Real estate

Saturday

Lionel Shriver

If you think your bills are bad now, just wait

Forgive the doom-mongering, but the US, and especially the UK, may be dangerously on course for a sovereign debt crisis. Yet debt and deficits play a surprisingly minimal role in our countries’ politics. Overspending on borrowed money hardly featured in either nation’s elections of 2024. A Labour MP hoping for Andy Burnham to challenge Keir Starmer for her party’s leadership recently told Times Radio that investors would see the UK as “the best place to be” if only the government pursued “progressive policies that do speak to our communities.” She added darkly, “The markets will have to get into line” – which was like brandishing a saber at the heavens and threatening that the weather “will have to get into line”... or else!

debt bills

Tuesday

Peter Watson

Palm Beach is stuck in a gridlock

Palm Beach is never happier than when it’s making news – the more unexpected the better. The latest opportunity to pat itself on the back came in the wake of Palm Beach resident Donald J. Trump’s “silly” wheeze (according to the local paper) to make Canada the 51st state. Whereas overall, as a result of President Trump’s speculations, visits to America by Canadians dropped by 2 percent in February – with a whopping 70 percent decline in bookings in March – reservations on flights from north of the 49th parallel to Palm Beach International Airport actually rose by 15 percent. The place remains popular, even for Canadians.

Palm Beach

Saturday

Joseph Moreno

The ruling against Trump is perverse in true New York fashion 

While Donald Trump’s excessive rhetoric often evokes eye rolls, in the case of Friday’s record-setting $350 million judgment against the Trump Organization, he is spot on. “Disgraceful.” “Lawfare.” “Banana republic.” All three apply.  It’s hard to imagine a more perverse and vindictive misuse of the justice system than that which New York attorney general Letitia James has committed. While campaigning in 2018, James promised to vigorously investigate Trump and his business. True to her word, once in the office James spent three years seizing and scouring through Trump’s tax and financial records for anything she could use as the basis for legal action.

ruling trump

Wednesday

Peter Van Buren

The ‘jail Trump’ mania reaches its sad end

New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, three of his adult children, and other senior members of the Trump Organization on Wednesday. Her suit alleges business and insurance fraud as well as conspiracy for the same, and marks the end of a three-year investigation into Trump and his business. The civil suit is basically a civil version of the criminal indictments the Southern District of New York (SDNY) and the Manhattan and New York State attorneys general have failed to generate at the federal and state levels.

blogger

Sunday

Lewis M. Andrews

Universal school choice would transform real estate

A new Arizona law which funds all the state’s K-12th grade children to attend a school of their family’s choosing, public or private, has been widely hailed as a landmark education reform, although evidence suggests the benefits will go far beyond academics. Studies by the Manhattan Institute, New Jersey’s E3, and Connecticut’s Yankee Institute all show that subsidizing students to use alternative placements would save any state millions each year. But perhaps the most unexpected promise of universal school choice is the impact it would have on area real estate markets, simultaneously lowering the cost of what families must pay for a desirable home, improving the value of distressed areas, and equalizing the quality of life between rich and poor communities.

Tuesday

Helen Raleigh

China delayed its 2008 financial crisis until 2022

The year 2008 was consequential by many measures. The collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers sparked a worldwide financial crisis. Yet China appeared to emerge out of it relatively unscratched after Beijing introduced a massive stimulus package in the world, about three times the size of the United States government's rescue program. Thanks to this expansionary fiscal policy and the easy credit that came with it, the Chinese economy quickly returned to its robust growth by growing 8.7 percent in 2009 and 10.4 percent in 2010. After 2008, the Chinese Communist Party leaders concluded that China "escaped" the financial crisis because of its outstanding leadership and the superiority of the Chinese political system over deeply flawed western democracies.

Friday

John Steele Gordon

The next real estate crisis could come from China

Debt is as much a part of the real estate business as bricks and mortar. And as the great New York builder William Zeckendorf once famously remarked, 'it’s better to be alive at 20 percent than dead at the prime rate.' But the Evergrande Group, the second largest real estate company in China, has taken corporate debt to new heights, with liabilities of a staggering $310 billion, to finance its breakneck growth. In 2010, it had revenues of $7.3 billion and assets totaling $16.7 billion. In 2020, the figures were $81 billion and $368 billion. To be sure, it is a huge company, with 1,300 projects in more than 240 cities in China and 200,000 employees. This year alone, it began 77 new projects.

evergrande