Canada Housing/Debt: Trust me, I'm a landlord.

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namaste friends: Sep 18, 2004; by Smythe

BTW if you want to corner the market in desireable addresses and license plates for the vietnamese community, they go absolutely apeshit over the number 9.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 06:44

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# ? May 24, 2024 22:23

Jan: Feb 27, 2008; The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

When I lived in Vancouver, I did this eco van tour and the guide had a random anecdote about a house in North Vancouver that had the number 707 and was worth twice as much as the neighbouring houses because apparently 707 sounds like "money lots of money" with different inflexions in Mandarin. or something.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 06:46

Barudak: May 7, 2007

etalian posted:

There's not much to be said about a culture that's wiped out multiple rare species in a vain attempt to cure the small penis problem.

Their doctors were systematically killed off, kept under strict control for high level party members exclusively, or forced to work in fields during the cultural revolution to the point where something like less than 15% of doctors, who it should be pointed out were already very rare in most rural areas, continued practice during the period. To replace this sudden extreme shortage of doctors Mao invented almost whole cloth the idea of a unified Traditional Chinese Medicine which is based on such well researched concepts as "you must balance your bodies internal heat and cold by eating foods from these sources in certain quantities." They're not some sort of idiot race they were just forced into from no other option by Mao "70% Right" Zedong and its stuck to this day since discrediting it discredits the party so it and its schools and practitioners enjoy a special privileged status.

My address has a 4 in it on purpose though to keep the inlaws out until we have a place that can accommodate them.

Barudak fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Feb 10, 2015

# ? Feb 10, 2015 06:49

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Kafka Esq. posted:

Predisposed? What, you mean, genetically?

Genetically, culturally, whatever. Like, how the gently caress can an entire culture of people be so convinced that one out of ten digits is bad and unlucky and base actual serious decision on it? Or that keratin can help impotence, but only if it comes from a rhino horn and not from fingernails.

Like, PRC has schools and poo poo, right?

EDIT: Hmm, looks like once again the blame can be laid at the feet of a bunch of fuckhead commies.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 06:49

etalian: Mar 20, 2006

Barudak posted:

Their doctors were systematically killed off, kept under strict control for high level party members exclusively, or forced to work in fields during the cultural revolution to the point where something like less than 15% of doctors, who it should be pointed out were already very rare in most rural areas, continued practice during the period. To replace this sudden extreme shortage of doctors Mao invented almost whole cloth the idea of a unified Traditional Chinese Medicine which is based on such well researched concepts as "you must balance your bodies internal heat and cold by eating foods from these sources in certain quantities." They're not some sort of idiot race they were just forced into from no other option by Mao "70% Right" Zedong and its stuck to this day since discrediting it discredits the party so it and its schools and practitioners enjoy a special privileged status.

My address has a 4 in it on purpose.

yeah was funny story, basically Mao knew china didn't have the capability after his little revolution so instead they decided to use "doctors" who used folk/quack cures instead since
the country didn't have much actual medicine.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 07:00

Kafka Esq.: Jan 1, 2005; "If you ever even think about calling me anything but 'The Crab' I will go so fucking crab on your ass you won't even see what crab'd your crab" -The Crab(TM)

Thread is really living up to the name right now.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 07:04

namaste friends: Sep 18, 2004; by Smythe

Before one of you White People even begin to think about white knighting the glorious Han in hopes of impressing that hot asian in your compiler theory class

http://www.economist.com/node/9558423

quote:

A MEMBER of the Chao clan of Gelao village in Shaanxi province was paying her respects recently to a newly buried female relative. She noticed a wheat stalk stuck in the mound of earth with a ribbon tied to it. Alarmed, she alerted her relatives. At 11 o'clock that evening, they ambushed two grave robbers who were starting to dig up the body. A member of the Chao family told a friend from the Wang clan in a nearby village, who had just buried one of its womenfolk. Clan members found nothing suspicious at the grave but the next day came across a large plastic bag in a ditch. Sure enough, it contained the body of their relative, exhumed and waiting for collection.

Parts of rural China are seeing a burgeoning market for female corpses, the result of the reappearance of a strange custom called �ghost marriages�. Chinese tradition demands that husbands and wives always share a grave. Sometimes, when a man died unmarried, his parents would procure the body of a woman, hold a �wedding� and bury the couple together.

The custom has a long history. In the legends of the classical romance of the �Three Kingdoms�, the warlord Cao Cao finds a corpse bride for his son who died in 208 AD at the tender age of 13.

The communists discouraged burials and suppressed ghost marriages as �feudal superstition�. Yet ancient beliefs die hard. As Marxism wanes, burials are reappearing�and so are corpse brides.

The practice is most common in the northern provinces of Shanxi, Hebei and Shandong. This is China's coal-mining heartland. In mountainous Shanxi, pit accidents kill many men too young to marry. Compensation to the family is spent on giving their son a wife in the afterlife.

A black market has sprung up to supply corpse brides. Marriage brokers�usually respectable folk who find brides for village men�account for most of the middlemen. At the bottom of the supply chain come hospital mortuaries, funeral parlours, body snatchers�and now murderers.

On March 7th this year, a local newspaper, Huashang Bao, reported that demand for corpse brides had led to sustained inflation. A top-quality piece of �wet� (recently deceased) merchandise that the newspaper said would have sold for a few thousand yuan four years ago now goes for 30,000-40,000 yuan ($4,000-5,300). In contrast, �dry goods� (long buried) fetch just 300-500 yuan down the Shanxi coal mines.

Such incentives prompted Song Tiantang to kill. In the late 1990s he had made money supplying the market by robbing graves. Mr Song (whose name is a homonym for the phrase �to send someone to heaven�) was jailed after he dropped his mobile phone at a grave he had plundered: the police used it to track him down. This January he was arrested again and confessed to strangling six women and selling their bodies. Killing for corpses, he said, was an easier way to make money than digging them out of the ground.

And just so you don't think this is just an isolated incident

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/04/china-imprisons-men-ghost-marriage-corpse-bride

quote:

A county court in central China has sentenced four men to prison for digging up and selling corpses on the black market to enable "ghost marriages", a millennia-old custom of burying deceased bachelors alongside newly deceased wives so that they will not grow lonely in the afterlife.

On Saturday, the Xi'an Evening News reported that the Yanchuan county court in Yan'an City, Shanxi province, sentenced each of the men to more than two years in prison for stealing 10 female corpses, cleaning them up and counterfeiting their medical records to boost their prices, and selling them on the black market for a total of �25,000.

Ritual ghost marriages, which may date back to the 17th century BC, are increasingly rare in contemporary China � Mao Zedong tried to eliminate them when he assumed power in 1949 � but they are still practised in rural parts of Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Hebei and Guangdong provinces. Families often employ a matchmaker to help find a suitable spouse for their deceased loved ones.

The four men, with surnames Pang, Bai, He and Zhang, exhumed the corpses in the winter of 2011 from a smattering of arid, coal-rich counties in Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces.

The state-run Global Times newspaper reported in 2011 that an influx of coal money to parts of northern Shaanxi province bolstered the area's underground corpse trade, with a newly wealthy but superstitious demographic suddenly being able to afford high prices for desirable postmortem mates. Some are known to purchase their corpse brides straight from hospitals, where they cut deals with grieving families.

This is not the first time that ghost marriage intermediaries have fallen on the wrong side of the law. One woman died over the lunar new year in February 2012 and was sold by her family to the family of a recently deceased young man for about �3,700; soon afterwards, police caught a graverobber selling her twice-exhumed body to another family for slightly less.

In 2009, a grieving father in Xianyang City, also in Shaanxi province, paid a team of graverobbers �2,700 to find a suitable bride for his son, who had died in a car crash. They were arrested for exhuming the remains of a teenage girl who had killed herself not long after failing her college entrance exams.

According to the Global Times, less affluent families who desire ghost marriages may use a non-human proxy for the corpse bride, such as a silver statuette or a doughy human-shaped biscuit with black beans for eyes. Some may buy an old, rotten corpse at a discounted price, dress it in clothing and reinforce its skeleton with steel wire.

The tradition has its own set of customs and rituals, including postmortem marriages with sumptuous feasts and dowries, according to the report.

I guess mao wasn't all re-education camps, purges and cannibalism

# ? Feb 10, 2015 07:18

etalian: Mar 20, 2006

maybe they are just fans of the hit Tim Burton movie?

# ? Feb 10, 2015 07:24

cowofwar: Jul 30, 2002; by Athanatos

quote:

This is not the first time that ghost marriage intermediaries have fallen on the wrong side of the law. One woman died over the lunar new year in February 2012 and was sold by her family to the family of a recently deceased young man for about �3,700; soon afterwards, police caught a graverobber selling her twice-exhumed body to another family for slightly less.

Haha, goddamn.

To be fair though, rural Chinese people are basically the most red necks of red necks by comparison. Dirt-poor with no education, basically a breeding ground for dumb rear end cultural memes. Same with any rural and isolated populations from any culture.

cowofwar fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Feb 10, 2015

# ? Feb 10, 2015 07:41

namaste friends: Sep 18, 2004; by Smythe

Wow that's racist

# ? Feb 10, 2015 07:50

I would blow Dane Cook: Dec 26, 2008

Us property bears really need an instruction manual or something on how to discourage Chinese property investors in our prospective cities.

So far i've got:
Use the number 4 a lot.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 09:35

Precambrian Video Games: Aug 19, 2002

Kafka Esq. posted:

Thread is really living up to the name right now.

Careful, if you bring up the r word (oh wait CI already did) or question what the ghost marriage thing has to do with Canada's housing bubble, exactly, you'll get labelled an SJW or card-carrying weed intellectual or worse.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 09:53

computer parts: Nov 18, 2010; PLEASE CLAP

PT6A posted:

EDIT: I'm joking above, obviously, but some people seem to take this very seriously. Leading me to my next question: are Chinese people predisposed to be retarded or something? Between this and their fixation on using rare animal parts to cure diseases, it seems like there's something very broken in that culture.

As much as Canadians are predisposed to genocide Native Americans.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 10:21

Professor Shark: May 22, 2012

Everything I learn about China is super depressing, this time it was horrifying :stonk:

# ? Feb 10, 2015 10:40

tagesschau: Sep 1, 2006; D&D: HASBARA SQUAD
THE SPEECH SUPPRESSOR

Remember: it's "antisemitic" to protest genocide as long as the targets are brown.

Cultural Imperial posted:

You laugh but burnaby was letting people apply to renumber their houses. All the mainlanders on my block applied for 8s asap.

Jan posted:

My vietnamese friend was reluctant to move closer to her invasive mother, but ended up getting a condo with the number 404 to keep her away.

Jan posted:

When I lived in Vancouver, I did this eco van tour and the guide had a random anecdote about a house in North Vancouver that had the number 707 and was worth twice as much as the neighbouring houses because apparently 707 sounds like "money lots of money" with different inflexions in Mandarin. or something.

I find it pretty dumb that the house between 664 Bathurst and 668 Bathurst in Toronto is 664A Bathurst, but this is an entirely new level of "your silly superstition is ruining things."

# ? Feb 10, 2015 13:37

Count Canuckula: Oct 22, 2014

If you ever want to read about the worst thing to come out of rural, China read "Mao: The Unknown Story"- The charming tale of a spoiled farmer's son who later grows up to have over 70 million people die under his rule.

Count Canuckula fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Feb 10, 2015

# ? Feb 10, 2015 13:38

Kafka Esq.: Jan 1, 2005; "If you ever even think about calling me anything but 'The Crab' I will go so fucking crab on your ass you won't even see what crab'd your crab" -The Crab(TM)

Never underestimate the willingness of westerners to sit down and chat about gross rare customs as a reason to keep people of a certain look out of their country.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 13:53

Ceciltron: Jan 11, 2007; Text BEEP to 43527 for the dancing robot!; Pillbug

PT6A posted:

EDIT: Hmm, looks like once again the blame can be laid at the feet of a bunch of fuckhead commies.

China is communist in name only. They have an autocratic, single party state that long ago lost any semblance of communist or marxist collective ownership. The whole communist notion of wealth redistribution is wholly absent.

It's a free market paradise. One, I would add, I think you'd quite like. No regulations, no taxes, just businesses and bribes.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 14:10

Precambrian Video Games: Aug 19, 2002

Count Canuckula posted:

If you ever want to read about the worst thing to come out of rural, China read "Mao: The Unknown Story"- The charming tale of a spoiled farmer's son who later grows up to have over 70 million people die under his rule.

I read it and am a bit skeptical because a lot of other historians take issue with the arguments and some of the evidence in that book. I don't know enough about the subject to decide for myself, really.

There's a whole lot of discussion about it in various threads including the China one, but I usually give up after a few minutes of reading them because I have no idea what people are talking about.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 14:25

Furnaceface: Oct 21, 2004

Kafka Esq. posted:

Never underestimate the willingness of westerners to sit down and chat about gross rare customs as a reason to keep people of a certain look out of their country.

Its not just a westerner thing sadly, its a human thing. We are all monsters.

At least stupidity around housing and population density and cost of living isnt just a North America thing:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/london-s-record-high-population-creates-real-estate-challenges-1.2951275

# ? Feb 10, 2015 14:26

namaste friends: Sep 18, 2004; by Smythe

shots fired from Scott Barlow, a Good Writer for the globe:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/glob...rticle22888116/

quote:

A new theory on the now-defunct U.S. housing bubble provides interesting reading for Canadian mortgage holders biting their fingernails in fear of a similar type collapse in the North.

The catalyst for the discussion is a new paper by economists from Duke University, M.I.T. and Dartmouth College arguing that the U.S. housing crisis was caused more by a surge in demand than loose credit conditions.

�While there was a rapid expansion in overall mortgage origination during this time period, the fraction of new mortgage dollars going to each income group was stable. In other words, the poor did not represent a higher fraction of the mortgage loans originated over the period�. the evidence in the paper suggests that there was no decoupling of mortgage growth from income growth where unsustainable credit was flowing disproportionately to poor people.�

Ok, for Canadians this theory likely applies in Alberta where rampant wage growth resulted in an upsurge in housing demand. (Vancouver real estate , driven by foreign capital, is another story entirely).

Does this mean Canada will endure a 2008-style housing apocalypse? I don�t think so, because the liability for loss of home values is far more clear in Canada.

In the pre-crisis U.S., huge swathes of the financial system were engaged in a game of hot potato. Mortgage originators would make home loans to people who couldn�t pay it back, then sell the loan to investment banks to avoid being on the hook for defaults. The investment bank packaged the mortgages into Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) bonds, thus pushing the liability away. The CDO holders, knowing eventually that the underlying mortgages were sketchy, bought credit default insurance (CDS) from the insurance industry, pushing the risk to insurers.

When U.S housing prices fell and the CDOs started to default, it became clear that the insurers couldn�t afford to make good on CDS guarantees. And then everything stopped � the global financial system had a heart attack.

There is no such leverage-related obscenity in Canada. And while it�s not ideal that the Canadian Home Mortgage Corporation is the final backstop, the odds of a domestic credit meltdown are far smaller.

�Yes, looser credit � and fraud � drove the housing bubble� � Klein, FT Alphaville (free registration)

Matthew C. Klein's article at ftalphaville:

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/02/10/2116771/yes-looser-credit-and-fraud-drove-the-housing-bubble/

quote:

There are two basic explanations for the US housing bubble:

There was a sudden change in the supply of mortgage credit, which led people to spend a lot more on housing and (more importantly) extract a lot of home equity
There was a sudden change in the demand for mortgage credit because people got caught up in a self-reinforcing mania
The disagreement has important implications for policy. If you think the excesses were caused by an insatiable demand for �safe� assets that encouraged lenders to boost volumes by lowering standards so much that you barely needed a pulse to qualify for a mortgage, there is a pretty straightforward list of things you can do to reduce the expected loss from a repeat performance. But if you think the bubble was caused by a temporary period of �irrational exuberance� about future house prices, it�s a lot less obvious what should be done.

We tend to think the supply-side view � excess lending fueled a bubble, rather than accommodated it � makes more sense, and we particularly like Hyun Song Shin�s argument that the big driver was the creation of the euro and the concomitant collapse in risk premia.

But not everyone agrees. A recent paper by Manuel Adelino, Antoinette Schoar, and Felipe Severino argues that the 2002-2006 boom in US mortgage lending was driven by well-off buyers who were experiencing above-average income growth, rather than people who had previously been shut out of credit markets due to weak credit scores, insufficient savings for a down payment, low incomes, or some combination.

As they put it:

While there was a rapid expansion in overall mortgage origination during this time period, the fraction of new mortgage dollars going to each income group was stable. In other words, the poor did not represent a higher fraction of the mortgage loans originated over the period. In addition, borrowers in the middle and top of the distribution are the ones that contributed most significantly to the increase in mortgages in default after 2007.

Taken together, the evidence in the paper suggests that there was no decoupling of mortgage growth from income growth where unsustainable credit was flowing disproportionately to poor people.

And later:

The aggregate increase in debt across zip codes (and nationally) was accompanied by an increase in individual borrower income levels, and was the result of an expansion of credit along the extensive margin: This suggests that home buyers increased the pace of home buying and therefore were holding more recent mortgages. As a result of the increased churning, zip codes as a whole became more levered, since a larger fraction of households held mortgages which had recently been originated.

The problem was not that levels of individual DTI at origination were grossly out of line with prior periods, but that a larger fraction of homeowners were levered up to the maximum level of their typical debt capacity. These results are most consistent with an expectations based view of the financial crisis where both homebuyers and lenders were riding the house price bubble and defaulted when house prices dropped.

This is an intriguing argument, in part because it appears to contradict the earlier finding of Atif Mian and Amir Sufi that, during the bubble, mortgage credit grew the most in the zip codes with the lowest relative income growth and worst credit scores.

It would be possible to reconcile these apparently competing claims � the worst-performing loans disproportionately went to the least creditworthy neighbourhoods yet also went to individual borrowers with relatively high and rapidly rising incomes � if it turned out that failed attempts at gentrification played a significant role in the bubble. And, in fact, Adelino et al believe that failed attempts at gentrification are an important part of the story.

Is that believable?

The failed gentrification thesis goes against intuitions one might have about the rise and fall in the homeownership rate during the 2000s, as well as the the evidence we have that the incomes and net worth of ethnic minorities fell far more than it did for whites. It also goes against what we know about the connection between changes in minimum down payments for low-grade borrowers and changes in house prices. Via John Geanakoplos:

And there is also the fact that most of the increase in total mortgage debt during the bubble came from equity extraction rather than new mortgages for purchase.

Still, the evidence presented by Adelino et al seems compelling on first read. So who�s right?

It turns out that the puzzle disappears when you realise that Adelino et al looked at mortgage applications to determine individual borrower incomes. After all, many people lied about their incomes during the bubble. Even the lenders that refrained from actively encouraging the practice had little reason to dig into the details if that meant slowing down volumes.

This matters because well over a third of all purchase mortgages originated during the bubbly years were either �low documentation� or �no documentation�, according to data from CoreLogic. The current share of these �liar�s loans� is in the low single digits. And there are lots of good reasons to think that plenty of �full documentation� loans also were based on fraudulent income data.

To be fair, Adelino et al do recognise that fraud could affect their results, but they believe they have corrected for this. They also believe that they found evidence to support their failed gentrification thesis, which would also imply that fraud wasn�t a major factor:

If income of the new buyers was high purely due to overstatement there should be no correlation with average household income in the zip code going forward. Instead, we find a positive and significant relationship between IRS income and lagged homebuyer income suggesting that neighborhoods where the new buyers had higher incomes also had higher IRS income in the following year.

In other words, there isn�t any inconsistency between the data collected at the zip code level by the Internal Revenue Service and the data gleaned from individual mortgage applications as long as you assume that the bulk of the extra buyers in poor neighborhoods were people moving in to exploit neighbourhood revitalisation.

However, a new paper from Mian and Sufi argues that Adelino et al didn�t go far enough in checking for fraud and ended up being misled by bad data.

The key is that, in most zip codes, especially outside of the boom years, there is a reasonably stable relationship between what the Internal Revenue Service says people make and what mortgage applications say people earn. During the boom years, however, this relationship broke down:

Tellingly, it didn�t break down by the same amount in every zip code. Mian and Sufi find that the disconnect between self-reported incomes and tax data was biggest in the zip codes that had the highest share of mortgages originated by private-label issuers rather than the government-sponsored enterprises, which also happened to be the zip codes with the highest share of �low doc� and �no doc� mortgages:

The breakdown in the correlation between buyer income growth and IRS income growth during 2002 to 2005 is entirely driven by zip codes with a low share of non-GSE mortgages. There is no change in the correlation between buyer income growth and IRS income growth in the zip codes with a high share of GSE mortgages. Further, the correlation between the growth in buyer income on mortgage applications and IRS income growth is positive in high non-GSE mortgages outside the 2002 to 2005 period. The decoupling is concentrated when and where fraud was most likely: high non-GSE share zip codes during the mortgage credit boom.

Mian and Sufi also cast doubt on the gentrification thesis. Prior to the bubble, a positive gap between the incomes of people taking out mortgages to buy houses in a neighborhood and the average income of existing residents does predict faster growth in neighbourhood income. In other words, gentrification is real and it usually works the way you might expect. However, the ostensible growth in borrower incomes during the bubble period doesn�t fit this pattern:

Buyer income overstatement forecasts negative income and financial outcomes. In every year of the mortgage credit boom, we calculate the difference between the average income reported on mortgage applications in a zip code and the IRS average income of all residents living in a zip code. We then show that zip codes with a large positive difference between buyer income from mortgage applications and IRS average income experienced subsequently lower IRS income growth in the following year.

Further, according to IRS data, high borrower income overstatement zip codes saw a relative decline in the number of high income individuals living in the zip code. We also use individual level data on credit scores to show that people moving into high borrower income overstatement zip codes do not have better credit scores than residents already living there.

On top of the income data, there are also credit score data. If you believe the gentrification thesis, then borrowers with relatively higher incomes moving into depressed neighborhoods ought to have relatively higher credit scores as well. Yet they actually have lower credit scores.

Perhaps most importantly, Mian and Sufi compared their data with independent studies of mortgage fraud (including this one) and found that the zip codes with the highest incidences of lying about property valuation, ownership, occupancy, second liens, and other forms of misrepresentation happen to be the exact same zip codes where borrowers reported much higher incomes than the IRS. The problem gets worse the more fraud there is.

At the extreme end, �in the 18 zip codes listed by InterThinx as being plagued with mortgage fraud, mortgage applications reported buyer income that was 90% higher than average IRS income.� We struggle to imagine the innocent explanation for this remarkable coincidence.

(Mian and Sufi make many other detailed critiques of Adelino et al�s methodological choices starting on page 22 of the PDF. If you had previously been persuaded by Adelino et al, you should probably read them, but they aren�t essential to the basic thesis about income fraud and subprime lending.)

Add it all together, and it shouldn�t be surprising that the zip codes that Mian and Sufi identify as the most riddled with mortgage fraud also are the ones with the highest default rates and the biggest drops in income. That looks a lot more like what you�d expect if lenders were chasing warm bodies to boost volume in response to demand from bond investors than if borrowers were begging lenders for a chance to ride a housing bubble.

tl;dr US housing meltdown happened because of mortgages not insured by fannie and freddie. Since most marginal lending is backstopped by the CMHC in Canada, it's unlikely that we'll have a housing meltdown of US proportions.

namaste friends fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Feb 10, 2015

# ? Feb 10, 2015 16:08

Count Canuckula: Oct 22, 2014

eXXon posted:

I read it and am a bit skeptical because a lot of other historians take issue with the arguments and some of the evidence in that book. I don't know enough about the subject to decide for myself, really.

There's a whole lot of discussion about it in various threads including the China one, but I usually give up after a few minutes of reading them because I have no idea what people are talking about.

I might owe everyone an apology then. I never really read up on the book's lack of sources- I'll have to scrounge the China thread to better educate myself.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 16:11

Kafka Esq.: Jan 1, 2005; "If you ever even think about calling me anything but 'The Crab' I will go so fucking crab on your ass you won't even see what crab'd your crab" -The Crab(TM)

Mao's Great Famine is a good alternative.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 16:19

Count Canuckula: Oct 22, 2014

Once I'm done with Party of One and The Four Pillars of Investing I'll pick it up! Thanks, Kafka Esq.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 16:21

Brannock: Feb 9, 2006; by exmarx; Fallen Rib

Kafka Esq. posted:

Never underestimate the willingness of westerners to sit down and chat about gross rare customs as a reason to keep people of a certain look out of their country.

Mainland Chinese people, especially the ones who actually have the money to invest in Canada, share much more in common with Western whites than they do with actual downtrodden minorities who are victims of actual legit systematic racism. Most of the reasons White People are Great Satan also apply to the rich Chinese.

All the handwringing about the prejudice towards the Chinese is at best misplaced.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 16:46

peter banana: Sep 2, 2008; Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

Cultural Imperial posted:

shots fired from Scott Barlow, a Good Writer for the globe:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/glob...rticle22888116/

Matthew C. Klein's article at ftalphaville:

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/02/10/2116771/yes-looser-credit-and-fraud-drove-the-housing-bubble/

tl;dr US housing meltdown happened because of mortgages not insured by fannie and freddie. Since most marginal lending is backstopped by the CMHC in Canada, it's unlikely that we'll have a housing meltdown of US proportions.

but does that mean prices will normalize and we'll have this "soft landing" we keep hearing about? Or are a generation of people just boxed out of home ownership forever (my god the realtors were right, I missed my chance!)?

# ? Feb 10, 2015 16:54

namaste friends: Sep 18, 2004; by Smythe

peter banana posted:

but does that mean prices will normalize and we'll have this "soft landing" we keep hearing about? Or are a generation of people just boxed out of home ownership forever (my god the realtors were right, I missed my chance!)?

Whenever people talk about the housing market in canada without specifically addressing a single regional market, they're including places which didn't see crazy increases like vancouver. The decline in these markets are unlikely to be tremendous.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 16:59

peter banana: Sep 2, 2008; Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

so places that went crazy will get hit hard and places that went up but stayed fairly normal will land softly? Is that the gist?

# ? Feb 10, 2015 17:02

Ceciltron: Jan 11, 2007; Text BEEP to 43527 for the dancing robot!; Pillbug

Brannock posted:

Mainland Chinese people, especially the ones who actually have the money to invest in Canada, share much more in common with Western whites than they do with actual downtrodden minorities who are victims of actual legit systematic racism. Most of the reasons White People are Great Satan also apply to the rich Chinese.

All the handwringing about the prejudice towards the Chinese is at best misplaced.

Precisely my point, thank you. I would even venture to say that they don't share so much in common with western whites as western elites.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 17:07

Kafka Esq.: Jan 1, 2005; "If you ever even think about calling me anything but 'The Crab' I will go so fucking crab on your ass you won't even see what crab'd your crab" -The Crab(TM)

Brannock posted:

All the handwringing about the prejudice towards the Chinese is at best misplaced.

The past two pages have been about clever tricks to keep superstitious Chinese out of the desirable neighbourhoods. The fact that the actual people moving in are Westernized and probably don't believe in corpse brides is not taking hold, apparently. In fact, some of those people may be Canadians who made their money here and don't want the equivalent of 666 Lane St for when their relatives come over.

So, yeah, sounds like just more white people talking about keeping undesirables out of their communities.

edit: in before "lmao whiteknight"

# ? Feb 10, 2015 17:09

Ceciltron: Jan 11, 2007; Text BEEP to 43527 for the dancing robot!; Pillbug

I'm sorry, Something Awful Comedy Forums Poster Kafka Esq., but I consider superstitious bourgeois assholes to be the epitome of undesirable and unwelcome in my neighbourhoods.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 17:11

Postess with the Mostest: Apr 4, 2007; Arabian nights
'neath Arabian moons
A fool off his guard
could fall and fall hard
out there on the dunes

Brannock posted:

Mainland Chinese people, especially the ones who actually have the money to invest in Canada, share much more in common with Western whites than they do with actual downtrodden minorities who are victims of actual legit systematic racism. Most of the reasons White People are Great Satan also apply to the rich Chinese.

All the handwringing about the prejudice towards the Chinese is at best misplaced.

You're saying that it's just the poor downtrodden victims who are paying $65,000/kilogram for crushed rhino horn?

# ? Feb 10, 2015 17:11

tagesschau: Sep 1, 2006; D&D: HASBARA SQUAD
THE SPEECH SUPPRESSOR

Remember: it's "antisemitic" to protest genocide as long as the targets are brown.

peter banana posted:

so places that went crazy will get hit hard and places that went up but stayed fairly normal will land softly? Is that the gist?

That's pretty much what always happens. People like to go on and on about how New York and San Francisco didn't see huge crashes, so that means Toronto and Vancouver won't, but they keep ignoring the fact that neither New York nor San Francisco saw a particularly large runup (and New York's prices still dropped 18% from 2007 to 2014). Toronto and Vancouver (especially the latter) have seen runups that look more like Miami than New York.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 17:13

Kafka Esq.: Jan 1, 2005; "If you ever even think about calling me anything but 'The Crab' I will go so fucking crab on your ass you won't even see what crab'd your crab" -The Crab(TM)

Ceciltron posted:

I'm sorry, Something Awful Comedy Forums Poster Kafka Esq., but I consider superstitious bourgeois assholes to be the epitome of undesirable and unwelcome in my neighbourhoods.

Better institute a law about it. Maybe some kind of quota if you're from a certain country. It's the only way to be sure!

I'm not calling you all racist, just saying that the repeated calls to try and engineer some kind of solution to wealthy but genetically predisposed retards and so on is starkly reminiscent of the kind of NIMBY bullshit that tried to keep BC the White Gateway to Canada for so long.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 17:19

namaste friends: Sep 18, 2004; by Smythe

peter banana posted:

so places that went crazy will get hit hard and places that went up but stayed fairly normal will land softly? Is that the gist?

Yep. Keep in mind that this in itself isn't much of a revelation. Im a little puzzled as to why this is significant to Barlow.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 17:24

Ceciltron: Jan 11, 2007; Text BEEP to 43527 for the dancing robot!; Pillbug

Well I mean it would probably be more effective to just cut off BC and float it out to sea.

In all seriousness: I'm not an expert nor would I claim to be one, but I think a good start would be to limit housing purchases to permanent residents and citizens, the same way a lot of places do. This would right off the bat curb a lot of the property problems.

It's either that or abolish borders, but that's not really the kind of thing a capitalist state can do, now, can it?

# ? Feb 10, 2015 17:29

peter banana: Sep 2, 2008; Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

oh hellll no, you'd better not tell anyone in Toronto they have to choose between their city income properties and their cottage.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 17:33

Lead out in cuffs: Sep 18, 2012; "That's right. We've evolved."

"I can see that. Cool mutations."

50+ new posts this morning. It's happening isn't it? Is it happening?

Oh. Ooooh.

:yikes:

# ? Feb 10, 2015 17:53

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Ceciltron posted:

China is communist in name only. They have an autocratic, single party state that long ago lost any semblance of communist or marxist collective ownership. The whole communist notion of wealth redistribution is wholly absent.

It's a free market paradise. One, I would add, I think you'd quite like. No regulations, no taxes, just businesses and bribes.

I'm not a supporter of an unregulated free market, and I have never been, though, and the specific thing I was referencing (TCM, aka "I need rare animal parts to put lead in my pencil") was being discussed as a reaction to Mao's dismantling of standard medical practice.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 17:55

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# ? May 24, 2024 22:23

Ceciltron: Jan 11, 2007; Text BEEP to 43527 for the dancing robot!; Pillbug

Mao was a semi-literate manchild who had such a poor grasp of Marx's manifesto that he basically rewrote huge parts of it with complete opposite meaning in his Red Book.

# ? Feb 10, 2015 18:09

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Canada Housing/Debt: Trust me, I'm a landlord.

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