Comments by "HKim0072" (@HKim0072) on "China Observer" channel.

  1. Dumb question: do Chinese students not do internships? Graduated a while ago, but even I started thinking about my future in my junior year. Quit my restaurant part time job and took worst paying research position in the finance department at college. Ended up parlaying into a job with a local CFP for summer + senior year.
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  2. Costco has a team of people working hard to ensure quality and the lowest price. Don’t tell me some random people can replicate that process. Chinese people only learned the bad parts of capitalism. Brands still mean something in the US. Maybe a bit less to the newer generation.
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  3. What a disaster. All these big tech companies have killed small businesses and related jobs. And, now they are firing their own people. Quick glance: NTES has 15B in cash on the balance sheet and generates 3-4B in free cash flow a year. And, this is the difference between small businesses and publicly traded companies. Small businesses will run less efficiently and carry more jobs. These big companies will slice jobs all the time.
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  4. lol, the forced closure of Lotte back in 2017-18 saved them tons of money. They probably sold their buildings / leases near the highs and didn’t have to take losses during the pandemic.
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  5. This isn't his first rodeo. They believed their own smoke and thought all Arabs / Muslims love China.
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  6. I've been to Korea many times and there are A LOT of condo buildings. Rows and rows of identical buildings in clusters which isn't something you'd see in the US. And, you do a little digging. Many of them are built by the big chaebols while others are built by real estate development companies. The building I lived in Daegu was called, "Hyundai Hyperion". Seems a big of overdominance, but to a degree it's a safeguard in quality. The big conglomerates need to deliver good quality projects or it will hurt their brand in other areas of business. CCP China has no such safeguards.
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  7. The commercial real estate will create way more tangible problems for banks than the residential side. Ordinary Chinese citizens can’t walk away from their mortgage easily. Defaults on commercial will immediately hit the banks NPL. And if standard mark to market accounting rules apply, all these assets need to be written down on someone’s balance sheet at some point.
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  8. umm, no one is spending money though. No jobs are getting created by people going to Chengdu.
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  9. I bet Pooh Bear's family sold their properties years ago.
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  10. Don't want to give them any ideas, but they should be trading with Russia in these brand name cars.
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  11. This has been a trend in the US for years now. Not sure why it's some type of surprise. Sometimes, it's just odd that China thinks they can escape trends ie malls were dying in the US for years, but China kept expanding. Cord cutting and eyeballs on internet platforms instead of cable / terrestrial TV has been happening for 10+ years in the US.
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  12. Love it. Everyone is trying to scam each other. The scammers become the scamees. It's one big circular scamfest. Peoples Republic of Scamville.
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  13. 16:14 Dude is stuck in the old CCP economy. Only so many cars and houses people can buy in a 7-10 year period. People can go on trips 2-4 times a year. And, this is the problem with the CCP economy. Money isn't flowing.
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  14. Really? This isn't the first crackdown. They put a limit on the hours played per week a while ago (for minors).
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  15. Samsung saw the writing on the wall much earlier. They started to move their productions in the early 2010s.
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  16. I find it quite amusing that Daddy Xi decided to dump a massive amount of money into another "new" city west of Tainjin. I'm only a simpleton, but wouldn't it make sense just to build up the older city that needed investment? They are both 100km away from Beijing.
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  17. Zeihan’s analysis makes sense. This isn’t the real carrier, but the test carrier to see if they could manufacture a carrier from the ground up. The last one was to see if they could copy old Soviet designs. The next one will be the one to evaluate.
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  18. Basically, it's the multiplier effect. Its one of the first concepts you learn in Econ 101. Works both ways. $1 less in spending isn't just $1. It rips through the whole economy. You can't have 25% of your GDP down -20% or more and not fix or combat it. Real estate has been trending lower for a year now (maybe longer. Can't remember when new home sales started plummeting). Was easy just to say it was the lockdowns last year. But, really it was real estate dragging everything lower.
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  19. While I think California's fast food wage law is stupid, I think people in CCP China would be shocked to know that fast food workers make 1,150 yuan per day for an 8 hour shift.
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  20. Basically going to be a dual hit: a terrible economy and births falling off a cliff. Going to see huge hits in anything kid related in the next 5-10 years.
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  21. This is the reality when CCP China has an average income is around 12K USD. The US has huge issues with inequity, but there are a lot of random jobs that put people / families in the middle class. Walmart managers can make 130K USD with a bonus that can triple the salary. Average full time UPS person is making 100K USD now. CCP just doesn't have the same paths for the common folk.
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  22. It's a good thing their population hasn't peaked and incomes haven't stagnated. That would be a massive waste of resources.
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  23. A bit weird. You'd think they would have 100 different preset iterations of attacking Taiwan by now.
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  24. Great, you studied books for an extra 2 years and have zero work experience. Congrats!
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  25. Australia?
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  26. Welcome to the death / downward spiral. 10 years from now, HK people will wonder where are all the jobs / businesses are shut down. If you want to keep your standard of living, you have to shop in your local area.
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  27. Someone isn’t passing the info to Winnie the Pooh. I’m going to assume that someone sees the GST / VAT collection numbers and is hiding the data.
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  28. The one good thing about HK still. You can trust their data. Maybe not in 10 or 20 years. But, they still have enough entrenched bureaucrats that won't fake data.
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  29. Just look at the Saudis. Their swap line is a measly $7 billion (50B yuan) with CCP China. That's peanuts. Do you think the LIV tour players accept yuan as their cash prize? or the imported Soccer / Football players? And, the bigger issue is what do you do with the yuan? Invest in tofu dreg real estate? buy stocks on the SSE? or some CCP bonds that are yielding 200 bps lower than UST?
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  30. It’s funny how different economies are. My Dad taught middle school English for 30 years. He had 2 Master’s degrees. After retiring from teaching, he was an editor at a publishing company. Perfect job to take advantage of his skill set. His boss was decades younger.
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  31. Hard to stock up on vegetables, but you have to crazy not to keep a 2+ week supply of food if you are a resident of any area in China.
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  32. lol, the food delivery company just reported earnings. They doubled their corporate profits.
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  33. I know Lai gets a lot of attention, but the VP is someone that was made in a lab to get Pooh Bear angry. Hsiao Bi-khim (VP) was born in Japan and her Mom is Anerican. Her Dad was born in Taiwan and focused on religious studies his entire life. Was an ordained minister. Long history of working with Japan and the US. Rev. Hsiao was an ardent supporter of human rights, democracy and freedom, and a faithful participant in the ecumenical church, having first been ordained as a minister in the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan. And even her white American mother learned and spoke Taiwanese. Most recently, she was the Taiwan representative to the US.
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  34. I will re-up my prior opinion. It’s the most inefficient form of shopping. There was a reason this type of shopping was shown in the middle of the night. Just weird how society goes backwards when better methods are available.
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  35. D E F L A T I O N
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  36. It's just math. I've been doing the calculations for a year now. Real estate has been -20% for a while now. That's 25% of their GDP. -20% = -5% hit to GDP -25% = -6.2% hit to GDP -30% = -7.5% hit to GDP Then add in less exports. Less industrial jobs. Less foreign investment. Only thing that might be up is government spending. The only "positive"...is they are starting to lap bad numbers, lol. Since GDP is a year over year number, the negative change won't be as bad. Edit: oh yeah, just as a reference point, US GDP was down -2.9% in 2009. And, everything was going down the drain.
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  37.  @onebridge7231  lol, taxing land has been around for centuries. The ancient Romans had two classes of taxes: the tributa and the vectigalia. Tributa included the tributum soli (a land tax) and the tributum capitis (a poll tax).
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  38. It was always so clear cut to me when everyone is quoting that real estate was 25% of GDP and 70% of household wealth. When new home sales started to downtrend by over -20%, I was like whoa. Then, it slid like that for 2 solid years (with a reopening bump).
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  39. Exploitation / leverage of labor is terrible for a country in the long term. Always felt ABNB is a more sustainable model than UBER because it's leveraging an asset / capital rather than labor.
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  40. Saudis buying from the US was always about a defense shield. There was an implicit agreement that the US would come to the Saudis aid if someone (Iran) attacked them. Pooh Bear and the PLA will not make the same agreement even if they could expand their naval / air fleet that far.
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  41. It works in SE Asia, but it's a process that has been handed down for many many generations. Not some weird cut and paste strategy.
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  42. Total madness. No license, registration or insurance.
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  43. We all have big TVs at home. Still isn't the same for certain type of movies.
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  44. lol, Asian-Americans aren't a monolith.
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  45.  @Un1234l  Not the US. Only 40% of the "younger" population has a BA or higher. In 2021, about 41 percent of the United States population aged 25 to 34 years had attained a bachelor's degree or higher.
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  46. The problem is they were treating "real estate" like a quasi-hard asset rather than a real asset. In the US, you can model out cash flow on how much rental income you can generate from the property. The price has to be in the ballpark to get someone to buy a property. A hard asset is just the greater fool theory. Hopefully, people will keep thinking it has "magic" value, but it has very little intrinsic value.
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  47. Who would have known that Hisense, a home appliance company, may struggle if people stop buying real estate / condos? Such a hard thing to figure out these darn markets (sarcasm).
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  48. After graduating college, it took me 4+ months to find a job. A few weeks or months isn't that long. (But, it was easy to get temp work at 3x the minimum wage until I found a position that was a decent fit.)
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  49. HK is done. Taiwan is worth saving.
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  50. Total death spiral. Cut back on government spending. People have less money to spend. Governments collect even less taxes. Edit: our 2009 stimulus package was 6-7% of GDP. And, we started ugh, QE. That barely worked.
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