Why China's Economy is Finally Slowing Down

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Writing by Sam Denby and Tristan Purdy
Editing by Alexander Williard
Animation led by Max Moser
Sound by Graham Haerther
Thumbnail by Simon Buckmaster

References

[zukaro]

Reminds me of Canada's housing and innovation situation. The money gets tied up in low risk real estate instead of risky innovations, and thus Canada becomes a technological laggard and slowly falls behind the rest of the world.

[jimsackmanbusinesscoaching]

The other part of this that is missed is that local governments were funding themselves via land sales. They can't sell land if the real estate market is in trouble. Worse still they put this money towards GDP growth which many times consisted of infrastructure projects that are not delivering. This has piled up debt for local governments in an uncontrolled way.

[Keenath]

Any situation where the only people buying homes are people who already own multiple homes is already broken, it's just a question of when that actually hits the companies where it hurts.

[Default]

As I used to explain to people, these property developments were basically giant concrete bitcoins sold to Chinese investors who didn't see any better options for preserving and growing their wealth.

[jdatlas]

Wait are you muscling in on PolyMatter's territory? :p

[elRandomTk]

This is a sincere suggestion, I paused at 10:00 when you were going to talk about the 'how' but not explained the true 'why' the Cjinese people were buying so much houses. As an investment yes, but the deep reason is that China has not developed other ways to invest, for middle and high class. A wealthy Chinese can't invest in the financial market for example, thus housing market became the way to do it. Just an addition, I'm a big fan of the channel, even this video's production value is top notch :D

[_Zekken]

This is happening in New Zealand as well, at a smaller scale. Housing is being all bought up by investors or people looking to make money at an increasingly large rate. The value has balooned far outside the actual utility value of the proporty. This is compounded by many extra cases of chinese buyers of course who were buying our property up the same way the video said they bought theres, from overseas, and leaving them empty up until the govt banned overseas buyers in 2017. But those already bought houses are still there, and still empty.

The bubble is going to burst at some point, and its gonna be a shitshow

[Synergy]

Those graphs were beautiful and extremely easy to understand. I just had to say that.

[kyriakoskrommydas]

to be fair, the average salary in China can not be easily compared with other countries since there is a major gap between the rural and urban areas.. that gap is not that much profound in most other countries..

[troyarrington]

13 years to fully buy a house in NYC? That sounds a little low…

[alasdaresineaeris]

The real estate investment craze was real. The Chinese were known to buy up and hoard apartments in Hong Kong where demand for housing is always strong with supply being limited due to land issues, causing the already insane real estate prices to go up even further and exacerbating the problem. A lot of these apartments weren't inhabited and everybody knew they're for investment. Adults learned of it first-hand and teenagers studied it and the related politics at school as housing is still one of the most pressing social issues in Hong Kong.

[jacquesmassard]

Evergrande opened a EV company cause china would pay the companies for each EV even if they didn't sell the car to anyone. that's why you find videos or tons of fields of EVs in china that nobody is buying.

[JohnSmith-rwyn]

3:30 this can be said of a lot of the world, here in the UK you can have a company own the frehoold of several 100 acres, they then sell the leasehold to a housing developer, who, once built, can lease it out to a management company, but also lease on 100 years more/or less individual plots to the public. In London you can often go 3 or 4 leases before you get through the entire chain.

[matheusp]

I love the videos but starting to find the background music distracting.

It’s not the first time I’ve noticed that, but this time was the worse. It should not be nearly as loud as Sam’s voice

[charlocharlie]

The crunchy and distorted background music is mega annoying in this one. Go easy on the normalization plugin.

[TheStretch]

If possible, please address the music audio issues in videos. I've been noticing with newer videos that it's becoming louder than it was originally and that the quality of the music is also really bad. It has distortions and clipping making it more noticeable to the point it's becoming distracting from the topic being presented.

[UltraStyle-AI]

I love your channel, you do a great job explaining things.

[Dr_Larken]

2:51 I made it this far in the entire two minutes and 51 seconds I was waiting for the phrase “Now, it’s time to learn how money works”!
I’m pretty sure because of the voice!

[evandpeng]

just fyi, multiple video clips (both archival and modern) you use in this video are of hong kong and not mainland china

[darktitan]

Thanks for showing all the info with the least bs, no clickbait, no shouting random pieces of info on the screen so as to force the viewer to take your words without trying to question you; while still making the video really engaging. This is why your channel is worth following.