this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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How do you recover that? How the hell are they going to recover what is essentially multiple time the sum of the wealth of all the top 10 richest individuals on earth???
Do you mean the $78B fine or the $300B debt?
In either case, you're way over exaggerating. All of the top 14 wealthiest people have over $100B each. Jeff Bezos (#2 richest) has close to $200B alone.
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires
It's even worse than I thought......... Holy fucking shit.
Right!?
These people have more wealth than the GDP of some nations.
Jeff Bezos has more wealth ($190B) than the GDP of Ukraine ($170B).
In theory, but if he tried to liquidate all of his Amazon stock at once it's very unlikely he would get that much for it. The price of the stock would crash.
except in theory they can borrow from the bank with their stock as leverage and would never actually need to liquidate anything (and they do just that).
Yep. This fucking loophole in the American tax system.
You borrow against your existing wealth, then the cost basis of your investments resets upon inheritance. So your estate can sell the investment to pay off the debt, and no capital gains tax is ever paid.
Because of this, in America, capital gains tax only applies to the middle class. The rich have a clear and obvious loophole.
By locking up the rich, seizing their wealth, and using SOEs to take over incomplete projects for pennies.
Presumably they won’t recover, because the Chinese state isn’t coming to their rescue: China’s housing minister says real estate developers must go bankrupt if necessary
I just hope the collapses won't pull others with them and the whole construction sector. I think the fear of that and the effects rippling to other sectors and to trust in the economy is why bailing out is sometimes done.
yes, it's a good reminder that capitalism doesn't actually work and needs to be propped up with bailouts to ensure it doesn't collapse and gets replaced.
Well China is trying to not bail them out, at least for now. And some others have done it before too. It's just people fear the risk of doing that, hoping that by bailing them out things won't be as bad.
Except that the Chinese national government is trying to reign in the domestic construction market and export as much as it can.
It was the right strategy to keep building for a generation, but it isn't right strategy any more.
I've read that they're trying to lessen the share of the GDP but an uncontrolled crash would still be horrible. Hopefully whatever they do that is avoided.
It is more than that. China significantly invested in infrastructure for a generation, which was generally good. However, China has hit a point where infrastructure investment won't produce the returns it used to or any at all. China also needs to figure out a way to find municipal governments, which it hasn't before. China also has to deal with a significant drop in economic growth, something it hasn't dealt with for a generation.
These are novel problems for the Chinese government.