At the beginning of the twentieth century, the American economy entered the most prosperous period in history.
The first is the upgrading of the industrial revolution, and the continuous progress of the automobile, telephone and electric power industries has brought about a leap in production efficiency. Secondly, World War I brought strong demand for military equipment, food and medicine in Europe. Capitalists try their best to expand factories and attract children from rural areas to cities, which pushes the tide of urbanization to a peak.
▲ American auto workers in the 1920s
In the 1920s, a powerful American middle class was formed. There are job opportunities, generous bonuses and numerous holidays everywhere. People can afford to buy a car to go to go on road trip. It has become everyone's consensus to increase the value of buying a house.
This phenomenon was also staged in Japan half a century later.
1973 after the oil crisis, Japan's economy recovered rapidly, and energy-saving cars made in Japan swept the world, especially in the American market, where GM, Ford and Chrysler were beaten to death. Household appliances, high-speed rail, video games and other industries have also benefited from the progress of new technologies and have risen rapidly. The continuous devaluation of the currency makes the export industry more competitive.
▲ Japan before the Great Depression in the 1980s.
In the mid-1980s, Japan's foreign exchange reserves exceeded US$ 400 billion, accounting for half of the world's foreign exchange reserves at that time. Japan has also replaced the United States as the world's largest creditor country. Luxury Japanese people go around the world to buy, travel and buy. Of course, what they need most is a Japanese house.
Southeast Asia once had this kind of deja vu glory.
▲ In the 1980s, Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia
After Japan became rich in the 1980s, a large amount of capital went to invest in Southeast Asia. At that time, Xinmatai was like a virgin land with low wages and simple folk customs. Toyota, Hitachi and Toshiba factories have been established in Thailand and Malaysia, and industrialization has developed rapidly. Tropical sunny beaches and relatively perfect infrastructure also make it a very attractive tourist attraction and an old-age real estate development area.
Golden decade in China is more vivid.
During Spring Festival travel rush every year, a large number of migrant workers return to their hometowns and people working in coastal areas make people feel the most spectacular migration in human history. Reform and opening-up, exchange rate depreciation, China's entry into the WTO, strength in numbers, industrial transfer in the Asia-Pacific region, the construction of power plants in highways, ports and airports ... are like a deafening grand symphony, interwoven with the needs of urbanization and industrialization, releasing the strong enthusiasm of the newly rich generation to buy a house.
Every wave of rise is driven by real demand. In particular, the rapid increase in productivity brought about by technological revolution, industrialization and industrial transfer has greatly expanded the purchasing power of the whole society, and the biggest expenditure is usually the house.
flood
1925, the British Empire resumed the pre-war gold standard, and the exchange rate of the pound against the US dollar rose from the previous 1 3.4 to 1 4.866. One result of this incident was that American exports to Britain accelerated and European capital flowed into the United States in large quantities. The flood began to overflow.
On the other hand, during the period of 1920- 1929, the United States continuously introduced tax reduction policies in favor of the rich, coupled with the oppression of small and medium-sized enterprises by monopoly families, the wealth of the whole society was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the upper class. Most of the wealth of this group of people will not be spent on consumption, but on various investments that can increase the value of assets, such as the stock market and the housing market. No matter which side appreciates quickly, it will be smashed.
In Japan, this phenomenon was originally a different way, but later it came to the same place wonderfully.
After the Plaza Agreement, the yen began to appreciate sharply, with an appreciation of 86% in three years. Seeing that the yen is appreciating every day, Japanese companies that rely on exports are crying, and the caring Japanese government has quickly introduced a series of policies to "stabilize growth and expand domestic demand". This policy is a common practice all over the world: lowering interest rates.
From 1986 to 65438+ 10 and then to 1987, the Bank of Japan cut interest rates five times in a row, reducing the central bank's discount rate from 5% to 2.5%, which was the highest in the world at that time. When interest rates fell, the flood of money began to flood. However, this industry is still not easy to do, so in the past few years, Japanese domestic funds began to enter the stock market and real estate in large quantities, and the stock price soared and the property market soared everywhere.
The appreciation of the yen benefited most from the new Matai region.
Because these areas adopt a fixed exchange rate system linked to the US dollar, and at the same time, since 1986, the restrictions on financial access have been relaxed one after another. Therefore, the yen directly enters the market, some people invest in factories, and some people just wait for appreciation to make quick money. In 1989, the housing loan in Thailand was 45.9 billion baht, while in 1996, this figure exceeded 790 billion baht, an increase of 17 times.
In Malaysia, * * * has made a grand plan to enter the developed countries in 2020, and vigorously launched the big killer of fixed asset investment. By 1997, it owed as much as $45.2 billion in foreign debt for these infrastructure projects, of which 30% was short-term debt.
The depreciation of exchange rate and the vigorous development of export will attract a lot of international capital in the first five years of golden decade, such as the United States, Southeast Asia and China. However, currency appreciation and export pressure do not mean that the flood may disappear, because the government usually lowers interest rates countercyclically to meet the needs of steady growth, which makes the output leader of the flood shift from the international market to the central bank.
This is the case in Japan, and so is China after the financial crisis. Since the beginning of this year, there have been frequent land kings in China, and the housing prices in the north, Guangzhou and Shenzhen have ranked among the top ten in the world. The four little dragons in Nanjing, Suzhou, Hefei and Xiamen have been relaying one after another, and more and more real estate agents are opening in urban communities, which is a sign of the flood of funds.
This, like the stock market, was originally driven by fundamentals. With the deepening of the market, the average price-earnings ratio is rising step by step. At this point, the driving force shifts from fundamental demand to excess capital liquidity.
foam
More funds will always flow into investment channels with room for appreciation. But sometimes, the indulgence of the government and the financial innovation of the market further push the problem to the boiling point.
In the United States, on the one hand, the government's inaction, insider trading, mixed operation of investment banks and commercial banks, and the Morgan family and other powerful people use their resources to short and make high profits. On the other hand, it is to implement a brand-new consumer credit system. 19 16 amendments to the federal reserve act and 1927 mcfadden act allow state banks to issue non-agricultural real estate loans.
This is a great financial innovation in human history. The middle-and low-income class who could not afford to buy a house can afford to buy a house, which makes the market scale multiply, and the amplification effect of leverage makes this bubble bigger and bigger and more illusory.
In Japan, on the one hand, it is the reform of bank capital management system. Under this system, banks must replenish a lot of capital. However, due to the low risk weight of real estate mortgage loan, which is usually only half of that of corporate loans, banks encourage the direction of mortgage loan funds. According to statistics, from 1984 to 1989, the average annual growth rate of mortgage loans of Japanese banks was 19.9%, while the overall loan growth rate in the same period was only 9.2%, twice the overall growth rate.
On the other hand, it is the chaebol structure in Japan. Enterprises hold shares with each other, which makes one enterprise profit from real estate or stock market, and the book assets of other holding enterprises also increase at the same time, so that they can get higher asking prices when borrowing from banks. This is actually a lever, constantly amplifying the wealth bubble of the whole society.
1985 The price index of commercial land in Tokyo was 120. 1, and 1988 soared to 334.2, nearly tripling in just three years. 1990 The land price index of the six major urban centers of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Yokohama and Kobe increased by about 90% compared with 1985.
In Southeast Asia, a game of "speculation in uncompleted flats" introduced from Hong Kong is as prevalent as a plague.
The so-called speculation of uncompleted residential flats means that the down payment was paid when the house was built, and it was sold when the house was not built. Fast forward and fast out when the house price rises sharply, and the compound interest effect is very obvious. The older generation of China people should have the impression that this kind of pre-sale game was also widely popular in coastal areas in the 1990s, but it was later banned by the Ministry of Construction. The Ministry of Construction made it clear that houses must be capped before they can be bought and sold.
In Southeast Asia, the hype is getting stronger and stronger. In 1994, the proportion of real estate loans to total loans is 33% in Singapore, 30% in Malaysia and 50% in Thailand. During the same period, the housing prices in Malaysia and Thailand have tripled in three years. By 1996, the vacancy rate of commercial office buildings in Bangkok has reached 50%.
As long as there is money to earn, capital is always changing, innovating and amplifying leverage. It is an addiction similar to drug abuse, which excites the whole society and falls into collective epilepsy and psychedelic consciousness.
In China, its variants are down payment loan and mortgage loan. The former has been blocked in the first half of the year, but the latter is blooming everywhere in the spring breeze like wildfire. Due to the high price of real estate, high leverage is inevitable. What I am most afraid of is that the irrational lending of banks is out of control under the pressure of performance. Through the rise of house prices-the appreciation of collateral-further promote lending and blow the bubble to the cloud step by step.
Agniel
Blowing a big bubble may not burst immediately; Things are always changing quietly.
1922, us senator Sturm drafted a tariff bill, the purpose of which is to protect our own brand from the impact of European multinational companies. 1927, the tariff bill was pushed by Sturm again. In fact, Smoot-Hawley Tariff Law was not finally passed until June 1930, but its harm was amplified more than a year ago.
The reason is that the bill raised the tariffs on more than 2,000 kinds of imported goods to the highest level in history, which attracted strong resistance from European countries. In 1929, the US government received 34 formal protests from foreign countries and a large number of retaliatory tariff measures. That year, American exports fell by 50%.
The problem in Japan is that the low interest rate has not improved the export competitiveness of enterprises, but has encouraged more enterprises to invest resources in the stock market and property market with quick money. Therefore, it is more difficult to export, forming a vicious circle, the average yield of the stock market is declining, and the faucet that can continue to flow into the speculative market is slowly exhausted.
On the other hand, with the end of urbanization, the arrival of aging and the accumulation of huge second-hand housing stock, the door just needed by the market has quietly closed.
Unlike big countries like the United States and Japan, small countries in Southeast Asia cannot help themselves.
The industrialization stage of Xinmatai is still in adolescence, and the demographic dividend and wage price are very competitive, but it can't resist the strong tsunami brought by the take-off of Beilong. 1994, the RMB was forced to depreciate, and the exchange rate was adjusted from 5.7 to 8.6, which suddenly depreciated by 50%. The direction of industrial transfer in the Asia-Pacific region has rapidly changed from south to north.
On the other hand, the fixed exchange rate linked to the US dollar also made the export industries of Southeast Asian countries lose their price competitiveness in front of China, and the yield of entity enterprises began to deteriorate step by step.
In the past twenty years, China has won great victories. However, times have changed, and now the problems facing China are equally severe.
The most alarming thing is the "post-90 s trap" in the population. Compared with the 1980s, the birth rate in the 1990s dropped by nearly half, resulting in three consequences-
1, the reduction of workers and the improvement of bargaining power have triggered a wave of salary increase, rising manufacturing costs and losing export competitiveness.
2. The real estate market just needs to be reduced, and the chain effect is that heavy industries such as steel and cement are sluggish and a large amount of overcapacity is lost.
3. The wealth effect is reduced, and the faucet that can invest in the real estate market is slowly tightening.
No matter whether the population is aging or not, many problems are accumulated bit by bit. At first, people didn't care, just like boiling frogs in warm water, until one day, the undercurrent swept into a huge wave and turned into a tsunami in Conan the Destroyer.
weaken
With the accelerated rise of housing prices, more and more divorced from the real demand of fundamentals, more and more people firmly believe that housing prices will rise forever, put all their wealth on it, and even borrow money to buy a house, and the crisis will approach step by step.
At the peak of the real estate bubble, the whole society is usually discussing the house, the party is discussing it, and the media is discussing it. Even the most rational people, who are completely dismissive, have been defeated by soaring housing prices and put all their money as a down payment. People firmly believe that "if you don't buy it today, you can't buy it tomorrow"!
This is exactly the same as the public opinion atmosphere at the peak of the bull market.
What destroys all these psychological foundations must not be the cry of the wise, and fanatical gamblers can't listen to any rational voice. That needle is usually the naked reality: the money is gone.
Because the money suddenly ran out, the buyer could not push the house price to continue to rise, which eventually led to the reversal of the whole market and the rapid withdrawal of wrong speculators, which led to panic social trampling
1929 in the first quarter, the federal reserve tightened its monetary policy to curb excessive speculation. Six months later, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression came.
During the period of 1989, the Bank of Japan raised interest rates five times in a row and strictly restricted real estate loans. A year later, the stock market crashed and house prices reversed simultaneously.
During the period of 1996, the hedge funds headed by Soros sold a lot of Thai baht. In order to stabilize the exchange rate, the Thai government was forced to use a large amount of foreign exchange reserves to absorb it and raise interest rates to prevent it. Funds quickly withdrew, and both the stock market and the housing market collapsed.
In 2004, the United States began to raise interest rates. After more than two years, after 17 interest rate hikes, the federal interest rate was raised from 1% to 5.25%, and the low-income class finally could not afford the mortgage. Sub-prime mortgage default began, gradually brewing into another round of financial turmoil.
Throughout the previous financial crises, almost every bubble burst is closely related to "raising interest rates". Every time the interest rate rises, some money will be taken away. After several times in a row, everyone suddenly found that there was not enough money.
So the bubble burst with a bang!
abyss
The real estate crash is terrible because its market value accounts for the proportion of the wealth of the whole country.
Generally speaking, due to the leverage effect of loans, the total market value of real estate is usually 2-3 times of the national GDP, accounting for about half of the total social wealth. Relatively speaking, the total market value of the stock market is usually only five to ten times that of the former, while the bond market, futures market and collectible market are even less.
More importantly, the upstream and downstream industrial chain of real estate covers a wide range, and its related investment will account for about half of the fixed investment of a country's whole society, not only moving bricks, but also digging coal, shipbuilding and transporting iron ore, making furniture curtains, and even serving transport drivers along the national highway. Shaxian snacks are tightly buckled by an invisible chain.
At the end of this chain, the most important link is the bank. Because the proportion of bank loans is usually the largest, once the bubble bursts, not only real estate enterprises go bankrupt, but also banks will be deeply involved because of huge bad debts. When there is a problem in the bank, then everyone will be entangled in this nightmare.
In the Great Depression of 1929, 65,438+10,000 enterprises went bankrupt, a quarter of the country's population lost their jobs, and countless rich people and speculators became beggars. Ray kroc, the founder of McDonald's, was forced to work as a paper cup salesman for 17 to pay his debts. Jesse Livermore, the protagonist of Memoirs of a Stock Masterpiece, committed suicide by swallowing a gun. According to "Glory and Dream", President Hoover called Senator Pomerin and appointed him to preside over Fuxing Financial Company. When receiving the phone call, Pomerene had only 98 cents in his pocket. On his way to be sworn in, ten beggars asked him for money.
Serious real estate crisis, stock market crisis and banking crisis eventually evolved into social crisis and military crisis sweeping the world.
In the lost decade of Japan from 65438 to 0990, the national residential land price in Japan fell by half, and the commercial land price fell by 70%, and the biggest decline was in Tokyo, where the bubble was the most serious.
This rapidly spreading crisis has led to the closure of more than 65,438+080 financial institutions, such as Tokyo Concord Credit Union, Cosmos Credit Union, hokkaido takushoku bank, Japanese Bond Credit Bank and Yi Shan Securities.
From June to February, 1990 people, and more than14,000 people were laid off in the securities industry alone. 1992 The number of unemployed people reached 800- 1 10,000, and the unemployment rate soared.
In the Southeast Asian financial crisis, countless families became negative assets, while Indonesia, the most serious country, was plunged into a series of turbulence such as government collapse, social unrest and genocide.
In 2009, the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States even swept through Europe and the Arab world, causing civil wars and political crises in Tunisia, Libyan, Egyptian and Syrian countries.
Where are we going?
Looking back at history, the top ten crises and nine real estates usually come from the economic prosperity brought by the initial technological revolution and industrial transfer, and then the rigid demand for buying a house is awakened in the process of social wealth growth. Then, house prices began to rise, investment attributes became prominent, and more and more savvy investors entered the market.
The longer the rise, the more people firmly believe in the truth that "house prices will always rise". There are roughly two supporting views:
1, "The government will not allow the real estate to collapse";
2. "House prices have gone up for 20 years. If it will rise for another 20 years before it collapses, then why should I care so much? "
In our life experience, we have seen too many asset prices rise and fall, commodity futures fall, and the stock market rises and falls for several rounds. Only real estate has experienced a slow cow. Therefore, people are more and more willing to put all their assets into this seemingly only safe haven, which has promoted the further skyrocketing housing prices.
The faster the house price rises, the more irrational people will be, fearing that they can no longer afford to buy a house, so they should also pay the down payment when borrowing money and mortgage loans, and be a miserable and happy homeowner. At this stage, the rental-to-sale ratio of house prices is getting higher and higher. Just like the stock market, the average price-earnings ratio keeps rising, and the whole society is in a frenzy.
But will house prices definitely collapse?
After reading the above descriptions of these phenomena, you will feel that China today is too similar to them, and almost every problem and symptom has appeared. Collapse can happen at any time.
If so, you haven't read enough history.
Let's reread history and simplify it.
In Southeast Asia from 65438 to 0997, industrialization just entered adolescence. Due to losing in the resource competition with China, profits deteriorated and the crisis deepened. Coupled with Soros's attack, the national reserves dried up, leading to liquidity shortage and unexpected collapse.
The United States with 1929 and Japan with 199 1 are already the most developed countries in the world. After the completion of urbanization and industrialization, demand stagnated, and then a series of policies such as raising interest rates and taxes were superimposed, and finally the bubble burst.
What inspiration did you get?
1. For a small country, the competitive situation is complicated and my fate is not up to me. Just like small-cap stocks, the fluctuations will be very intense, and the crash will come soon.
For example, in Hong Kong, the real estate cycle has been repeated every ten years or so for half a century since the 1970s. 1973 After the oil crisis, house prices fell by 40%. 198 1 After the Sino-British negotiations, house prices plummeted by 60%, and then fell by 70% during the 1998 financial crisis, and fell again by 20 18.
The real estate crash is like playing house. What kind of world have you never seen?
2. For big countries, competitiveness is in their own hands, and the outcome is completely different. Just like the big blue chip, it is much more stable.
Especially for the world's first and second largest countries, in the process of catching up with the advanced, because of the optimal market size, potential and other resources and strong competitiveness, they can usually get continuous "transformation priority."
For example, although China has many problems of one kind or another, globally, China is undoubtedly the strongest compared with the BRICS countries with the same level of economic development, and compared with developed countries, China's per capita GDP is still low, so it can still enjoy the "productivity improvement dividend" brought by technology transfer.
This is a very crucial point.
This makes China still the country with the best transition prospect and potential among all developing China countries. This ensures that China has a great chance to get out of the transition trap, and the average rate of return of the whole industry will not drop to negative. As a result, housing prices higher than housing prices have been supported, although the bubble will not burst.
In fact, our social development stage today is only1Japan in the mid-1970s. After the energy crisis of 1974, Japan also experienced a period of transformation downturn and its exchange rate depreciated. However, since then, with the success of transformation and the improvement of industrial competitiveness, corporate profits and social wealth have soared, and the housing price bubble has eased and continued to rise for more than ten years.
In today's market environment, more than half of the industries are in recession, so it is impossible for the government to raise interest rates. Faced with China's $3 trillion foreign exchange reserves, no hedge fund can dare to throw a moth into the fire.
This is an important difference between China and the United States, Japan and Southeast Asia when they collapsed. From this, we can believe that this bubble will not see the possibility of bursting for several years.
For big countries, the collapse of house prices usually comes from their countries reaching the peak of the world.
The United States in 1929 and Japan in 1990 were both the most developed countries in the world at that time, with strong industrial competitiveness and seemingly invincible. But this is how crises are often conceived.
Because at this time, the improvement of social productivity will no longer be achieved through "transfer", the growth rate will gradually stagnate, and it will no longer be able to catch up with the expanding bubble, and the bubble will be blown to infinity under the action of inertia.
In the United States in 1929 and in Japan in 1990, the housing price bubble was actually far more exaggerated than in China today. By comparison, we can see that in Japan in 1990, the land price of Tokyo alone was equivalent to the land price of the whole United States, while in the United States and Miami in the late 1920s, there were 25,000 real estate agents and more than 2,000 real estate companies out of a population of 75,000.
Let's face it, although there is a bubble in housing prices in China today, on the whole, the housing prices are obviously not as high as those in the United States and Japan. Judging from the degree of bubbles in the United States and Japan in those years, the housing prices in the north, Guangzhou and Shenzhen will probably be twice as high as those in new york.
It is so crazy and incredible, just like the 6000-point A-share. In 2000, Nasdaq eliminated the stock of 10 yuan, and its P/E ratio was thousands of times.
We have reached such a crazy state because the prosperity of big countries has inflated confidence to the extreme, and the stock market, property market and almost all asset markets are rising, which makes it easier for everyone to get lost.
Only when it is extremely prosperous will it become arrogant and push the crisis to extinction, and no one can stop it. Compared with them, China's current bubble is still in the primary stage of socialism.