I really feel for the people who put their life savings into a prepurchase flat and lost it all. Hopefully they get some kind of recompense and closure from this. I find it so interesting how...
I really feel for the people who put their life savings into a prepurchase flat and lost it all. Hopefully they get some kind of recompense and closure from this.
I find it so interesting how differently China comes down on illegal business practices compared to the west. Not to say they're always right, but when you see the $90M AUD fine the Australian government handed to Qantas airlines last year for illegally firing 1,800 workers and pocketing $500M in savings, for example, I think we can definitely learn a thing or two from China.
I think we could learn a thing or two from Australia in this case. I feel like theres already too much government in my life telling me what I can and cant do with my body in the US, I don’t trust...
I think we could learn a thing or two from Australia in this case.
I feel like theres already too much government in my life telling me what I can and cant do with my body in the US, I don’t trust them with the power to take down whole companies, even though I wish I could.
At first thought I get you but I think I disagree. If regulatory systems can't inflict real pain on corporations I suspect democracy is in a very bad way, because who then are corporations...
At first thought I get you but I think I disagree. If regulatory systems can't inflict real pain on corporations I suspect democracy is in a very bad way, because who then are corporations beholden to? Their shareholders are all that's left, if they have any, and that leaves most of us screwed.
I mean you're living that reality now in the US and I think you can make a very sound argument it's a large part of why you're being told what you can and can't do in the way you are.
Yeah I mean, the US absolutely needs more regulation power over corporations. Ideally we would start with a legal decree “corporations are not people” but it’s been so long I don’t even know if it...
Yeah I mean, the US absolutely needs more regulation power over corporations. Ideally we would start with a legal decree “corporations are not people” but it’s been so long I don’t even know if it would help at this point and if it would we’d never get it passed.
We could do anything we want if we just had better people up top, but we don’t, and we keep voting people in who suck because propaganda.
So right now the last thing we need is our government taking out companies who support LGBT rights, for example. I don’t trust this current government with the power to take down companies
Even if that LGBT supporting company was found to be illegally firing 1,800 workers and pocketing $500M in savings to the tune of a $90M slap on the wrist?
So right now the last thing we need is our government taking out companies who support LGBT rights, for example. I don’t trust this current government with the power to take down companies
Even if that LGBT supporting company was found to be illegally firing 1,800 workers and pocketing $500M in savings to the tune of a $90M slap on the wrist?
Right now you might well be correct in your distrust. But even in the medium term any trust in companies to continue to do things like support LGBT rights is probably badly misplaced. As you note,...
So right now the last thing we need is our government taking out companies who support LGBT rights, for example. I don’t trust this current government with the power to take down companies
Right now you might well be correct in your distrust. But even in the medium term any trust in companies to continue to do things like support LGBT rights is probably badly misplaced. As you note, they are not people and the people in them get sacked, retire, move on, die or any number of other things, meaning you are in effect trusting in the selection of new people in a process you have no control over. Consider the evolution of Google or even the buyout of a company like Ben and Jerry's.
If you want some level of control you need regulation with teeth decided on by people that represent you effectively. I am aware of the absurdity of that statement in your country at the moment but I don't think there are many shortcuts around it that hold together in the long term.
Make it profitable to do the illegal thing? A lot of western countries do this, the only recent notable law with some teeth I can recall is the EU's Digital Markets Act which can levy a fine based...
I think we could learn a thing or two from Australia in this case.
Make it profitable to do the illegal thing? A lot of western countries do this, the only recent notable law with some teeth I can recall is the EU's Digital Markets Act which can levy a fine based on a percentage of worldwide revenue.
I feel like theres already too much government in my life telling me what I can and cant do with my body in the US, I don’t trust them with the power to take down whole companies, even though I wish I could.
I do agree with you here, there's an eerie level of freedom-restricting controls being put in place, digital and physical surveillance being another example, and no sense that it's being done to benefit the general public. Having a powerful government can be great, if it can be trusted to actually serve the people.
I’m wondering why this pre-paying was a thing at all. It seems like a weird thing to do to use a real estate company as a bank if you’re saving up for an apartment? Why were there no government...
I’m wondering why this pre-paying was a thing at all. It seems like a weird thing to do to use a real estate company as a bank if you’re saving up for an apartment? Why were there no government protections?
Selling real estate "on paper" (with a construction project that hasn't yet been initiated) is also a thing here. It can be cheaper for the buyer than making the purchase after the building is ready.
Selling real estate "on paper" (with a construction project that hasn't yet been initiated) is also a thing here. It can be cheaper for the buyer than making the purchase after the building is ready.
I would expect there to be a deposit held in escrow. I wouldn’t expect the builder to effectively be borrowing money from the home buyer. They’d get loans from a bank for that, or maybe raise...
I would expect there to be a deposit held in escrow. I wouldn’t expect the builder to effectively be borrowing money from the home buyer. They’d get loans from a bank for that, or maybe raise money from investors.
I'm no expert but from what I understand, property was pretty much the only way for a normal family to build wealth, and it created a classic bubble of people doing anything to buy, even buying...
I'm no expert but from what I understand, property was pretty much the only way for a normal family to build wealth, and it created a classic bubble of people doing anything to buy, even buying more than one. The demand was so big that they were willing to purchase sight-unseen. The average price-to-yearly-income of properties in Beijing or Shenzhen was hitting 30x or 40x, compared to 5x-10x here.
It seems like their real estate bubble expanded faster than the laws could keep up, and by the time the 3 Red Lines for limiting company debt were put in place, Evergrande was instantly hitting the limit and fell over.
I don’t see how it’s all that different. Madoff got 150 years in prison. SBF got 25 years just a few years ago for wire fraud. The difference with Qantas is severity.
I don’t see how it’s all that different. Madoff got 150 years in prison. SBF got 25 years just a few years ago for wire fraud.
Maybe I will just post the same thing the next news about another Chinese billionaire being taken down. There's a reckoning for overseas trusts as well: 20% at every stage, retroactive to 2023....
Maybe I will just post the same thing the next news about another Chinese billionaire being taken down. There's a reckoning for overseas trusts as well: 20% at every stage, retroactive to 2023. China is in a collecting mood and it'll keep going.
Don't mistakes this for free market guy getting rich by violating laws and are getting their just deserts. They got rich in a tightly controlled market and grew in tightly controlled ways and then when the State needs money they're collected. Some Chinese media call it harvesting chives (割韭菜) and imperial Chinese version of civil forfeiture (抄家)
The firm was dealt a huge blow when Beijing introduced measures in 2020 to control debt in the country's property sector.
Are people thinking that this was the only man who benefited from over building and heavy investments into real estate? And that what he was doing was somehow all along something the country didn't want? People are being naive here: oh yes jail a rich man and his sons, take all his assets hurrah. But this guy was doing perfectly legal (at the time insanely high risk yes) business, encouraged from top down, when the state suddenly declared for his sector to collapse. The shinannigans came quickly after the edict, in an attempt to cover 20 pots with 5 lids.
There's got to be more punishment and regulations for Western Capital, yes, but the Chinese model of fattening a few small businessmen up, encourage them to balloon and everyone profit wildly and then suddenly killing the industry and slaughtering the one guy like a fatted calf isn't the way either.
I don’t really see any reason to believe that what he did was legal or that it was just political reasons he is being charged. He essentially did the exact same thing Bernie Madoff did - ran a...
I don’t really see any reason to believe that what he did was legal or that it was just political reasons he is being charged. He essentially did the exact same thing Bernie Madoff did - ran a legitimate business, and turned it into a pyramid scheme, using new investors money to pay off old debts and investors while forging documents.
There’s no reason the Chinese government would have been secretly happy with him running a pyramid scheme. That doesn’t really help the CCP. A pyramid scheme isn’t a high risk business, it’s just… fraud?
I would note that Bernie Madoff got 150 years in prison, in the US.
On July 1, as the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its centenary with a grand parade in the capital, Beijing, Hui Ka Yan watched from a position of honour atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, overlooking Tiananmen Square.
Dressed in a blue blazer, his receding hair dyed the pitch black of China’s elite, Mr. Hui’s prominent presence at the celebration was seen by many observers as a vote of confidence in him and his company, the real estate developer Evergrande. [...]
Since the founding of the People’s Republic, property had been tied to employment, with people living in worker dorms and collectives. But in the 1990s, China was beginning to experiment with private home ownership, and Mr. Hui’s new company surfed the growing wave of urbanization, as millions of workers migrated from the interior of China to coastal cities.
Much of this was fuelled by debt, with many real estate developers taking on huge amounts of leverage to build tower blocks quickly, often to very poor standards and, as prices went up, increasingly with an eye to speculators rather than homeowners. This growing bubble became characterized by so-called “ghost cities” – vast developments built in rural China that struggled to convince anyone to occupy them. But empty apartments were also a common sight even in major cities, as speculators and easy borrowing drove home prices ever higher.
Chinese ghost cities were much reported on by Western media in 2009-2010s (wiki). But locals had known about them for longer. That's not just developers being greedy, that's State position of build build build.
The State isn't happy citizens lost their life savings and the State is not happy about ghost towns and plummeting prices, but it did spend much of this century trying to thread the needle between keeping up with the aggressive growth that they've been pushing, and collapse. Then 2020 is when it finally all started to inevitably , and publicly, fall apart. Keep in mind also this entire time the State is made up of many individual billionaires who got rich investing in and supporting Evergrande and other projects. These insider committee billionaires all knew this was coming and they let the pyramid keep building and building.
I'm not saying don't cheer for one billionaire being busted like a pinata. I'm saying this isn't justice and there's the whole lot of them who are getting away with this whole thing. In the end only the everyday citizens lose, and that's why China isn't this amazing system except for how it treats people -- how it treats people is exactly why nothing should be admired about it.
So were Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-fried in the US before their fall. Before fraud is known, business owners look like economic heroes. It happens. A bubble is one thing, fraud is another. Using...
He was very much an insider and lauded for much of China's economic rise in the 2010s
So were Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-fried in the US before their fall. Before fraud is known, business owners look like economic heroes. It happens.
A bubble is one thing, fraud is another. Using loans to make poor investments is not illegal. Lying on financial statements is illegal.
I'm saying this isn't justice and there's the whole lot of them who are getting away with this whole thing.
Why isn’t it justice? Shouldn’t people who commit what would be classified as wire fraud in the US go to jail?
I’m not cheering for a billionaire to be busted, billionaires are fine, it’s rather than this is a pretty banal legal proceeding. What Hui Kan Yan did is pretty much illegal like, everywhere, including the US. We arrested SBF for it like 3 years ago.
I really feel for the people who put their life savings into a prepurchase flat and lost it all. Hopefully they get some kind of recompense and closure from this.
I find it so interesting how differently China comes down on illegal business practices compared to the west. Not to say they're always right, but when you see the $90M AUD fine the Australian government handed to Qantas airlines last year for illegally firing 1,800 workers and pocketing $500M in savings, for example, I think we can definitely learn a thing or two from China.
I think we could learn a thing or two from Australia in this case.
I feel like theres already too much government in my life telling me what I can and cant do with my body in the US, I don’t trust them with the power to take down whole companies, even though I wish I could.
At first thought I get you but I think I disagree. If regulatory systems can't inflict real pain on corporations I suspect democracy is in a very bad way, because who then are corporations beholden to? Their shareholders are all that's left, if they have any, and that leaves most of us screwed.
I mean you're living that reality now in the US and I think you can make a very sound argument it's a large part of why you're being told what you can and can't do in the way you are.
Yeah I mean, the US absolutely needs more regulation power over corporations. Ideally we would start with a legal decree “corporations are not people” but it’s been so long I don’t even know if it would help at this point and if it would we’d never get it passed.
We could do anything we want if we just had better people up top, but we don’t, and we keep voting people in who suck because propaganda.
So right now the last thing we need is our government taking out companies who support LGBT rights, for example. I don’t trust this current government with the power to take down companies
Even if that LGBT supporting company was found to be illegally firing 1,800 workers and pocketing $500M in savings to the tune of a $90M slap on the wrist?
Right now you might well be correct in your distrust. But even in the medium term any trust in companies to continue to do things like support LGBT rights is probably badly misplaced. As you note, they are not people and the people in them get sacked, retire, move on, die or any number of other things, meaning you are in effect trusting in the selection of new people in a process you have no control over. Consider the evolution of Google or even the buyout of a company like Ben and Jerry's.
If you want some level of control you need regulation with teeth decided on by people that represent you effectively. I am aware of the absurdity of that statement in your country at the moment but I don't think there are many shortcuts around it that hold together in the long term.
Make it profitable to do the illegal thing? A lot of western countries do this, the only recent notable law with some teeth I can recall is the EU's Digital Markets Act which can levy a fine based on a percentage of worldwide revenue.
I do agree with you here, there's an eerie level of freedom-restricting controls being put in place, digital and physical surveillance being another example, and no sense that it's being done to benefit the general public. Having a powerful government can be great, if it can be trusted to actually serve the people.
I’m wondering why this pre-paying was a thing at all. It seems like a weird thing to do to use a real estate company as a bank if you’re saving up for an apartment? Why were there no government protections?
Selling real estate "on paper" (with a construction project that hasn't yet been initiated) is also a thing here. It can be cheaper for the buyer than making the purchase after the building is ready.
I would expect there to be a deposit held in escrow. I wouldn’t expect the builder to effectively be borrowing money from the home buyer. They’d get loans from a bank for that, or maybe raise money from investors.
I'm no expert but from what I understand, property was pretty much the only way for a normal family to build wealth, and it created a classic bubble of people doing anything to buy, even buying more than one. The demand was so big that they were willing to purchase sight-unseen. The average price-to-yearly-income of properties in Beijing or Shenzhen was hitting 30x or 40x, compared to 5x-10x here.
It seems like their real estate bubble expanded faster than the laws could keep up, and by the time the 3 Red Lines for limiting company debt were put in place, Evergrande was instantly hitting the limit and fell over.
I don’t see how it’s all that different. Madoff got 150 years in prison. SBF got 25 years just a few years ago for wire fraud.
The difference with Qantas is severity.
Maybe I will just post the same thing the next news about another Chinese billionaire being taken down. There's a reckoning for overseas trusts as well: 20% at every stage, retroactive to 2023. China is in a collecting mood and it'll keep going.
Don't mistakes this for free market guy getting rich by violating laws and are getting their just deserts. They got rich in a tightly controlled market and grew in tightly controlled ways and then when the State needs money they're collected. Some Chinese media call it harvesting chives (割韭菜) and imperial Chinese version of civil forfeiture (抄家)
Are people thinking that this was the only man who benefited from over building and heavy investments into real estate? And that what he was doing was somehow all along something the country didn't want? People are being naive here: oh yes jail a rich man and his sons, take all his assets hurrah. But this guy was doing perfectly legal (at the time insanely high risk yes) business, encouraged from top down, when the state suddenly declared for his sector to collapse. The shinannigans came quickly after the edict, in an attempt to cover 20 pots with 5 lids.
There's got to be more punishment and regulations for Western Capital, yes, but the Chinese model of fattening a few small businessmen up, encourage them to balloon and everyone profit wildly and then suddenly killing the industry and slaughtering the one guy like a fatted calf isn't the way either.
I don’t really see any reason to believe that what he did was legal or that it was just political reasons he is being charged. He essentially did the exact same thing Bernie Madoff did - ran a legitimate business, and turned it into a pyramid scheme, using new investors money to pay off old debts and investors while forging documents.
There’s no reason the Chinese government would have been secretly happy with him running a pyramid scheme. That doesn’t really help the CCP. A pyramid scheme isn’t a high risk business, it’s just… fraud?
I would note that Bernie Madoff got 150 years in prison, in the US.
He was very much an insider and lauded for much of China's economic rise in the 2010s. Small example,
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-evergrande-founder-hui-ka-yan-is-in-the-centre-of-chinas-real-estate/
Chinese ghost cities were much reported on by Western media in 2009-2010s (wiki). But locals had known about them for longer. That's not just developers being greedy, that's State position of build build build.
The State isn't happy citizens lost their life savings and the State is not happy about ghost towns and plummeting prices, but it did spend much of this century trying to thread the needle between keeping up with the aggressive growth that they've been pushing, and collapse. Then 2020 is when it finally all started to inevitably , and publicly, fall apart. Keep in mind also this entire time the State is made up of many individual billionaires who got rich investing in and supporting Evergrande and other projects. These insider committee billionaires all knew this was coming and they let the pyramid keep building and building.
I'm not saying don't cheer for one billionaire being busted like a pinata. I'm saying this isn't justice and there's the whole lot of them who are getting away with this whole thing. In the end only the everyday citizens lose, and that's why China isn't this amazing system except for how it treats people -- how it treats people is exactly why nothing should be admired about it.
So were Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-fried in the US before their fall. Before fraud is known, business owners look like economic heroes. It happens.
A bubble is one thing, fraud is another. Using loans to make poor investments is not illegal. Lying on financial statements is illegal.
Why isn’t it justice? Shouldn’t people who commit what would be classified as wire fraud in the US go to jail?
I’m not cheering for a billionaire to be busted, billionaires are fine, it’s rather than this is a pretty banal legal proceeding. What Hui Kan Yan did is pretty much illegal like, everywhere, including the US. We arrested SBF for it like 3 years ago.
What he did was illegal and he's going to jail for it agreed. But I guess we disagree on whether or not that is justice.
More CEOs should be in jail.