For example, in China, the National Bureau of Statistics explained that buying a house is an investment, not a consumption, when answering why CPI does not include house prices. Since investment is not consumption, of course, it cannot be included in CPI. Otherwise, from 2000 to 2022, our inflation will not increase by 3-5 percentage points on average every year!
When the government controlled housing prices, it initially said that houses were used for living, not for speculation, and later upgraded to create a new term called "living without speculation". Buying stocks belongs to investment, so it is called stock trading, and buying and selling futures is called investment, so it is called speculation. Houses can't be speculated, and there is a jargon in the industry called removing the financial attributes of houses. The final conclusion is consumption, not investment.
But for banks, houses are regarded as the best quality collateral by banks. In bank mortgage loans, more than half of the collateral is a house, which is more than other collateral combined. Can be juxtaposed with machinery and equipment, raw materials, products, patents, securities and other investment products, and the house as the first collateral, of course, has always been an investment product.
For the rich, having more houses is definitely an investment. For example, Lin Pingjun in Fang Jie has an apartment of 1 200, and often sighs: "It's really tiring to get up early to collect rent!" ! This house sister has 9 buildings, and the monthly rent is 6.5438+0.6 million yuan; For example, Xu Changyuan, a former deputy municipal official in Dalian, actually mastered 27 14 properties, with assets of tens of billions and family annual income exceeding 500 million; For example, summing up the "67 steps of full-time real estate speculation", China was the first person to make real estate speculation in Europe. As early as 2009, he owned 20 Shanghai properties, and the return on book assets has reached 1 100 million. For these people, the house must be a pure investment.
But for the poor, for ordinary people at the bottom of the country with a monthly income of only 1000 yuan, you are an old, broken and narrow house, and you can't understand the rise and fall of house prices, so you can only live in it. If a mortgage with big dreams and courage loses money in business, there may be no place to live. For them, the house must be a consumer product.
Is the house an investment or a consumer product? Is the house a consumer property or a financial property?
From an economic point of view, all consumer goods actually have the property of investment at the same time, and you can't completely distinguish them. For example, if you buy Maotai, it is a consumer product. You bought a collection, which is an investment. For example, rice is a consumer product when you buy it, and it is processed or resold when you buy it. It has become an investment product.
For example, if you read articles from the media platform, that is pure cultural consumption. But some people read the copy and paste or switch to their own accounts to do traffic, and he is an investment. You see, my articles are often copied, and many of them are copied verbatim. He gets more traffic and reading than I do. There is no such low-cost and low-risk investment product in the world!
To sum up, there is nothing black and white in the world, and there is no right or wrong. When we look at the problem, we must avoid looking at the leopard in the tube and the blind touch the elephant. We must think and compare from different angles, and then analyze and judge.