Deep, Dark, Cold in China's Ghost Cities

This Chinese City’s Property Market Is Even Chillier Than Its -22-Degree Weather

 

Wall  Street Journal - China Real Time

Here in the frigid, wind-battered northeast Chinese port city of Yingkou, real-estate developer Zhang Wang is hoping that weather might be a selling point for potential apartment buyers.

Temperatures in the region plunge to -30 degrees Celsius (-22 Fahrenheit) in the winter. But in Yingkou, they bottom out at a mere -20 degrees, he says. Maybe he can get some buyers looking for a better climate.

Cities like Yingkou in China’s northeast rust belt were among the earliest cities in the country to be overbuilt. In 2005, now-Premier Li Keqiang was party secretary of Liaoning province, where Yingkou is located. He pushed a massive restructuring project to wean the region from its reliance on steel, coal and mining. 

As Mr. Li moved up the government ranks, developers counted on his endorsement as an implicit government backing of the region’s future development, developers and analysts say. Yingkou, along with other cities, sold vast tracts of lands to developers to build apartments for the workers who – they hoped –  would populate the new factories, malls and industrial parks to come.

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GOOD NEWS: FBI Targets Market Flash Front Runners

Heroes In Action

FBI investigating high-speed trading outfits


U.S. federal agents are investigating whether high-speed trading companies violate U.S. laws by using fast-moving market information not available to other traders, a FBI spokesman confirmed on Monday. 

The Silent Firm -Flash Partners

Launched by the Federal Bureau of Investigation about a year ago, the investigation called the High-Speed Trading Initiative, is still in its primary stages, a senior FBI official and an agency spokesman told The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the story.

The spokesman who spoke to the Journal said high-speed trading based on information about orders that other investors do not have access to and hence putting them at a disadvantage could violate insider-trading laws. 

Why it's time for a public hearing on the stock market

Separately, an FBI spokesman, who did not want to be identified by name, told Reuters the agency was probing high-frequency traders front-running others' trades by getting to exchanges first, among other areas. 

Never Ends?

The spokesman said a big trade, such as bank shorting a million shares of a company under investigation, could be considered a material event.

The FBI has deployed a large number of agents, looking at proprietary-trading outfits as well as fast-trading operations at brokers who buy and sell orders on behalf of clients, such as mutual funds and pension plans, the Journal said. 


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More Predict Wall Street Collapse

I've been predicting the next financial crash ever since the last one.

The Coming Financial Crisis 

Yes Indeed, Another Crash Is Coming 

By Al Lewis, The Wall Street Journal

It isn't easy flapping my wings like Chicken Little while the stock market races to new highs and economists drone on about a recovery, but history is on my side.

I have witnessed the 1980s savings-and-loan crisis, the 1987 stock-market crash, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the 1998 collapse of a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management that had to be bailed out before it took down the global economy.

Then came the 2000 dot-com bust. Then, the 2008 financial crisis and the muck our economy has been stuck in ever since.

Every crisis is different in detail, but the cause is always some variation of the same game: High rollers amass debt until they can't pay it off, and then they default, setting off a string of insolvencies that can be stopped only by putting taxpayers at risk.

Systemic fraud is exposed in every crash, but little is done about it. Big business, big government and big bankers are too often from the same self-dealing clan. The most culpable among them will claim no one could have possibly seen the big crash coming, even though plenty of warnings went unheeded.

Economists working for the looting class often compare the economy to the weather. They claim that unavoidable cycles cause crashes, as if the economy were a natural phenomenon, existing apart from humanity. But humans create economies, and humans cause financial disasters.

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