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You may have noticed that this blog has gone rather quiet while I work on my next book – sorry. The FT is going to mothball it, which seems reasonable.
So – thanks for following so far. If you’d like to keep going, here’s what to do:
Here is the
feed of all my Undercover Economist columns.
of my website,
is . The website feed contains columns but also all sorts of other writing, and if I start blogging again when the book’s finished, that’s where the blog will be.
And at the moment I’m far more , where I post links to all my writing and much else besides.
T I hope the click over to a new format isn’t too inconvenient.
Reposted from Monday.
Posted in , ,
From 8th July, 2006.
If you want to be rich, you can try to set up a brilliantly successful company. Or you can steal money. Trans-parency International, the corruption watchdog, has estimated that Mohamed Suharto embezzled up to $35bn when he was Indonesia’s president, a figure that is in the same league as the entrepreneurial fortunes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. On a humbler scale, we all face the same choice. We can try to earn money by doing something useful, or we can try to steal or extort it from other people. A society where most people are doing something useful has a good
a society full of corruption will be poor.
That is a glib enough explanation of wealth and poverty, but what causes corruption? Many economists believe that corruption is a response to perverse incentives. For example, in Indonesia it takes an average of 151 days to legally establish a small business, according to the World Bank’s “Doing Business” database. This is a large incentive to pay bribes or keep a business unregistered. It is not surprising that there is a strong correlation between red tape and corruption…
Continued at .
You may have noticed that this blog has gone rather quiet while I work on my next book – sorry. The FT is going to mothball it, which seems reasonable.
So – thanks for following so far. If you’d like to keep going, here’s what to do:
Here is the
feed of all my Undercover Economist columns.
of my website,
is . The website feed contains columns but also all sorts of other writing, and if I start blogging again when the book’s finished, that’s where the blog will be.
And at the moment I’m far more , where I post links to all my writing and much else besides.
T I hope the click over to a new format isn’t too inconvenient.
Posted in ,
I recently had the dubious pleasure of having to deal with someone who is successful and indeed popular, and yet a stubborn, selfish bully when he thinks nobody is looking. It moved me to speculate on an old question: do nice guys finish first, or last?
The remainder of the article .
Please post comments
From 15th July, 2006.
My school used to offer two varieties of food. There was canteen food, which was inedible, and there were chocolate bars from the tuck shop. For two years, I had four chocolate bars for lunch every day.
These days schools are trying to outlaw the unhealthy options, but some markets are irrepressible. William Guntrip is a 13-year-old boy whose Northamptonshire school banished vending machines and tuck shop food in favour of nutritious offerings at the canteen. Guntrip spotted a market opportunity and has been buying soft drinks and sweets and reselling them in his school playground. The school is trying to stop him and claims that most students are happy with the new regime, although if that was true then Guntrip wouldn’t be making ?50 a day.
Suppressing a market is a bit like squeezing a balloon – the trade will usually pop up somewhere else. The Soviet Union was full of markets. The factory in north Vladivostok would be allocated too much sheet metal but not enough coal. The factory in south Vladivostok had the reverse problem. Both factory managers would ask for extra resources but in the command-and-control system the incentive was to ask for more of everything, with little hope of success. So the managers would quietly, and illegally, do a deal with each other. Professional expediters would be sent out to barter for scarce inputs and the informal market reached a high level of sophistication…
Continued at .
Should the government hire people to bury banknotes down disused mine
shafts, thus stimulating the private sector to dig them up again? Keynes
argued that there were circumstances in which even government spending
as wasteful as this could be economically worthwhile, and ever since he
did, people have been tying themselves in knots about how fiscal
stimulus actually works.
The remainder of the article .
Please post comments below.
From 17th June, 2006:
It may surprise casual observers of the beautiful game to discover that one of the heroes of English football this year was a German. Jens Lehmann, the Arsenal goalkeeper, saved a last-minute penalty against the Spanish side, Villarreal, thus earning Arsenal a coveted spot in the Champions League final.
Penalties pit the goalkeeper against a lone striker in a mentally demanding contest. Once the penalty-taker strikes the ball, it takes 0.3 seconds to hit the back of the net – unless the goalkeeper can somehow get his body in the way. That is simply not enough time for the keeper to pick out the trajectory of the ball and intercept it. He must guess where the striker will shoot and move just as the ball is being struck. If Lehmann had not guessed correctly, he wouldn’t have been a hero.
Continued at .
For many years the received wisdom in economics has been much the same
as that in Buddhism: money doesn’t make you happy (see, for instance, “”, FT Weekend Magazine, August 28/29).
The remainder of the article .
Please post comments below.
From 10th June, 2006:
I am becoming a dab hand at turnip soup now that Family Harford eschews supermarket mange-tout in favour of a weekly organic box. I have to confess that I miss the marvellous mange-tout, bursting with freshness and rushed to me straight from Nairobi in a battered old 747.
The mange-tout is, sadly, now beyond the pale. My tree-hugging friends condemn the purchase of anything that has travelled what they judge to be excessively long distances – in the jargon, anything with too many “food miles”. The term echoes “air miles” and the distinct impression we get is that anything you buy outside a farmers’ market has been flown first class at terrible cost to the planet.
The truth is somewhat different. Hardly any food miles are, in fact, air miles. Just under half of them are customers driving to the shops, the rest are vans and lorries shipping food around on the roads. Air and sea miles are a rounding error &# per cent for air and 0.04 per cent for sea, according to a report on food miles commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and published in July 2005.
Continued at .
The moral case for doing more to help the very poor is unanswerable. The practical case is more problematic: much foreign aid has been spent poorly in the past and we still have plenty to learn.
The remainder of the article .
Please post comments below.
This blog is no longer updated but it remains open as an archive.
Tim, also known as the Undercover Economist, writes about the economics of everyday life.The&Economist&Blog&13
April-28 issue of “The
Economist”
Write an essay on Hong Kong
Property Market.
Analyze the current market and
predict how the market will look like at the end of 2012. Express
your own views.
REFERENCE:
Hong Kong Property Market:
Prediction for 2012
Where is the Hong Kong Property
Market heading towards the end of 2012? Though we are almost
halfway through the year, the place where the price is going to
reach ultimately is yet unclear. However, the chances are good that
the housing market will go through a slowly downward correction
before finishing the last quarter of 2012.
Status Quo
Supported by sound economic
fundamentals, prices of Hong Kong property market have gone all the
way up from the valley in 2009 to a record peak in Feb 2011, yet
followed by a turnover as of the first quarter of 2012. As the
highest level being reached in this process is parallel to the
record right before Hong Kong’s last property crash in the late
1990s, this price correction is considered, by some, as a signal
that buyers are quitting and the burst of property market bubble is
on the horizon. (See charts)
Source: The
Further consolidating this
bearish forecast is Leung Chun-ying’s winning the Hong Kong’s
leadership election in March of 2012. This self-made millionaire
property consultant vows to press down the high property price once
being the Chief Executive, and he claims to provide some 75,000
public housing and more land supply in his five-year reign to solve
the housing problem for a larger number of Hong Kongers.
But will the market listen to HK government’s command? Below is a
chart depicted by Zarathustra. who plots a 30-year history of Hong
Kong Real Estate Prices along side with major economic and
political events, as well as major government policies. (see the
Evidently, the government has,
for years, tried to curb home prices in bull market, and support
home prices in bear market, but most of the time the policies
failed. Though it might be too rush to conclude that the policies
won’t work this time as well, we do need to figure out the force of
other factors that also drive the market.
Demand vs.
Price of property in Hong Kong is
determined by both demand and supply, just as that of the majority
of other products. Thus, we need to analyze both of the two forces
of the market before making a prediction. Let’s begin with
Hong Kong is among the top tier
cities that have high living density and small living space. Every
year, people from around the world pour into Hong Kong looking for
a higher pay and better life. But the land is seriously limited. So
the Hong Kong government has been strictly controlling the supply
of it to sustain the housing market—auctions of land are held only
when the government thinks it necessary, and the parcels are
constricted as well.
And as property prices went
through the roof in 2011, the “necessary” time has come, and HK
government pledges to increase supply of land to satisfy the demand
and ease public complaint. Through zoning changes, the
redevelopment of old residential sites and land-reclamation
projects, the C.Y. Leung’s coming administration promise to make
more land available. And he also wants to increase the subsidized
public constructions. Within five years starting in 2011, the
planned public housing production will move upwards to increase a
total 75,600 units, as shown in chart below.
And in 2011, the government sold 4 million square feet of
residential floor area with record proceeds (see chart and
table)(For Chart: the 2012/13 is the accumulation of two months—
April and May of 2012).
It seems like the supply is going
to boost quickly in 2012 which will then drags down the property
price and dampen the private market as is expected by the
government. But there are more details to concern.
First, the housing incremental
will remain on book at least till the end of 2012. The building
construction usually takes 3 to 4 years to complete, so, as there’s
just 6 months ahead, the supply market won’t see the influx of the
some 75 thousand units. By the same token, the land sold in
increasingly during
needs more time to turn into realized
Second, though a number of
newly-built units will be released in 2012 which have started their
construction several years ago, quite a proportion of them are to
replace the old and run-down houses. For example, the 26 years and
over Flats are the ones that are badly in need of maintenance, but
as it’s costly to repair them and dangerous for people to live in,
the government will replace most of them by new ones. And from the
table below, we can see that flats of this category are taking a
larger proportion of total HA PRH F in 2011, the ratio was a
substantial 35%. Likewise, the supply promised by the government
for the year 2012 will be discounted.
Third, though the planned construction will increase, that figure
is still below that of the latest crash. In the 1990s, new-home
completions averaged about 23,000 a year, while for the period
between 2011/12 and 2015/16, the average is just about 15000 per
So, taking both the plus and
minus of supply into consideration, the real and effective increase
of housing supply is not as considerable as the government has
promised, and bearish force from the slight incremental of supply
may be canceled out by any expected or unexpected improve of
The demand comes from
The former mainly comes from
Hong Kongers’ buying deeds while the latter is mostly attributed to
buyers outside the region.
For average local residents, the
consumption need for housing grows steadily as family size expands
and income improves. As is shown in the following two charts, the
population growth has been below 1% in the recent decades, at the
mean time the nominal median income for domestic household moves up
about 10%—hardly higher if consider the inflation rate in this
mentioned decade.
So the reasons for property price
fluctuation should be something else. And as money flow is the de
facto driving force for price, except for the in and out amount
from local residents, we see two other major channels for
The first channel is formed by
the currency peg with US dollar. Consequent on the financial crisis
and huge budget deficit, the US Federal has kept the prime rate way
below 1% (result of Quantitative Easing I&II) to
stimulate the economy and depreciated the US dollar to alleviate
debt burden in real terms. Cash is looking for return, and HK
dollar denominated assets is deemed one of the nice choices.
Lashings of cash flowed into Hong Kong market, and the Hong Kong
Monetary Authority have to buy US dollar and sell HK dollar to keep
the exchange peg. This increased the money supply in HK and the
interest rate moved down to almost the same level as that of
US—next to zero.(see chart)
Source: Hong
Kong Monetary Authority
This ultra-low interest rate
environment has prompted inflation in Hong Kong soon after (see
chart). The inflation not only pushed up the nominal price of
property, but also arouses the demand for property as “bricks” are
generally considered a safe inflation hedge. And as US Fed has
announced in the first Federal Open Market Committee meeting in Jan
2012 that the Fed will keep the current low interest rate until
late 2014, the influence on Hong Kong property market will
certainly not end before that time point, and at the end of 2012,
the demand generated from this channel will keep
The second channel is related to
the first—the depreciation of HK dollar against CNY as Chinese Yuan
is moving on appreciation track while US dollar depreciates. The
key is the lately tight policies of Chinese government towards
mainland property market.
In order to prevent the
disastrous consequence brought by the burst of property bubble,
central government vows to crack down on invest-cum-speculate
purchase to cool down this overheated market. Mortgage loans for
the2nd, 3rd and more are strictly limited by commercial banks and
the loan-to-value ratio drops sheer if you buy more houses. But as
the domestic currency supply continue to grow with trade surplus
and deposit interest rate is hardly the level of inflation rate,
excess liquidity has to find new place to go. The appreciation of
CNY against HKD indicates some clues.
As the purchasing power of CNY
keeps improving in terms of foreign exchange rate, many Chinese
buyers crowd into HK property market, especially those expensive
private constructions. This greatly soars up the housing price, and
is somehow the fuse of Anti-mainland tension in Hong Kong of late.
The HK government has implemented some countermeasures to
discourage the wealthy Chinese—it imposed a Special Stamp
Duty& (SSD) and minimum down payments ranging from
10% and 50% imposed on foreign buyers acquiring a property priced
not lower than HK$6 million and HK$10 million,
respectively.
Though the SSD somewhat hinder a
group from buying, what can really plummet the mainland buyers
number is when macro-economy of mainland China goes south. In order
to control the inflation upward trend, the mainland is practicing a
tightening monetary supply with more interest rate hikes and
reserve requirement ratio increases, economic growth in China will
slow, and there will be a danger that the Chinese property bubble
is going to burst followed with the breakdown of banking system.
Even though it is in the Chinese government interest not to create
a recession in China, when it comes to moderating economic
activities, no government can claim to be omnipotent. And there is
a straw in the wind indicating that the mainland buyers are
starting to consider the downside possibility and some are exiting
from HK market to preserve cash in hand. The chart below shows
clearly that this turnover has already begun in the last quarter of
2011. As far as I am concerned, the concern about macro environment
in mainland will keep on, and the prudence and hesitation for
investors as well as speculators will last at least for half a year
until the end of 2012.
Thus, the aforementioned three
aspects of demand are actually moving in opposite directions—up,
horizon, down. Together with the worsening euro debt crisis and
upgrading international dispute, I consider the need of liquidity
will grow as cash in hand is safer for the majority of people, and
demand for property in Hong Kong will go down steadily.
On the balance, within 6 months,
as supply is enhancing slightly while demand is predicted to dip a
bit more, Hong Kong property market will see a smooth cool down
towards the end of 2012 and may drop more if the global environment
deteriorates further.
References:
Mid-levels they ain’t.
April 28th 2012.
Zarathustra.Hong Kong Property: My Prediction for
2011. Also Sprach Analyst. Jan 10th 2011.
Zarathustra. 30-year History of Hong Kong Property
Market in One Chart. Also Sprach Analyst. Jan
17th 2011.
Centaline Databank
Hong Kong Housing Authority
Hong Kong Monetary Authority
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