Vehicle Co.’s parent ordered as many as 850 “electromobiles” from its manufacturing affiliate in Hartford, Conn. In seven weeks that spring, the share price of the New York electric taxi company nearly tripled. Then the surge began to fade as overexpansion took its toll. Short battery life doomed the London and Paris firms in a year or two. In 1902, the General Carriage Co. collapsed after its stock shot from 87.5 cents to $20.50 and fell back again. Most of the electric-taxi services in smaller U.S. cities never got traction. Above all, Henry Ford supplanted the electric car by changing the idea of what automobiles were for. Electric taxis were the natural offshoot of the 19th-century model of transportation, exemplified by steamboats and railroads: centralized services that charged fixed prices to serve fixed routes on fixed schedules. Consumers who accepted that as the status quo would rather pay others to drive them than to drive themselves. Instead, Ford got consumers to think of transportation not as a service someone else offered but as a product they could own and operate themselves. That enabled people to go anywhere they wanted whenever they wished. Transportation no longer had to be rigid; it could offer freedom. Traveling was usually still a necessity, but it could also fulfill an aspiration. Huge improvements in the power and range of gasoline engines helped, but Ford’s biggest weapon was low price: He introduced his Model T in 1908 at $850, roughly one-third of what electric cars cost at the time. Suddenly millions of people could own a product that gave them a sense of control over time and space. Decades later, Sir Freddie Laker adopted a similar approach. Air travel had long been limited mainly to the wealthy and to business travelers when, in 1977, he launched his Skytrain, a bargain-priced, no-reservations and no-frills airline linking the U.K. to the U.S. People stood in line for hours, sometimes days, in what they called “Queue Gardens” to snag tickets at one-half to one-third of competitors’ fares. Laker’s innovation helped force governments to deregulate the airline industry, slashing airfares across the board just as the global economy was about to boom. In 1976, 137 million middle-class people world-wide had traveled by air. By 1981, that number hit 212 million; a decade later, it reached 583 million. Technologies and industries often take leaps forward when products and services can be put to surprising new uses, enabling customers to fulfill needs—or aspirations—they didn’t even know they had. Radio, developed to assist navigation, became the indispensable musical accompaniment to people’s lives. The airplane, in its early decades, was used far more for delivering mail and shipping goods than for carrying passengers. The mobile phone, originally designed for people to talk with, has become the all-in-one wristwatch, camera, stereo, movie theater, road map and encyclopedia we all carry in our pockets and purses. Endless commutes in torturous traffic jams have made travel something millions of people dread. Perhaps—if all the technology works and every bureaucracy cooperates—air taxis can someday reinvest travel with the sense of novelty and freedom it once had. Success might depend on what the technology can deliver soon. It might depend even more on whether the technology can deliver what people don’t know they will want later."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-came-before-the-9-billion-bet-on-flying-taxis-11615566244

Hmm I thought cannabis is yesterdays business and not cool anymore:)? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-11/psychedelics-replace-pot-as-the-new-favorite-edgy-investment https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-18/psychedelic-schools-teach-mental-health-therapists-to-be-shamans https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-30/why-psychedelics-big-in-1960s-draw-new-interest-now-quicktake https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-15/psychedelic-drugs-will-follow-pot-s-path-to-legalization https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-19/all-inclusive-magic-mushroom-ayahuasca-retreats-are-new-luxury-trips

It is interesting, do not own it, but I follow them to see how everything plays out. However I am not sure what kind of business eventually (and advantages over others) they whould have, even if beeing right/aprooved/accepted soon?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/low-interest-rate-dow-35000-joby-aviation-carvana-coinbase-beyond-meat-investing-11631464939 "Joby Aviation, which plans to begin an electric air taxi service in 2024, is worth more than Lufthansa, EasyJet or JetBlue. Does that seem right? In this market, why not? Heck, earlier this year, Tesla was worth more than the next nine car manufacturers combined, though now only the next six. Beyond Meat, made with pea protein, is worth more than the entire market for peas eaten globally—like the bumper sticker says: Imagine whirled peas. Do fundamentals even matter? I can go on. Used-car sales platform Carvana is worth more than Volvo, Honda, Ford or Hyundai. Airbnb is worth more than Marriott and Hilton combined. Crypto-exchange Coinbase is worth more than the Nasdaq. I live at the intersection of innovation and disruption, but when companies are worth more than any possible reality, watch out. How about those meme stocks still getting hyped on Reddit’s WallStreetBets? Those who bid GameStop shares into the stratosphere waved at Virgin Galactic Holdings as they soared by. A year ago, the stock was $6 and it is now $190—some dupes paid $483, game over. Short sellers Melvin Capital, Point 72 and D1 Capital focused on fundamentals and got their assets handed to them. Shorts lost more than $9 billion between January and June. New Chairman Ryan Cohen, who is driving change at GameStop, may be a retail genius for turning around Chewy, but Redditors may want to put in a call to hedge-fund manager Eddie Lampert, who bought Kmart and merged it with Sears in 2005, as a highly touted “integrated retail” play, combining stores and online sales, eerily similar to the argument for investing in GameStop today. The stock peaked at $135 in 2007. It is now at $0.30 as the company languishes in bankruptcy. A 1970s Sears Johnny Miller leisure suit is worth more. Venture capital is cuckoo. After investing $120 billion in the 2000 dot-com frenzy, and just $16 billion in 2002, U.S. venture capital invested $130 billion in 2020 and then $140 billion in the first half of 2021. Startups these days raise money as “the Uber of gardening” or “Space as a Service.” Oh wait, the latter was WeWork’s pitch, whose founder Adam Neumann declared in 2017, “our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.” Is “spirituality” the S in SPAC? And check this out: In June, an Italian artist auctioned an invisible statue for $18,000—in reality it was an empty box the artist claimed was a “space full of energy.” WeWork energy? Yeah, maybe fundamentals are a quaint relic of a bygone era." https://stratechery.com/2020/the-end-of-the-beginning/ "The implication of this view should at this point be obvious, even if it feels a tad bit heretical: there may not be a significant paradigm shift on the horizon, nor the associated generational change that goes with it. And, to the extent there are evolutions, it really does seem like the incumbents have insurmountable advantages: the hyperscalers in the cloud are best placed to handle the torrent of data from the Internet of Things, while new I/O devices like augmented reality, wearables, or voice are natural extensions of the phone. In other words, today’s cloud and mobile companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google — may very well be the GM, Ford, and Chrysler of the 21st century. The beginning era of technology, where new challengers were started every year, has come to an end; however, that does not mean the impact of technology is somehow diminished: it in fact means the impact is only getting started. Indeed, this is exactly what we see in consumer startups in particular: few companies are pure “tech” companies seeking to disrupt the dominant cloud and mobile players; rather, they take their presence as an assumption, and seek to transform society in ways that were previously impossible when computing was a destination, not a given. That is exactly what happened with the automobile: its existence stopped being interesting in its own right, while the implications of its existence changed everything."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-15/new-york-city-has-once-again-defied-the-doomsayers-here-s-why?sref=ZtdQlmKR

RE Ghost cities, yes, I remember it was quite a noise around those, but like fareastwarriors posted (this was interesting, thanks), seems that ghost cities are also worked out: "It took a while for people to show up. A 2013 news report by 60 Minutes described the place as a ghost town: “new towers with no residents, desolate condos, and vacant subdivisions uninhabited for miles and miles and miles.” But today, Zhengdong New District is bustling with life. Waiters eagerly wave passersby into their restaurants, food delivery workers weave in and out of crowds, and professionals congregate outside office buildings for cigarette breaks. On summer evenings, families sit beside a human-made lake to watch light shows on “Big Corn Tower” or Greenland Plaza, which houses the city’s JW Marriott hotel. The area was spared most of the damage from July’s heavy flooding in Zhengzhou, which killed almost 300 people. About half of the world’s iPhones are manufactured at the 11‑year-old Zhengzhou factory of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., better known as Foxconn. Favorable government policies for businesses also attracted large pharmaceutical and auto plants to the region, and Zhengdong New District’s economy grew at an annualized rate of 25% in the five years through 2015, according to the most recent data. The population of the district grew 27.5% from 2019 to 2020, and property prices there are up tenfold over the past decade." “It takes time for a city to develop, and Kangbashi’s situation has improved gradually,” says Sun Bindong, an urban planning professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai, who advised the Ordos City government on urban planning and development in 2007 and 2008. City leaders in China rarely occupy their posts for more than five years, so the bureaucrat who initiates construction is usually no longer in charge when the time comes to turn buildings, roads, and rail lines into a fully functional city. Local Communist Party Secretary Xing Zheng has been in charge of Kangbashi for only a few months. Over beers at a local karaoke bar, the University of Oxford- and London School of Economics-educated lawyer says that the original plans were overly ambitious but that the area offers “a lot of potential” for sectors including education, tourism, health care, and digital industries. “The plans for the city were ahead of their time, but now you can see they were right,” he says. “In the future, Kangbashi will be small but fine.”

Perhaps true, but as I understand, especially at this point in time, due to all this Huawei situation, they just happen to want things like advanced chips even more:) From some interview: "So tell me about Alibaba and Tencent. I think that this is a point that you’ve made as well, that Americans tend to focus on the consumer-facing companies both domestically and abroad, and that’s not necessarily the Chinese point of view. What’s your take on these companies we’ve heard of, the issues they’ve had, and how that relates to the private sector as a whole? DW: Well, I think one of the things is that the US has a defined stack. First of all, centered in Silicon Valley, which has now become bifurcated between the consumer internet in San Francisco and then the actual Silicon producers closer down in San Jose and in a normal year, I’m in California quite a bit, and I just find it remarkable that these two worlds almost never talk to each other, they’re just on completely different wavelengths. And right now today, when we think of US tech, we’re still thinking of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple. And I think that this has become a very clever marketing trick from California, which I rue. I do not think that Facebook and Tencent are the truest signs that we live in a technologically accelerating civilization. Tencent to me is mostly a video game company, Alibaba is making my life as someone living in urban China very, very convenient, but this to me does not represent the very apex of technology, and I would say the same of Facebook and Google as well. These are companies that are not creating a huge amount of IP. They’re very good at business model innovation as well as exploiting network effects but my heart is with the Industrial Silicon Valley. I’m in favor of the silicon! One of the interesting things is that, I think the Chinese government is actually moving towards this rejection of what I think are the most prestigious sectors in the US — tech, finance and real estate. And China has in my view over the last year, President Xi has really rejected each of these things. He is cracking down on finance, he is cracking down on real estate, and he is also now cracking down on tech. I think what we see now is very consistent rhetoric from the Communist Party that we cannot de-industrialize, we need to keep doing very well on manufacturing and this is consistently what the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, has been saying. So you can see how this is manifesting in this antitrust crackdown that’s currently ongoing against Alibaba, also to some degree on Tencent. And I think what the party has recognized is that these are not the technology leaders that are going to drive forward our technologically accelerating civilization and we don’t need to fall for American marketing here."

It will be interesting to watch, how this plays out. Also it is really strange how (including all crackdowns) much anticyclical policy they run at this point in time, especially comparing to the rest of the world: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-09/china-could-be-heading-for-first-balanced-budget-since-1985

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-08/it-s-a-lehman-moment-not-volcker-that-china-should-fear-in-its-real-estate-boom https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-if-chinas-property-crackdown-goes-overboard-too-11631017035 A crackdown on runaway housing prices jibes with other recent initiatives like President Xi Jinping’s populist call for “common prosperity.” Unaffordable homes are a major cause of inequality and an obstacle to child-rearing. A huge amount of capital has also been channeled into housing that could be put to more productive uses. Previous research has linked China’s housing boom to falling productivity. The problem, of course, is that property is already so entwined with China’s economy that a sudden stop could be extraordinarily dangerous. Real estate is the biggest asset of Chinese households—who recognize that the political sensitivity of the market, and its outsize economic footprint, make sustained price falls risky for Beijing. A lack of investment options and the preference of banks for mortgage loans has exacerbated that concentration. The wealth impact from a housing crash could seriously affect already-weak consumption.

As part of the 2020 trade deal with the U.S., China has been opening up its financial industry. Earlier this year, JP Morgan got permission to take full control of its securities business there. Previously, foreign brokers had been required to operate through joint ventures. If you are scratching your head wondering why Beijing is welcoming American securities firms while relations with the U.S. are plumbing new depths, the answer is simple: The move is in China’s interest, too. Beijing has long wanted capital markets to play a larger role in China. Chinese companies rely mostly on bank loans and retained profit for investment, which is quite different from many other major economies. Around 60% of outstanding total social financing, a broad measure of credit in the economy, comes from bank loans, according to data provider Wind, while corporate bonds and equity for non financial companies make up around 12%. In the U.S., equities and bonds provide 73% of funding for non financial corporations. The stranglehold of state-owned banks on the financial system makes it harder for small businesses without good connections to secure long-term funding to grow—even if they have an innovative, well-run business model. And with Beijing more wary of dependence on U.S. stock markets, the problem has become more urgent. The involvement of names like Black Rock could help gain the trust of domestic investors and redirect Chinese household savings out of real estate, which Beijing wants to shift the economy away from. Apart from opening up finance to foreign players, China has rolled out the welcome mat for investors outside mainland China. Off shore investors, including those based in Hong Kong, now hold 7.6 trillion yuan, the equivalent of $1.2 trillion, of Chinese domestic stock sand bonds as of June, according to data from China’s central bank via Wind. That has quadrupled the amount four years ago but is still a drop in the ocean of the country’s $19 trillion bond and $13 trillion stock markets. Such inflows could also help off set capital outflows from China-based investors and bring discipline to the market.

from 13:30