I think the normal cycle is actually more like 25 hours (what you get if you live in a cave and don't know what time it is outside), but certain impulses throughout the day push it into the 24 hour frame. Things like light, eating, exercise, habit for example.
I'm sorry, but does that article offer ANY evidence at all for the impact of money laundering, except for the "just so" story in the middle? ("money launderers beat up prices, and the rest of the market just runs with it" - as if people were able or willing to pay arbitrary prices).
Have you ever lived in Vancouver? It’s a strange place. Everything is expensive and you see ultra rich people everywhere, but there is little in the way of local industry to explain all this wealth. Everyone who lives there will recognise this uneasy feeling of ‘Where did all the money come from?’ For ‘normal’ people it feels like there’s this richer strata of society that exists but there is no clear path into it. Almost like royalty.
This article may offer little evidence, but it rings very true for people who live there.
I’ve been to Vancouver a number of times and yes, it has the vibe you describe.
However, money laundering isn’t the only driver of that vibe. I just got the sense it was a lot of money from Hong Kong that flooded Vancouver. So no industry was needed to support the high housing prices, it was being supported from foreign money.
But again, that’s different than laundering money.
Yes but fairly easy to use houses to launder Mony (if you have enough clean Mony). It's also not to hard to abuse houses for speculative investments and houses if well invested are lastly not prone to turn worthless if there is a big crash. So in the right areas they are a "I lose at most a bit but never all" safety investment you can also use for Mony laundering.
Very attractive for certain kind of wealthy people.
So even if a price rises for normal reasons that people tend to always mingle and drive prices even more.
My understanding is that much of the reason for parking money in these properties is to get around local (that is, their local, our foreign) tax laws and wealth regulations. If that's the case, it's not different from money laundering. "Tax avoidance" is tantamount to money laundering.
Tax avoidance is not money laundering. Not even close. TFA does a good job of describing the process, of which zero pieces fit "purchasing foreign property to avoid local taxes". Reintroduction of these funds back into the local economy after performing whatever tax avoidance tricks might qualify as money laundering.
I have not been to Vancouver, but it sounds very attractive: next to the sea and the mountains, good health care, working democracy and civilization and so on.
It does not sound implausible that housing prices are soaring.
Also perhaps a lot of government regulation that make it difficult to build more housing.
And there are other sources of money besides "money laundering" - why assume of all sources, "money laundering" is the driving force?
Like lets say newly rich Chinese people appreciate the investment in Vancouver. Is that then "money laundering"? Do they just equate "foreign investors" with "money laundering"?
I think the fact they're not allowed to take money out of China makes it laundering by definition. They're hiding illegal money from the Chinese government (once it leaves China it's illegal to hold as I understand it) and legitimising it in Canada. From Canada's perspective, it's probably not laundering depending on how it was originally earned.
> next to the sea and the mountains
Next to the US is probably another big reason but I'm not sure how much that matters with planes.
> Everything is expensive and you see ultra rich people everywhere, but there is little in the way of local industry to explain all this wealth.
Maybe the money comes from abroad, has this occurred to you?
> This article may offer little evidence, but it rings very true for people who live there.
It's a boogeyman used by politicians to have a set of "bad guys" to point to. The truth is most of those wealthy foreigners buying up Vancouver real estate are not money launderers, they're just wealthy foreigners.
Elsewhere. It can be surprising only when you look at it through an industrial, 20-century world view. Now, even middle class people are free to move and work wherever they like, so it's only natural that people who made a fortune would seek the most comfortable cities in first world countries and bring their wealth with them. Is there any specific reason to suspect that this wealth is laundered and not simply imported?
They offer an indirect source for the one explicit claim made in the article: 20% of the price increases in London due to laundering. It's not linked, and I wasn't able to find an article online, but the claim is credited to "Christoph Trautvetter of Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit"
Aside from that concrete claim, they offer a plausible explanation for why something that may make up a small proportion of sales could cause an outsized increase in prices. And they do draw comparisons to known cases in stock markets. So I think it's still an interesting article.
Yeah, the article just assumes that a) money laundering via real estate is happening, b) it is increasing prices and then c) is trying to explain the logic behind it. But the title is misleading because the never actually establishes a) and b) ... it just meanders around in c)
>Yeah, the article just assumes that a) money laundering via real estate is happening
Sort of like how people are walking into BC casinos with half a million dollars in $20 bills and authorities are being told not to ask questions? Yeah, we don't "know" there's money laundering, but reasonable people ask questions...
Oh, I'm very, very sure money laundering is happening in BC.
I'm certain money laundering via real estate is happening all over Canada; Chinese investors are buying abandoned farm land in Northern Ontario for some reason.
I'm not sure the former owners of the houses would agree. They made good money from the houses they sold to Chinese people. Is that necessarily a bad thing?
Yes, it is a bad thing. Many of those condos and homes are now empty, raising housing prices on families and making effective city planning impossible.
I'm not convinced. If Chinese investors buy properties unseen, you could build lots of cheap apartments and sell them for lots of money. Sure it would be wasteful for a while, but in the end a lot of money would have flown to Canada, and presumably at some point the madness would stop.
I'm guessing regulation is the real problem, as it is so often.
Even if foreign investors let houses sit empty, the rising prices should be an incentive to build more houses, leading to more supply of housing eventually.
Speculation is after all a bet on future demand, and useful for anticipating future demand.
Like most econ-101 reasoning, the "eventually" is doing a lot of work here.
From a policy point of view, it's easy to see why the picture is a bit trickier. Allowed to proceed unchecked, the underlying mechanism you describe will displace a pretty large fraction of the current population, especially as the offshore money fundamentally doesn't bring in much local economic activity after the new construction. These are the people you represent as a government, not the putative future immigrants and speculators.
"Surely it would be wasteful for a while" here represents a multigenerational disruption to a large fraction of your voting public, the majority of whom will see little or no benefit from the incoming money, and the overwhelming majority of whom will see negative impacts.
Why would it displace people, if you build cheap houses to sell to Chinese Investors?
That an influx of money doesn't benefit the economy would also be interesting for most Western governments. "Stimulus" by monetary means seems to be a very popular approach currently. (I don't know, but it seems debatable).
I also don't think prices are going up only because of Chinese investor. I also live in a city with the problem of steeply rising prices (Berlin, Germany), but the fact is simply, it is a very popular city with many people wanting to live here.
There is a lot of research on this you can follow up on but short story on your first two points is a) a combination of old stock sales and rezoning is pricing existing residents out of neighborhoods, and b) the money isn't effective as stimulus, it's "parked". Besides the fact that "trickle down" theory has proven a failure at this point, there is no local value to a non-resident whose economic activity is done elsewhere not living in housing that is also not rented.
I think your last point is clearly true also, but the balance isn't obvious.
Research in that area is unfortunately very politically loaded. I don't think simply claiming "there is a lot of research" in such a politically disputed subject is sufficient.
As for b), if a Chinese investor buys some house from a Canadian, why is the money parked?
Trickle down or not, it seems in general if you can sell something (in this case houses to Chinese people), it is good.
If you build houses to sell to Chinese people, you also employ people from the building industry, for example. I'm not convinced that "trickle down theory" is the correct theory to apply there.
Special issues presumably arises with land and housing as a good - you shouldn't simply sell all your land to some foreign powers, presumably. Still, in general it holds.
If you worry about land area, you could build a huge skyscraper in a corner of the town that doesn't disturb too many people, and sell the flats to Chinese investors. Very little land use, huge margins.
Even if imperceptible slow (to our human senses), there would eventually a point of "ice free in October". A simple report about that event doesn't tell me anything about the rate.
One datapoint out of the norm would be explainable via noise, which is why the article is not about a single datapoint but the trend of all the recent datapoints being far below the norm. You're dismissing the article as a "simple report of an ice free october" when that's not what the article is.
It would not normally just be imperceptible slow to our human senses, it would normally be imperceptibly below the noise floor over our entire lifetimes.
First of all I criticize the alarmist headline. As for the article, I know see data goes only back 41 years. Is that even a meaningful geological timeframe?
Also there often seems to be the assumption that every year should be like average. In fact, average implies that some years should be below and some above.
Not saying there is nothing going on, but I don't automatically believe we are all going to die just from that article. (We as in mankind, every individual will of course die, unless there is a major scientific breakthrough).
I find it absolutely incredible the mental gymnastics you're performing to conclude that your "common sense" take is a more accurate representation of reality than what these scientists are telling us.
> but I don't automatically believe we are all going to die just from that article.
Nowhere in the article does it say that. Nothing about this article is alarmist.
The simple truth is you've already made up your mind about climate change in general, and now you're just looking for tiny crumbs of evidence that researchers are slipping up somewhere, and criticizing anything that doesn't fit your notion of how this should play out.
I guess you could describe all science as "mental gymnastics". And all we humans have is common sense.
"The simple truth is you've already made up your mind about climate change in general, and now you're just looking for tiny crumbs of evidence that researchers are slipping up somewhere, and criticizing anything that doesn't fit your notion of how this should play out. "
That exact line could be handed back to yourself, except that you are sucking up all evidence that confirms your point of view.
So you are taking the contents of the article at face value, but somehow I am the silly person doing mental gymnastics?
Common sense is essentially how people think. Scientists are also people. If claims don't add up or data is missing to support a claim, common sense can be used to spot it.
You are thinking in Quantum Mechanics? Or scientists do, as opposed to normal people? Because scientists are somehow "superhuman"?
"how much evidence there is in the "there is no climate change" side?"
Why are you bringing up "there is no climate change"? Nobody made such a claim. But even if there is climate change, not every article has to be taken at face value, and not every theory on how it comes about has to be automatically considered true.
I haven't really seen Quantum Mechanics applied to climate science, though. Maybe it exists, but it doesn't seem to feature high in the public discourse. So I guess it is all bunk, because it is not Quantum Mechanics?
A lot of things that used to be imperceptible are now perceptible thanks to precise measurements and systematic, complete and reliable written records. For example, an average change in temperatures of 1 degree over one century used to be imperceptible, now it's not.
But doesn't arctic ice all be floating in sea water mean it has no effect on sea levels? Why "there is no going back"? Since it has been ice free in the past and then ice came back, why shouldn't it happen again?
Salt water is denser than fresh water. The displacement of the Arctic ice is less than the displacement of the water contained in that ice when it melts. So the sea levels will rise. Though, that's not the only problem...
Think of the Arctic as exactly what it is, a giant ice cube, keeping your drink (or, you know, the world) cool. The smaller the ice cube gets, the smaller its effect on keeping your drink cool. When it's gone, your drink quickly goes to room temperature. It's highly unlikely that we can survive like we currently do without the Arctic. Sure, the ice might come back in 10 000 years or so, not particularly useful to us in the short term though, is it?
And the problem isn't that the Earth goes through natural cycles of cooling and warming, it's that our actions are accelerating the warming of the Earth, meaning we've got even less time to figure out how we as a species would survive the natural heating of the Earth.
Thermal expansion of the oceans will contribute significantly to sea level rise. That is, until that is dwarfed by Greenland melting, followed by Antarctica.
