At the beginning of the twentieth century, the American economy entered the most prosperous period in history.

The first is the upgrading of the industrial revolution. The continuous progress of the automobile, telephone and electric power industries has brought about a leap in production efficiency. Secondly, World War I brought a strong demand for military equipment, food and medicine in Europe. Capitalists try their best to expand factories, attract children from rural areas to cities, and push the tide of urbanization to a peak.

▲/kloc-American auto workers in the 1920s.

In the 1920s, a powerful American middle class was formed. There are job opportunities, generous bonuses and numerous holidays everywhere. People can afford a car to play in road trip, and increasing the value of buying a house has become everyone's knowledge.

This phenomenon was also staged in Japan half a century later.

1973 after the oil crisis, Japan's economy recovered rapidly, and its energy-saving cars swept the world, especially in the American market, where GM, Ford and Chrysler were beaten to death. Household appliances, high-speed rail, video games and other industries have also benefited from the progress of new technologies and have risen rapidly. The continuous devaluation of the currency makes the export industry more competitive.

▲ Japan before the Great Depression in the 1980s.

In the mid-1980s, Japan's foreign exchange reserves exceeded US$ 400 billion, accounting for half of the world's foreign exchange reserves at that time. Japan has also replaced the United States as the world's largest creditor. Luxury Japanese people go around the world to buy, travel and buy. Of course, what they need most is a Japanese house.

Southeast Asia once had this kind of deja vu glory.

▲ In the 1980s, Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia

After Japan became rich in the 1980s, a large amount of capital went to invest in Southeast Asia. At that time, Xinmatai was like a virgin land, with low wages and simple folk customs. Toyota, Hitachi and Toshiba factories have been built in Thailand and Malaysia, and their industrialization has developed rapidly. Tropical sunny beaches and relatively perfect infrastructure also make it a very attractive tourist attraction and an old-age real estate development area.

China's golden decade is even more vivid.

During Spring Festival travel rush every year, the vast tide of migrant workers returning home and the people working in coastal areas make people feel the most spectacular migration in human history. Reform and opening-up, exchange rate depreciation, China's entry into the WTO, strength in numbers, industrial transfer in the Asia-Pacific region, power plant construction in highways, ports and airports ... are all like a deafening symphony, interwoven with the needs of urbanization and industrialization, releasing the strong enthusiasm of the newly rich generation to buy a house.

Every wave of rise is driven by real demand. In particular, the rapid increase of productivity brought by technological revolution, industrialization and industrial transfer has greatly expanded the purchasing power of the whole society, and the biggest expenditure is usually the house.

flood

1925, the British Empire resumed the pre-war gold standard, and the pound appreciated from the previous 1 to 3.4 to 1 to 4.866. As a result of this incident, American exports to Britain accelerated and European capital flowed into the United States in large quantities. The flood began to overflow.

On the other hand, during the period of 1920- 1929, the United States continuously introduced tax reduction policies in favor of the rich, coupled with the oppression of small and medium-sized enterprises by monopoly families, the wealth of the whole society was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the upper class. Most of the wealth of this group of people will not be spent on consumption, but on various investments that can increase the value of assets, such as the stock market and the housing market. Whoever appreciates quickly will be smashed.

In Japan, this phenomenon was originally a different way, but later it came to the same place wonderfully.

After the Plaza Agreement, the yen began to appreciate sharply, with an appreciation of 86% within three years. Seeing that the yen is rising day by day, Japanese enterprises that rely on exports sigh, and the caring Japanese government has quickly introduced a series of policies of "stabilizing growth and expanding domestic demand". This policy is a routine all over the world: cutting interest rates.

From 1986 to 65438+ 10 to 1987, the Bank of Japan cut interest rates five times in a row, reducing the central bank discount rate from 5% to 2.5%, which was the highest in the world at that time. When interest rates came down, the flood of money began to flood. However, this industry is still not easy to do, so in the past few years, domestic funds in Japan began to enter the stock market and real estate in large quantities, and stock prices soared everywhere, and the property market soared.

The appreciation of the yen benefited most from the new Matai region.

Because these areas adopt a fixed exchange rate system linked to the US dollar, and since 1986, the restrictions on financial access have been relaxed one after another. Therefore, the yen has been pouring in. Some people invest in factories, while others just wait for appreciation to make quick money. 1989, the amount of housing loans in Thailand was 45.9 billion baht, 1996, which exceeded 790 billion baht, an increase of 17 times.

In Malaysia, the leaders made a grand plan to enter the developed countries in 2020, and vigorously launched the big killer of fixed assets investment. By 1997, they owed up to $45.2 billion in foreign debts for these infrastructure projects, of which 30% were short-term debts.

In the first five years of golden decade, the depreciation of exchange rate and the prosperity of export will bring a lot of international capital, such as the United States, Southeast Asia and China. However, currency appreciation and export pressure do not mean that floods may disappear, because the government usually cuts interest rates countercyclically to meet the needs of steady growth, which makes the output leader of floods shift from the international market to the central bank.

This is the case in Japan, and so is China after the financial crisis. Since the beginning of this year, there have been frequent land kings in China, and the housing prices in the north, Guangzhou and Shenzhen have ranked among the top ten in the world. Nanjing, Suzhou, Hefei, Xiamen four little dragons relay one after another, and more and more real estate agents open in urban communities, which is a sign of the flood of funds.

This is like the stock market, which is originally driven by fundamentals. With the deepening of the market, the average price-earnings ratio is rising step by step. At this time, the driving force shifts from fundamental demand to excess capital liquidity.

foam

There will always be more funds flowing into investment channels with room for appreciation. But sometimes, the indulgence of the government and the financial innovation of the market further push the problem to the boiling point.

In the United States, on the one hand, government inaction, insider trading, mixed operation of investment banks and commercial banks, Morgan family and other powerful people use their resources to short and make big profits. On the other hand, a brand-new consumer credit system is implemented. The amendment to the Federal Reserve Act of 19 16 and the mcfadden Act of 1927 allow national banks to issue non-agricultural real estate loans.

This is a great financial innovation in human history. The middle-and low-income class who could not afford to buy a house can afford it, which has multiplied the market scale. The amplification effect of leverage makes this bubble bigger and bigger and more illusory.

In Japan, on the one hand, it is the reform of bank capital management system. Under this system, banks must replenish a lot of capital. However, due to the low risk weight of real estate mortgage loans, usually only half of corporate loans, which makes banks more encourage the flow of mortgage funds. According to statistics, from 1984 to 1989, the average annual growth rate of mortgage loans of Japanese banks was 19.9%, while the overall loan growth rate in the same period was only 9.2%, which was twice the overall growth rate.

On the other hand, it is the chaebol structure in Japan. Enterprises hold shares with each other, which makes one enterprise profit from the real estate or stock market, and the book assets of other holding enterprises also increase at the same time, so that they can get higher asking prices when lending to banks. This is actually a lever, constantly amplifying the wealth bubble of the whole society.

1985 The price index of commercial land in Tokyo was 120. 1, and 1988 soared to 334.2, nearly tripling in just three years. 1990, the land price index of the six major urban centers of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Yokohama and Kobe increased by about 90% compared with 1985.

In Southeast Asia, a game of "speculation in uncompleted flats" introduced from Hong Kong is as prevalent as a plague.

The so-called speculation in uncompleted flats means that a down payment was made when the house was built, and it was resold when the house was not built. Fast forward and fast out when house prices rise sharply, and the compound interest effect is very obvious. The older generation of China people should have the impression that this kind of pre-sale game was also widely popular in coastal areas in the 1990s, but it was later banned by the Ministry of Construction, which clearly stipulated that houses must be capped before they can be bought and sold.

In Southeast Asia, the hype is getting stronger and stronger. 194 The proportion of real estate loans to total loans was 33% in Singapore, 30% in Malaysia and 50% in Thailand. In the same period, the housing prices in Malaysia and Thailand have tripled in three years. By 1996, the vacancy rate of commercial office buildings in Bangkok has reached 50%.

As long as there is money to earn, capital is always changing the pattern to innovate and amplify leverage. It is an addiction similar to drug abuse, which excites the whole society and falls into a collective epilepsy and psychedelic consciousness.

In China, its variants are down payment loan and mortgage loan. The former has been blocked in the first half of the year, but the latter is like wildfire and spring breeze, blooming everywhere. Because the real estate price is high, high leverage is inevitable. What I am most afraid of is that the irrational lending of banks is out of control under the pressure of performance, and the rise in house prices-the appreciation of collateral-further promotes the rise in lending and blows the bubble to the cloud step by step.

Agniel

Blowing up a bubble may not burst immediately; Things are always changing quietly.

1922, us senator Sturm drafted a tariff bill, the purpose of which is to protect our own brand from the impact of European multinational companies. 1927, the tariff bill was pushed by Sturm again. In fact, the smoot-Hawley tariff bill was not finally passed until June 1930, but its harm was amplified more than a year ago.

The reason is that the bill raised the tariffs on more than 2,000 kinds of imported goods to the highest level in history, which attracted strong resistance from European countries. 1929, the us government received 34 formal protests from foreign countries and a large number of retaliatory tariff measures. That year, American exports fell by 50%.

The problem in Japan is that low interest rates have not improved the export competitiveness of enterprises, but encouraged more enterprises to invest resources in the stock market and property market with fast money. As a result, it is more difficult to export, forming a vicious circle, the average yield of the stock market drops, and the faucet that can continue to flow into the speculative market slowly dries up.

On the other hand, with the end of urbanization, the arrival of aging and the accumulation of huge stocks of second-hand houses, the market just needs to close quietly.

Unlike big countries like the United States and Japan, small countries in Southeast Asia can't help themselves.

The industrialization stage of Xinmatai is still in adolescence, and the demographic dividend and wage price are very competitive, but it can't help the strong tsunami caused by the take-off of Beilong. 1994, the RMB was forced to depreciate, and the exchange rate was adjusted from 5.7 to 8.6, suddenly depreciating by 50%. The direction of industrial transfer in the Asia-Pacific region has rapidly changed from south to north.

On the other hand, the fixed exchange rate linked to the US dollar also made the export industries of Southeast Asian countries lose their price competitiveness in front of China, and the yield of entity enterprises began to deteriorate step by step.

In the past twenty years, China has won great victories. However, times have changed, and the problems facing China today are equally severe.

The most alarming thing is the "post-90s trap" of the population. Compared with the 1980s, the birth rate in the 1990s dropped by nearly half, resulting in three consequences.

1, the reduction of workers and the improvement of bargaining power have triggered a wave of salary increase, rising manufacturing costs and losing export competitiveness.

2. The real estate market just needs to be reduced, and the chain effect is that heavy industries such as steel and cement are sluggish and a large amount of overcapacity is lost.

3. The wealth effect is reduced, and the faucet that can invest in the real estate market is slowly tightening.

Whether the population is aging or not, many problems are accumulated bit by bit. At first, people didn't care, just like boiling frogs in warm water, until one day, the undercurrent swept into huge waves and became a tsunami in Conan the Destroyer.

weaken

With the accelerated rise of housing prices, more and more divorced from the real demand of fundamentals, more and more people firmly believe that housing prices will go up forever, put all their wealth on it, and even borrow money to buy a house, and the crisis is approaching step by step.

At the peak of the real estate bubble, usually the whole society is discussing the house, the party is discussing it, and the media is discussing it. Even the most rational person, completely dismissive, was defeated by soaring housing prices and gave all the money down payment. People firmly believe that "if you don't buy it today, you can't buy it tomorrow"!

This is exactly the same as the public opinion atmosphere at the peak of the bull market.

What destroys all these psychological foundations must not be the cry of the wise, and fanatical gamblers can't listen to any rational voice. That needle is usually the naked reality: the money is gone.

Because the money suddenly ran out, buyers could not push the house price to continue to rise, which eventually led to the reversal of the whole market, and the speculators who saw the wrong quickly withdrew, leading to the stampede of panic society.

1929 in the first quarter, the federal reserve tightened monetary policy in an attempt to curb the atmosphere of excessive speculation. Six months later, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression came.

During the period of 1989, the Bank of Japan raised interest rates five times in a row and strictly restricted loans to real estate. A year later, the stock market crashed and house prices reversed simultaneously.

During the period of 1996, the hedge fund headed by Soros sold a lot of Thai baht. In order to stabilize the exchange rate, the Thai government was forced to absorb a large amount of foreign exchange reserves and raise interest rates to prevent it. Funds quickly withdrew, and both the stock market and the housing market collapsed.

In 2004, the United States began to raise interest rates. More than two years later, after 17 interest rate hikes, the federal interest rate was raised from 1% to 5.25%, and the low-income class finally could not afford the mortgage. Sub-prime mortgage default began, gradually brewing into another round of financial turmoil.

Throughout the previous financial crises, almost every bubble burst is closely related to "raising interest rates". Every time the interest rate rises, some money is taken away. After several times in a row, everyone suddenly found that there was not enough money.

So the bubble burst with a bang!

abyss

The real estate crash is terrible because its market value accounts for the proportion of the wealth of the whole country.

Generally speaking, due to the leverage effect of loans, the total market value of real estate is usually 2-3 times of the national GDP, accounting for about half of the total social wealth. Relatively speaking, the total market value of the stock market is usually only five to ten times that of the former, while the bond market, futures market and collectible market are even less.

More importantly, the upstream and downstream industrial chain of real estate covers a wide range, and its related investment will account for about half of the fixed investment of a country's whole society. Not only moving bricks, digging coal, shipbuilding, transporting iron ore, making furniture curtains, but even Shaxian snacks serving transport drivers along the national highway are tightly buckled by an invisible chain.

At the end of this chain, the most important link is the bank. Because the proportion of bank loans is usually the largest, once the bubble bursts, not only real estate enterprises go bankrupt, but also banks will be deeply involved because of huge bad debts. When the bank goes wrong, then everyone will be entangled in this nightmare.

1929 Great Depression, 65,438+million enterprises went bankrupt, a quarter of the country's population lost their jobs, and countless rich people and speculators became beggars. Ray kroc, the founder of McDonald's, was forced to work as a paper cup salesman at the price of 17 in order to pay his debts. Jesse Livermore, the protagonist in Memoirs of Stock Masterpieces, committed suicide by swallowing a gun. According to "Glory and Dream", President Hoover called Senator Pomerin and appointed him to preside over Fuxing Finance Company. When he received the phone call, Pomerene had only 98 cents in his pocket. On his way to be sworn in, ten beggars asked him for money.

Serious real estate crisis, stock market crisis and banking crisis eventually evolved into social crisis and military crisis, which swept the world.

In the lost decade of Japan from 65438 to 0990, the national residential land price in Japan has dropped by half, and the commercial land price has dropped by 70%, and the biggest drop is in Tokyo, where the bubble is the most serious.

The rapidly spreading crisis has put more than 65,438+080 financial institutions such as Tokyo Concord Credit Cooperative, Cosmos Credit Cooperative, hokkaido takushoku bank, Japanese Bond Credit Bank and Yi Shan Securities in trouble.

1990 in June and February, more than 4000 people were laid off in the securities industry alone/kloc-0. 1992 The number of unemployed people reached 800- 1 10,000, and the unemployment rate soared.

In the Southeast Asian financial crisis, countless families became negative assets, and Indonesia, the most serious country, was plunged into a series of turmoil such as government collapse, social unrest and genocide.

In 2009, the US subprime mortgage crisis even swept across Europe and the Arab world, causing civil wars and political crises in Tunisia, Libyan, Egyptian and Syrian countries.

Where are we going?

Looking back at history, ten crises and nine real estates usually come from the economic prosperity brought by the technological revolution and industrial transfer at the beginning, and then in the process of social wealth growth, the rigid demand for buying houses is awakened. Then, house prices began to rise, investment attributes became prominent, and more and more savvy investors entered the market.

The longer the rise, the more people firmly believe that "house prices will always rise". There are roughly two kinds of supporting statements:

1, "The government will not allow the real estate to collapse";

2. "The house price has gone up for 20 years. If it will rise for another 20 years before it collapses, then why do I care so much? "

In our life experience, we have seen too many asset prices rise and fall, commodity futures fall endlessly, and the stock market rises and falls for several rounds. Only real estate has experienced a slow bull. Therefore, people are more and more willing to put all their assets into this seemingly only safe haven, which has promoted the further skyrocketing housing prices.

The faster the house price rises, the more irrational people will be, fearing that they can no longer afford to buy a house, so they have to pay a down payment to borrow money for mortgage and be a miserable and happy homeowner. At present, the rental-to-sale ratio of house prices is getting higher and higher. Just like the stock market, the average price-earnings ratio keeps rising, and the whole society is in a frenzy.

But will house prices definitely collapse?

After reading the above descriptions of these phenomena, you will feel that China today is too similar to them, and almost every problem and symptom has appeared. Collapse can happen at any time.

If so, you haven't read enough history.

Let's read the history again and simplify it.

In Southeast Asia from 65438 to 0997, industrialization just entered adolescence. Due to losing in the resource competition with China, profits deteriorated and the crisis deepened. Coupled with Soros's attack, the national reserves dried up, leading to a shortage of liquidity and an unexpected collapse.

The United States with 1929 and Japan with 199 1 are already the most developed countries in the world. After the completion of urbanization and industrialization, the demand stagnated, and then a series of policies such as raising interest rates and taxes were superimposed, and finally the bubble burst.

What inspiration did you get?

1. For a small country, the competitive situation is complicated and the fate is not up to me. Just like small-cap stocks, fluctuations will be fierce and a crash will come soon.

For example, in Hong Kong, the real estate cycle has been repeated every ten years or so for half a century since the 1970s. After the oil crisis 1973, house prices fell by 40%; after the Sino-British negotiations 198 1, house prices plummeted by 60%; during the financial crisis 1998, they fell by 70% and then fell by 20 18.

The real estate crash is like playing house. What kind of world have you never seen?

For a big country, the competitiveness is in its own hands, and the outcome is completely different. Just like the big blue chip, it is much more stable.

Especially the world's first and second largest countries, in the process of catching up with the advanced, because of the best market size, potential and other resources and strong competitiveness, they can usually get the continuous "transformation priority".

For example, although China has many problems of one kind or another, it is undoubtedly the strongest compared with the BRICS countries with the same level of economic development, and its per capita GDP is still low compared with developed countries, so it can still enjoy the "productivity improvement dividend" brought by technology transfer.

This is a very crucial point.

This makes China still the country with the most transformation prospect and potential among all developing China countries. This ensures that China has a great chance to get out of the transition trap, and the average yield of the whole industry will not fall to negative value. So house prices, higher than house prices, have been supported, although the bubble will not burst.

In fact, our social development stage today is only1Japan in the mid-1970s. After the energy crisis of 1974, Japan also experienced a period of transformation downturn and its exchange rate depreciated. However, since then, with the success of transformation and the improvement of industrial competitiveness, corporate profits have soared, social wealth has soared, and the housing price bubble has eased and continued to rise for more than ten years.

In the current market environment, more than half of the industries are depressed, so it is impossible for the government to raise interest rates. Faced with China's $3 trillion foreign exchange reserves, no hedge fund can dare to throw a moth into the fire.

This is an important difference between China and the United States, Japan and Southeast Asia when they collapsed. It can be believed that this bubble will not burst in a few years.

For big countries, the collapse of house prices usually comes from their country reaching the peak of the world.

The United States 1929 and Japan 1990 were the most developed countries in the world at that time, with strong industrial competitiveness and seemingly invincible. But this is how crises are often conceived.

Because at this time, the improvement of social productivity will no longer be realized by "transfer", the growth rate will gradually stagnate, and it will no longer catch up with the expanding bubble, and the bubble will be blown to infinity under the action of inertia.

1929 in the United States and 1990 in Japan, the housing price bubble was actually far more exaggerated than that in China today. By comparison, we can see that in 1990 Japan, the land price of Tokyo alone is equivalent to the land price of the whole United States, while in the United States and Miami in the late 1920s, there were 25,000 real estate agents and more than 2,000 real estate companies with a population of 75,000.

Let's face it, although there is a bubble in housing prices in China, on the whole, it is obviously not as high as that in the United States and Japan. Judging from the degree of bubbles in the United States and Japan in those years, the housing price in Beishen will probably be twice as high as that in new york.

It's just so crazy and incredible, just like A shares with 6000 points, Nasdaq in 2000, and 10 yuan shares were eliminated, with a price-earnings ratio of several thousand times.

The reason why we have reached such a crazy state is because of the prosperity of big countries and the extreme expansion of confidence. The stock market, property market and almost all asset markets are rising, which makes it easier for everyone to get lost.

Only when it is extremely prosperous will it be arrogant and push the crisis to extinction, and no one can stop it. Compared with them, China's current bubble is still in the primary stage of socialism.