I don't think its black and white. I think sometimes success is a matter of luck. For example, in large organizations there can be a lot of roles generated where there isn't always that much direct pressure and people can be hired through luck (e.g. getting on with the boss, some types of diversity hires, being loyal to a company even if you are not that good etc.). If teams of people make products/reports etc. sometimes it can be hard to shine, and 'talkers' who don't contribute much can get promoted into a 'lucky' role.
Its not black and white.
You illustrate a perfect example of simply not understanding what people want. Talkers get promoted because talkers have social skills, and companies are social systems, and social skills are required to advance through them. Social skills are probably more desirable than technical skills most of the time. It’s not luck that these people succeed, it’s the fact that they have the qualities that people want.
You can succeed through partially through luck, like if a record executive decides they going to manufacture some massive level of fame for you. But this isn’t a viable long term strategy, only providing what people want is. Over time the variance of luck goes away. The luck outlook relies on the fallacious idea that you only get one opportunity to succeed, but you don’t, you have as long as you’re willing to keep trying. Maybe a failure on one particular day can be explained by luck, but you get to wake up and keep trying every day, and if you have what people want then luck becomes irrelevant and eventually you will succeed. That’s how basically every single successful person you’ve ever heard of has done it.
The budget option is just to go to settings and select "digital wellbeing and parental controls".
You can set timers to block your apps after X amount of time.
I've found it useful to block chrome on my phone after 30 minutes of activity.
You can of course 'hack' this setup by just switching off the setting or rewarding yourself another 10 minutes etc. but then you can do this with anything...
At the moment I am busting my ass to get ahead at work so that's my focus. But...
I have a 22 year old adult daughter (I had her when I was 19) - she didn't grow up with me (I did provide financial support) but I do feel connected to her. Its nice she exists. She's even finished college. I would though like to have 1-2 more children (I am 42 so its possible) ideally in the next 2 years.
I plan also, as a hobby, to make a 'social' boardgame. I hope one day it can be turned into a web application.
I would also like to write a blog / write stories.
When I'm retired I would like to help out with community stuff too.
I want to try and be useful and spread kindness till I'm gone. Other people are all we have.
Does AI/Robotics counter a lot of OPs arguments?
AI in 50 years time could be totally mind blowing.
And there could be all kinds of robots running around by then.
I think the human population going down to 2-5 billion is a good thing.
To maybe offer a different perspective:
I think the Canadian mortgages linked to Chinese accounts will likely all be paid.
What may be happening is that there is a lot of underground chinese financial activity that is not recorded in Canada and part of this 'network' is utilized to get money out of china.
> I think the Canadian mortgages linked to Chinese accounts will likely all be paid.
This is a "heads, I win", "tails, you lose" type of scam. The mortgage holders are all judgement proof. They have no income or assets to go after. So if the housing market crashes, the banks have no recourse.
It's the same as taking out a mortgage and instead of buying a house, you go to the casino and bet double or nothing. Sure, the intention to pay back is there. But it is contingent on the investment performing, and the bank is taking on unknown risks.
There is probably an unlimited number of people in China would would like to own Canada real estate. As long as you don't block those sales it can continue forever.
Mortgages in Canada are different than mortgages in the US in that they are full recourse. If the sale price during foreclosure doesn’t cover the costs, the banks can go after you personally for the balance. So you’d have to either a) leave the country, or b) declare bankruptcy. So, not exactly a risk-free option.
It is a risk free option. The Chinese income isn't real. You can't meaningfully garnish the wages of a part time casino dealer. They have no other assets to cover the potential shortfall.
You assume these are poor people, other assume they're quite wealthy and laundering untaxed income into assets in .ca. If the latter, they may even have a proportionate pile of assets to seize locally. I betcha you could restate your point to come across a little less jingoistic.
It's entirely plausible that you're not on the moral high ground you think you are, calling other commenters jingoistic because you didn't read the article is prime example.
It's not a matter of if they get paid, it's the unfair advantage this gives in an already competitive market. 2/3 of these properties are probably rented out at inflated prices and the two probably pay the mortgage of the third owners live in. This is a free money glitch, aka fraud.
The market's not bearing rent so much as existing property owners are colluding to prevent new construction.
If new construction wasn't so aggressively blocked in some major cities (San Francisco, Boston, all of Canada it seems), then the rents would not be nearly as high as they are.
Wealthy property owners are behaving a lot like a cartel in many places.
Exactly. The discourse about foreign buyers of homes in Canada is centered on the morally bankrupt notion that it is only wrong if that race exploits the system. If a good old white guy exploits the same system it is not worth mentioning. What I am saying, and you seem to concur, is that the system itself is the problem. The identity of the person exploiting it is irrelevant unless you are a racist.
It is a legal distinction that has a huge number of implications in most countries. As is the focus of discussion on other threads, it necessarily changes approaches to income validation, the laws that apply, the presence or absence of credit history, etc.
This has nothing to do with nationality and everything to do with fraud. If other nations are doing this, it should stop too. Telling lies to acquire loans is illegal and inflates prices for everyone working legitimately.
Good point. Well I know Canadians, Chinese, immigrants and banking.
I'm not surprised that some Chinese (or any) immigrants in Canada try to take advantage of the linguistic barrier to obtain credit. And since important Canadian documents are often less standardized than in other countries, one can surely employ a bit of artistic creativity with a stamp here and a stamp there to put through a false document.
I've personally dealt with fraudulent credit applications, submitted and approved, because the bank employee (Canadian, no relation to the client) wanted to improve his numbers. At least when I was involved in credit, because of the workflow, the middle office made decisions first based on the numbers provided to them by the front office. Of course they were supposed to control all supporting documents but they weren't exactly zealous and if you knew their work habits, you could probably deduce the best time and language for the submission of a questionable application.
Yeah but you seem to be suggested that without this yellow peril, the tenants would be, for some reason, getting a better deal. As if the problem is actually that Chinese people are better at price finding.
Tangentially related, there was an undercover Vice News report on the connections between Chinese Triads and the Mexico/US fentanyl trade a couple months ago [1]. I also wouldn't be surprised if there were underground networks of capital in Canada that were related to these mortgages.
> think the Canadian mortgages linked to Chinese accounts will likely all be paid
Out of curiosity, why? China's stock market is melting down in the midst of persistent deflation. A lot of people who thought they had liquidity may not anymore. Beijing could open the taps, but then that puts pressure on the currency.
> Out of curiosity, why? China's stock market is melting down in the midst of persistent deflation. A lot of people who thought they had liquidity may not anymore. Beijing could open the taps, but then that puts pressure on the currency.
The whole point of the money laundering operation is to get the money out of the country. China going to pot only accelerates it.
Most Chinese don't invest in their stock market. The accredited investor qualification is much harder to get than in the US.
Most investment is in real estate, which has remained fairly stable in Tier 1 cities (which is where most of the post-2008 Chinese Canadians are from)
To get more than the $50k limit out, people would use a hawala type system where you'd use assets in China as collateral and get guaranteed cash from a broker abroad.
> Most Chinese aren’t buying British Columbian property.
Yep. They don't buy Chinese stocks either. They would invest in property within China.
The kind of Chinese moving to Canada (and Australia) after 2008 aren't "most Chinese".
They tend to be from much more affluent and connected backgrounds. Think businesspeople, large property owners, or middle level party members.
Upwardly mobile Chinese (eg. Those in the tech industry or finance) will target the US or Singapore if they emigrate because they can keep their careers - something which Canada absolutely sucks at (eg. Most foreign degrees aren't recognized, white collar salaries have largely stagnated since the 2000s, blue collar work like oil drilling pays much more)
Blue collar/middle class Chinese tend to target Malaysia, Thailand, or Singapore because it's easy for Chinese to emigrate and average salaries are higher and they can blend in as the Chinese diaspora is massive in all those countries
> On a relative basis, right? In absolute terms, it’s still very low. Similar to the practical requirements for opening an American brokerage account
But faith in it is low for most Chinese. The 2015-16 market crash was extremely volatile.
Also, stock investing is a new concept for a lot of Chinese - stock markets started unofficially in the 1987-1991 period, didn't formalize until 1997, and most companies preferred listing in Hong Kong or Singapore until the 2010s.
Also, if you have a finite amount of cash, you would be chasing the highest stable returns, and for most of the post-Mao era, that was in real estate.
> Do you have data for this
I'm using Shanghai as my example, but it's the same story for Shenzhen, Beijing, and Guangzhou - the Tier 1 cities.
The real estate bust happened in cities outside of those, but specifically, in property located outside the "Inner Ring"
Chinese cities are planned with 3 rings - an Inner Ring with all the businesses, government offices, and residential property of people working for both, a middle ring that would often be industrial but increasingly converted into residential, and an outer ring that was farmland until 10-15 years ago when it was converted to residential.
It's that expansion of outer ring construction in all cities across China that caused the property bust.
Inner Ring residential property is basically VIP. Those are the kinds of people buying property in Canada.
You can label it however you want, if both the lender and borrower are willing participants, it will be difficult to prevent this from happening.
Like mentioned in the article, often times the material is very obviously suspicious and banks probably know this and still turn a blind eye to it because these borrowers are low risk and much less sensitive to the high/rising interest rates of today...
It's not that difficult. You just appoint an auditor and make the bank pay progressively higher fines until they figure it out.
American banks learned to be much better at it after 2008. And given 2008 and the MBS balance sheets at central banks and the municipal budgets propped up by property values and national mortgage programs intended to encourage homeownership, this is by no means just a matter between the bank and its clients, even if you put aside the money laundering angle. Mortgage fraud destabilizes economies.
> if both the lender and borrower are willing participants
Eventually this behavior goes overboard and everything crashes. In the meantime, law-abiding people are screwed by the bubble. Then they are made to pay for the clean up.
Fraud is costly, and rationalizing it contributes to the problem.
But the "fraud" is slowing the bubble. Without capita controls, PRC buyers would operate like any other international buyer, except there would be a shit load more of them who would do more cash purchases and outbit everyone else. This fraud to circumvent capital controls is why wealthy PRC buyers who liquidated their extra multi million dollar tier1 units only bought 1 house in Canada instead of 3.
The article discusses how they're not just buying one home outright. Far more profitable to put downpayments on 3 or 4 homes and just push that money to pay those mortgages while AirBnBing and renting a couple of them.
The article discusses one incident of person with Canadian tax residency with multiple mortgages, where the leaker allege is typical, when number of net worth assessments in low double digit per year suggest it's not typical. Not with 30k new Chinese Canadian immigrants per year, or 150k home sales in Ontario. From my experience (I know many people who facilitate this process in ON/BC) PRC buyers typically are not renters / airbnbers, they either live in their units part time / full time (or their kids) or leave it empty. Renting/slumlording/airbnbing is largely Chinese _Canadian_ affair, emphasis on Canadian, i.e. not wealthy, middle class who needs to make their capital work to cover costs. They speak mandarin and can insert themselves into the machine. Generally PRC buyers / big bidders aren't playing the RE game in Canada to play landlord. They just want to hide some of their assets abroad. The allegation kind of skips over that distinction, are these "diaspora" PRC individuals or Chinese-Canadians with access to PRC RE networks doing ponzi mortgages to try to get wealthy off Canadian RE. In my experience, it's the Chinese Canadians, because the PRC buyers were busy speculating off much more profitable (at the time) PRC RE, especially if whistleblower is talking about 2015-now time period.
> this behavior goes overboard and everything crashes
Maybe... but you need to keep in mind most of these people are not really building a bubble. Unlike the subprime mortgage crisis, where things were built on inflated valuations, many borrowers in this "scheme" do have more than enough funds to cover the entire mortgage. It's just that their capital is relatively illiquid. This is also why the high interest rates have not significantly affected this.
The effects on housing cost is because of natural market merging where chinese properties are "overvalued" domestically. This is actually not new, and happened with Japan at some point as well.
That being said, the main risk for this is actually geopolitical... Should capital controls tighten (or, like, if war were to occur etc.) then there is a much bigger risk, but many are banking on the fact that, at least given the signs today, that is still unlikely.
> Maybe... but you need to keep in mind most of these people are not really building a bubble.
No, I'd don't need to keep anything of the sort in mind. I've lived through multiple real-estate and speculation bubbles and crashes now. The arguments you make are the same sort heard before each one, and I can easily anticipate the rationales and excuses that will be offered after the next one.
You don't know how widespread this is. You don't know how many other banks are leaning on this latest house of cards, or how much of this is going on in the US and Europe as well. As far as the banks are concerned it's just one big world of suckers and they play these games everywhere, simultaneously.
And there is no "should." Capital controls will tighten. Wars will happen. Eventually, inevitably, the overhang destabilizes and this heinous crap will blow up.
> You can label it however you want, if both the lender and borrower are willing participants, it will be difficult to prevent this from happening
These aren't purely private transactions. If HSBC Canada fails, Ottawa is on the hook. The defrauded party here is the public. (And possibly the bank's lenders and shareholders.)
This is somewhat counterintuitive but... the fraudulent mortgages are not more risky, they are often times more stable than other local borrowers.
I think what many people are imagining is the subprime mortgage situation of yore. But in this case, a lot of the "fraud" is the result of knock on effects from capital controls in the PRC. Many (new and aspiring immigrants) have capital from sales of their property in China, but due to capital controls, cannot get it out quickly. They have to do it in $50k/year chunks.
Usually a loan or mortgage is the solution for this, but those depend on _income_ rather than _wealth_, so normally these people can't take out as much as they need to, even though they could easily back actual value of the mortgage. So there's a little collusion between banks and mortgage brokers to get in on this market gap (probably more so now that interest rates are high, which these borrowers are much less sensitive to).
Of course, there are risks, but those risks are tied to more geopolitical circumstances and less market-driven, and apparently banks are more willing to take their chances on that.
The issue here is that the geopolitical risks are hard to separate from the market risks.
If BC property is being fraudulently leveraged against Chinese real estate, opaque decisions by the ccp can dramatically impact default rate for Canadian loans.
No market actor would expect that in a non-fraud based market. Instead a transparent pricing of Chinese assets would show them as much less valuable on a risk adjusted basis than their book wealth value. Especially compared to western income or equivalent wealth.
They don't offer these services to anyone. Because the paperwork is fraudulent, a lot of people involved are/will be personally implicated (could easily lose their job and/or face legal challenges on top) in the scheme. It's not like banks are not monitoring delinquency/default rates already, and if the stats are start indicating problems they will certainly investigate...
So while outside observers can't verify anything, those perpetrating the scheme do have to balance their own personal risk and many will in exchange request invasive details around the clients' assets in China to cover their own ass. Not admissible evidence to the bank, of course, but they're not handing these out like candy.
> The Chinese property market is in freefall.
Realistically, people involved have already sold so this doesn't affect them. At least in the Vancouver area, the brokers (who are the usual point-of-contact to the clients) won't even proceed unless you've already sold and have the cash.
> And capital controls can get tightened.
This is the main real risk that those in the scheme look out for, but it's a geopolitical risk rather than a market-based one. Which makes more sense when rates are high, like now. When rates were low, this didn't happen as much since there are plenty of clients to go around.
---
Also, in the grand scheme of things, even if the bubble bursts, the broader economy is still not worse off. Each cent paid into these mortgages is real "new money" being introduced into the economy. This is not the subprime mortgage days where at the end it became just a transfer of wealth to the banking industry. For the most part "the public" is not the one being defrauded, it's China...
> while outside observers can't verify anything, those perpetrating the scheme do have to balance their own personal risk
Everyone in every corrupt scheme says this. The rule of law wins, in the long run, because these structures aren’t robust. They get perverted and subverted, and while it’s nice to imagine a bunch of competent crooks keeping up their shop, the reality is we have rules for a reason.
> it's a geopolitical risk rather than a market-based one
Capital controls aren’t geopolitical. Neither is an offshore property market bursting.
The borrowers are borrowing against an doubly-illiquid asset. Buy long, borrow short—this has been a widowmaker since antiquity.
> even if the bubble bursts, the broader economy is still not worse off
Canadian banking would collapse. You’d see the equivalent of America’s 2008 crisis, except while the rest of the world has high rates. If allowed to fester, or if it already has, that’s a generation’s quality-of-life gains going down the tube.
I agree with all the points on top. The proper instrument to do this would be banks setting up a system that lets people borrow against an illiquid asset, in this case would be CNY, but it's not anything new... (and is one proposal for how to work with cryptocurrencies). That would price in the political and market risks.
---
The last one I don't agree with. This is different from the 2008 crisis in that the 2008 crisis was primarily "internal" and for the most part zero sum --- some people gained, some people lost (kind of loosely like a long-horizon pump-and-dump scheme), and at the end things revert to the original non-inflated value.
This situation is more of an encouragement of external injection _into_ the economy. Rising prices are due to external capital flowing in (and the anticipation of more to come). Even if it were to pop, things would be no worse than a hypothetical alternative timeline where there was no bubble. And that's assuming no external capital actually flowed in, that not a single person wired money into the country. Clearly this is not true, and the money coming in is still net positive. So _in aggregate_, the economy is still improved due to the injection. Again, these gains are not spread evenly, and it may be the case again that some individuals will be hurt while others reap large returns.
> a generation’s quality-of-life gains going down the tube
If anything, that just means the previous quality-of-life gains were achieved by overdrawing against the future... nothing new here.
Willing participants huh. Was the taxpayer a willing participant when we had to pay for the monumentous fuck up of 2008? Did the banks and investors pay for it, go to prison? Pretty sure it was just one scapegoat and that's it.
From the mortgages, just as they should, and just as the borrowers (i.e. "the willing participants") deserved to pay - it's not a burden on some unrelated taxpayers.
I won't throw a stone at anyone trying to circumvent chinese capital controls. Though Canada isn't the place I would go to escape financial repression.
On a separate but related topic, I have heard that meditation can trigger/worsen epilepsy, but there is also counter evidence that it can reduce seizures. I find this link interesting - even if there is no definitive finding yet.
Note: there are different types of meditation.
hi, as a meditator and epileptic my curiosity is piqued. When you say 'this link', did you mean OP or is there a link you meant to add to your comment? if the latter I would be keen to look at it.
"No time to lose" a book by Pema Chodron. Its a translation and commentary of a Buddhist manuscript on basically how to become enlightened. I found the sections on how humans all suffer from past emotional memories (kleshnas) really interesting. As was the discussion on rage and forgiving people cruel to oneself. I followed it up with another of her books "when things fall apart". Again very good.
I'm now reading a Witcher fantasy novel. Blood of elves.
I think I'm an odd case, in that I did have "tinnitus" (a constant high pitched buzz in my right ear), along with a constant tension headache that resulted in me not getting any sleep. I was prescribed sleeping pills and then a visit to the neurologist said all my conditions were caused by anxiety. I actually didn't think I was anxious (I think it was the result of a bad night on cocaine).
Err... Anyway, a large career break with lots of relaxation gave me relief from both my daily headaches and tennitus. I was doing lots of exercise and also drinking a lot of water mixed with corriander (I was convinced this would help to detox me for some reason).
The tennitus went away after about 2 months and it took about a year to get away from the constant headaches. I haven't done class A drugs since...
Probably not at all helpful, but I thought I'd share.
The prevalence of sugar in so many foods can't help.
Personally I avoid "sugary" food and drinks like the plague. I also don't snack and do regular exercise and sometimes don't eat dinner. I'm at a healthy weight in my 40s.
How many adults that are obese have a healthy relationship with food and do regular exercise / fast? Obese children I have sympathy for, I'm uncertain how I feel about obese adults. I don't know if their metabolism is ultra slow, or they are just not taking care of themselves. Its complicated...
What about obese adults that used to be obese children?
Regardless of the cause of the obesity epidemic, it should be addressed compassionately and efficaciously. What makes that difficult (at least in the US) is that the most efficacious treatments aren't aligned with how the healthcare system works. Maybe you won't blame being fat on diet and exercise, but there's almost certainly a diet and excercise plan that will make you lose weight.
First-line treatment should be,
- Walk/jog 30 min, 3x per week. Pace for a mildly elevated heart rate.
- Eliminate super sweet foods from regular diet. No more than 3x per week. This could be VERY hard for sugar-addicted folks, so start small and work up.
- Fast occasionally. Intermittent is great, but longer is even better.
- Take a multivitamin.
The end goal is to replace your sweet craving with a fat craving and be ok feeling hungry for periods of time.
