Original headline says “(foolishly)” but that’s too cringe to put in the title lol
Apparently forcing the owners to pay for the debt and liquidating the company when they can’t instead of bailing them out like capitalist countries do is “foolish” because it prioritizes regular people over capitalists (who could’ve guessed Xi would do that :0)
And the way I read it, if the government buys the properties, that means the people who previously owned them would get paid off. They would be made whole. The author goes on to suggest an alternative that would have let the scheme continue and gradually wind down in order to not cause people to lose their shirts, but fails to realize that buying their properties (at a fair value) achieves the same result but quicker, and likely more efficiently. The one thing that I think makes sense is that the CPC really sat on their hands for too long with this one. BTW, they could have created a national pension system in exchange for blowing up this bubble, which would have probably worked better than a buyout but Xi doesn’t believe in welfare so…
use government funds to buy up bankrupt properties so that in time the government’s role in real estate would rise from 5% of the market at present to 30%. Such an act would surely take the nation back to its communist roots if not quite the days of Mao Zedong.
I’m trying to imagine the innards of the person’s head who came up with this. Am failing. Just the sheer ignorance that this is the model behind affordable housing in western capitalist countries is mind boggling.
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