Chinese ghost cites.....worth keeping an eye on this.

In the future would you pay $70 a month for a landline if you can get what you need from Mobile phone and a router you plug in your phone?

Great youre on TPG

 

People will be surprised what 4g, 4.5g and 5g will do within 2 to 5 years.

Hands up who has a dial up

 

I will try anything that gives me a better service for the same price, no worries about that. When you mentioned dial up I had a flood of memories. Remember "one tel" had the gumby looking cartoon guy as there mascot, orange screen? $25 a Month unlimted 56kps, talk about drop outs......

Crikey we've stuffed up the thread.

Now back to Chinese Ghost towns.....

 

True... What do people thing of the biggest Ghost towns ever built like Shenzen, Zhengdong and Ordos Kangbashi.

 

No doubt 5G will be much better then 4G. But it will always fall way behind what the current fiber can do.

 

This hasn't been on the headlines, but there has been reports that that the local governments in Chinese cities have been quietly buying off empty apartments from the market for the last couple of years with money from the central bank, and this has accelerated since 2016.

Interesting concept if you consider that city governments get the bulk of their revenue from selling land to developers. Pushing up property prices so you can sell more land. No guesses as to how much properties the city government officials have bought themselves.

If anyone wonders how glut and rising prices can exist at the same time? Sounds like the opposite of gold and silver - how falling prices can happen when there's a shortage.

Market Manipulation

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-cities-buy-off-housing-glut-with-borrowed-money-1507887001

 

Yea i was reading about this too. It wouldn't surprise me if the Chinese government are acting as buyers of last resort to keep prices high. I guess governments/ central banks are known to do these kind of things as they hate the free market.

 

China might be the first country in the world to do this. I've not heard of any country that buys excess property off the market in order to keep prices high.

 

I meant in a more general term that governments/central banks step into markets to prop up prices, so the idea is common. But yes non to my knowledge have directly purchased property in a so called "free market", but i guess no other country has ever had such a massive oversupply.

 

There's no genuine resale or secondary market in China due to the rapidly deteriorating condition of apartments older than 10 years, so if the government don't step in, the market will collapse because if they were to leave it to market forces, buyers will probably need to sell their properties at unbelievable discounts - something like 70% or more off the purchase price.

China will need to support the market by printing more and more RMB. Very soon, the Yuan will start to plummet against all currencies, not only against the dollar and all countries will have problems dealing with "dumping".

In the meantime, Trump has already put up the defence for the US - tariffs will follow the devaluation.

 

One reason maybe be that the private and semi govt owned PRC development companies are so leveraged with debt and they can't sell their housing stock, that if the PRC govt let the housing prices fall, the development companies would have to mark to market the unsold stock they hold on balance sheet and if they did that, then liabilities exceed assets, negative equity occurrs and probable financial collapse thereafter. Me thinks it's about propping up the private sector as large scale financial failures will have a domino effect throughout the PRC economy....developers fail, banks don't get repaid, banks come under stress and maybe fail.

It's one big house of cards.................

 

There's going to be a silver lining when this biggest bubble in the history of the world finally blows. Last I saw, first time home buyers have dropped below 30%. Can you imagine this? Less than 1 out of 3 buyers are buying it for their own stay and in a place like China where 99.9% of the population are citizens, not foreign immigrants or expat renting a place.

 

60 minutes

 

You ought to, you paid $4k in taxes for it. ($51B / 12.5M working population)

 

5G isn't magic, it's very range limited (hundreds of meters), and obstacles and signal penetration are showstoppers for many applications. It's not a replacement for 4G.

 

5g is for mind control.

 

It'll be interesting to see how Australia's iron exports go when they stop building ghost cities.

 

5G doesn't get through the skin let alone the skull. But I'd wear a tin foil hat 24/7 just to be safe.

 

I wonder if 60 minutes looked at South Korea and surely other countries do this too

Though due to small landmass in Korea many of this development are by nature closer to a larger city.

The cities are planned and built on a dirt patch, and it takes 20 years to fill up. Even Seoul could be considered, where whole sections went from few hundred to million population in a space of ten years or so. Ie you can google apartments parks where 200 apartments buildings are built in one large block and a kilometres away another 100 to 300 apartment block is built.

The latest is Sejong City
population 1 in 2012
Polulation 300,000 in 2018
Considered a success and still expanding,
(typically planned cities have patron government departments or large enterprises moving in on opening, some older example else where in Korea is Samsung City near Suwon region 50km from Seoul, and Posco town located 90km etc)
When Sejong city opened there would have been apartments that was not occupied for 5 years as the city wasn’t allowed residents until it opened.
In 2012 official opening there was 15,000 empty apartments.

Songdo Intertantional Business District. Running behind but a beautiful place when I was there last year.
Not very successful due to lofty ambitions and not having a “patron government department or keystone enterprise” but getting there
Population zero 2014 with 80,000 apartments.
Construction continues for more apartments???? Not sure why they don’t delay delay but as more companies relocate, would mean more people and the people like the area very much.
Population in 2018 100,000
It’s a lonely place right now
https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/06/sleepy-in-songdo-koreas-smartest-city/561374/

Sometimes late at time, in certain areas of Songdo it was surreal, like a scene of West World, where all brightly lit super modern buildings on one side and tiny farms from 1950 as you walk down, all of the ground retail store obviously never has a shop in it.