In the Fox Business interview, Frank also was critical of public policy that promoted homeownership at any cost. He also said the federal government should not be a "backstop" in guaranteeing mortgages.
"There were people in this society who for economic and, frankly, social reasons can't and shouldn't be homeowners," Frank said. "I think we should, particularly, stop this assumption that you put everybody into homeownership."
No to raising state taxes. No to borrowing to close historic budget deficits. Yes to capping state spending. Yes to capping local property tax hikes. Yes to freezing the salaries of state workers. Yes to trimming "benefits and pensions that are out of line with economic reality." Yes to charter schools. Yes to slashing by 20% a state government that has, by XXXXXXX's count, 1,000 agencies. Yes to nonpartisan redistricting and full financial disclosure.
Compared with the week ended April 11, the average transaction price of commercial residential properties in Beijing plunged 31.43 percent or 7,744 yuan per square meter.
So, essentially its speculators and rich people who will take losses on their investments. Since you need a 20% or more down payment for a mortgage in China and many people actually buy in cash, the real estate bust will simply result in some rich people losing some value on their house.
Plus, we know Chinese folks and houses...they never sell or even rent half the time. They will quietly just take the loss and raise mosquitoes..."yang wen-tz"
Any bank that got in trouble in China would just get bailed out by the central government (sound familiar?) I doubt Citibank is exposed to this sort of stuff.. probably not allowed to lend to locals.
Oh, and China just had a 33% increase in tax revenues, so they could actually afford to bail someone out without printing money.
If the Yuan devalues somehow, I am going to be pissed though. I had some second thoughts on my last trip when I made another bank deposit in Yuan...
"What Europe needs is a growth pact because without growth, public finances aren't going to be sustainable," Tilford said. "The bond markets are going to be forcing them to make those kind of changes."
Even EU president Van Rompuy warned that the bloc risks irrelevance and the end of its expensive welfare programs if it can't speed up economic growth, forecast to expand by just 1 percent this year.
"With 1 percent growth we can't finance our social model any more. With 1 percent structural growth we can't play a role in the world," he told the World Economic Forum in Brussels. "We need to double the economic growth potential that we now have."
White House officials hope Wednesday's announcement will attract support from Republicans, who adopted a chant of "Drill, baby, drill" during 2008's presidential campaign.Put this with the Afghan surge and I see some stuff I like.
It will be Samson's first plant outside China. The company says it can fill some of its product needs at a lower expense in Bangladesh.
The 500,000-square-foot plant will be in the port city of Chittagong in southeast Bangladesh, along the northern coast of the Bay of Bengal. Company officials have been working on the project for about two years. Construction began in October and initial production is set for July.
The plant will produce a line of lower-medium to medium-priced solid and veneer casual dining sets for Samson's U.S. marketing companies, Legacy Classic and Lacquer Craft USA. The company isn't currently producing such sets in China that hit the price points it can achieve in Bangladesh, said Lacquer Craft President Mohamad Amini.
While China remains its main manufacturing hub, the company said it chose Bangladesh because of its lower-cost labor. Amini estimated that labor costs are about 40% of what they are in China.
Of course, they are bringing over Chinese managers and technicians to start the plant up, but that's not new as they did that when they moved to China, too. Laquercraft was one of the first Taiwanese factories to move to China to take advantage of lower labor costs there.
Since furniture is a relatively new industry to Bangladesh, it will take time to train workers and also to get the supply chain in place, Amini said. This includes anything from finish to hardware suppliers.
"There is no furniture presence there," he said, adding that the lack of a furniture infrastructure reminds him of China 15 years ago. "Although we are very optimistic about what we can do there, we will have our share of challenges. But we have done this in China so we know what to do to accomplish our task."
Amini said a team of supervisors, technicians and engineers from China will help get the plant running and train workers.
Prediction: In 20 years, it will be Bangladeshi supervisors, technicians and engineers flying into Somalia to set up the next factory.
In the video, the man driving the car is Gregg Bergersen. He's a civilian analyst at the Pentagon with one of the nation's highest security clearances. His companion is Tai Shen Kuo, a spy for the People's Republic of China.
Kuo was born in Taiwan, but he's a naturalized American citizen who owns a number of businesses in Louisiana; Bergersen worked at the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency which manages weapons sales to U.S. allies.
Bergersen knew a secret the Chinese desperately wanted to know: what kind of weapons America was planning to sell to Taiwan, the rebellious Chinese island that mainland China wants to reclaim.
One thing that frequently happens in China is that factory owners will bid extremely low — even to the point where they have no profit — just to win an order. Once they've got the business, they search for ways to cut corners so they can widen their profit margin and recover what they lost with their lowball bid. They might switch to cheaper lead paint or buy inexpensive metal containing cadmium. This is called "quality fade."
To avoid misunderstandings and deviations, many buyers will create an elaborate "bill of materials" — a document that specifies what kind of materials must be used in the product. A furniture maker might specify the type of foam used in a chair's padding and what size nail will be used. The more experienced buyers will create an elaborate, highly technical bill of materials that is signed by both sides.
But the document doesn't have much teeth if buyers don't hire their own quality control staff to supervise the making of their products. Factories are notorious for making subtle, cost-saving changes to the product.
All of this is doubtless useful to the interests of Tata back in India, which is heavily involved not just in bio-energy, renewables and insurance but also in ‘carbon trading’, the worldwide market in buying and selling the right to emit CO2. Much of this is administered at a profit by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which the Copenhagen treaty was designed to replace with an even more lucrative successor.
Under the CDM, firms and consumers in the developed world pay for the right to exceed their ‘carbon limits’ by buying certificates from those firms in countries such as India and China which rack up ‘carbon credits’ for every renewable energy source they develop – or by showing that they have in some way reduced their own ‘carbon emissions’.
It is one of these deals, reported in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, which is enabling Tata to transfer three million tonnes of steel production from its Corus plant in Redcar to a new plant in Orissa, thus gaining a potential £1.2 billion in ‘carbon credits’ (and putting 1,700 people on Teesside out of work).
(from this story)
-----
So, large corporations can reap even larger profits by moving any production from developed countries to India or China just for the carbon credits they can sell.
And how does this help reduce carbon emissions? Why, it does not reduce them at all.
Its simply a weird re-distributive quota system, that pays corporations to move production overseas.
-----
Pervese result from this will be Chinese and Indian multinationals gobbling up any remaining US and European industries that can be moved overseas. The selling price now has a nice Carbon Discount attached.
(Why not a carbon consumption tax that is leveled across the board - imports subject just as much as domestic production. Then the incentive is to truly reduce carbon emissions, rather than game the system.)
