How Justin Trudeau went from liberal darling to possibly endangered species
By Salena Zito
When Trudeau called the elections in August, polls were in his favor, with both liberal and conservative voters supporting his vaccination mandates for federal public servants and rules requiring proof of vaccination to fly, take trains or enter indoor spaces. Currently, Canada has the highest vaccination rate — of single and double doses — anywhere in the world. Eighty-two percent of the eligible population aged 12 and up have received at least one dose and 70.3 percent are fully vaccinated.
If Trudeau loses, it will be because he failed to give voters a good reason to go to the polls after they were told for more than a year not to venture out in public, Lebo said.
“The day he announced the snap election, he was looking great in the polls,” Matt Lebo said. “That all changed within days of announcing he was calling an election.”
In short, voters perceive the move as an exercise in vanity and power.
Click here for the full story.
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The Afghanistization of America
By Victor Davis Hanson
We are doing our best to become a Third-World country of incompetency, constitutional erosion, a fractious and politicized military elite, and racially and ethnically obsessed warring tribes.
The United States should be at its pinnacle of strength. It still produces more goods and services than any other nation—China included, which has a population over four times as large. Its fuel and food industries are globally preeminent, as are its graduate science, computer, engineering, medical, and technology university programs. Its constitution is the oldest of current free nations. And the U.S. military is by far the best funded in the world. And yet something has gone terribly wrong within America, from the southern border to Afghanistan.
The inexplicable in Afghanistan—surrendering Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night, abandoning tens of billions of dollars of military equipment to the Taliban, and forsaking both trapped Americans and loyalist Afghans—has now become the new Biden model of inattention and incompetence.
Or to put it another way, when we seek to implant our culture abroad, do we instead come to emulate what we are trying to change?
COVID Chaos
Take COVID-19. Joe Biden in 2020 (along with Kamala Harris) trashed Trump’s impending Operation Warp Speed vaccinations. Then, after inauguration, Biden falsely claimed no one had been vaccinated until his ascension (in fact, 1million a day were being vaccinated before he assumed office). Then again, Biden claimed ad nauseam that he didn’t believe in mandates to force the new and largely experimental vaccinations on the public. Then, once more, he promised that they were so effective and so many Americans had received vaccines that by July 4 the country would return to a virtual pre-COVID normality.
Then came the delta variant and his self-created disaster in Afghanistan.
To divert his attention away from the Afghan morass, Biden weirdly focused on an equally confused new presidential COVID-19 mandate, seeking to subject federal employees, soldiers, and employees of larger firms to mandatory vaccinations—right as the contagious delta variant seemed to be slowly tapering off, given the millions who have either been vaxxed, have developed natural immunity, or both.
Consider other paradoxes. American citizens must be vaccinated, but not the forecasted 2 million noncitizens expected to cross the southern border illegally into the United States over the current fiscal year. Soldiers who bravely helped more than 100,000 Afghan refugees escape must be vaccinated, but not the unvetted foreign nationals from a premodern country?
Scientists now are convinced naturally acquired COVID-19 immunity from a previous infection likely provides longer and better protection than does any of the current vaccinations.
Yet those who suffered COVID-19, and now have antibodies and other natural defenses, must likewise be vaccinated. That anomaly raises the obvious logical absurdities: will those with vaccinations—in reciprocal fashion—be forced to be exposed to the virus to obtain additional and superior natural immunity, given the Biden logic of the need for both acquired and vaccinated immunity?
Tribal Lands
We have Afghanistanized the border as well, turning the United States into a pre-state whose badlands borders are absolutely porous and fluid. There is no audit of newcomers, no vaccinations required, no COVID-19 tests—none of the requirements that millions of citizens must meet either entering the United States or working at their jobs. Our Bagram abandonment is matched by abruptly abandoning the border wall in mid-course.
Yet where the barrier exists, there is some order; where Joe Biden abandoned the wall, there is a veritable stampede of illegal migration.
Coups, Juntas and Such
Third-World countries suffer military coups when unelected top brass and caudillos often insidiously take control of the country’s governance in slow-motion fashion. The latest Bob Woodward “I heard,” “they say,” and “sources reveal” mythography now claims that General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, discussed separating an elected commander-in-chief from control of the military. Woodward and co-author Robert Costa also assert that Milley promised his Chinese Communist military counterpart that he would tip off the People’s Liberation Army of any planned U.S. aggressive action—an odd paranoia when Donald Trump, of the last five presidents, has proved the most reluctant to send U.S. troops into harm’s way.
If that bizarre assertion is true, Milley himself might have essentially risked starting a war by eroding U.S. deterrence in apprising an enemy of perceived internal instability inside the executive branch, and the lack of a unified command. (So, Woodward wrote: “‘General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable, and everything is going to be okay,’ Milley said. ‘We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.’ Milley then added, ‘If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.’”)
More germanely, when Milley called in senior officers and laid down his own operational directives concerning nuclear weapons, he was clearly violating the law as established and strengthened in 1947, 1953, and 1986 that clearly states the Joint Chiefs are advisors to the president and are not in the chain of command and are to be bypassed, at least operationally, by the president.
The commander in chief sets policy. And if it requires the use of force, he directs the secretary of defense to relay presidential orders to the relevant theater commanders. Milley had no authority to discuss changing nuclear procedures, much less to convey a smear to an enemy that his commander in chief was non compos mentis.
Milley has been reduced to a caricature of a caricature right out of “Dr. Strangelove”—and is himself a danger to national security. After Milley’s summer 2020 virtue-signaling “apology” for alleged presidential photo-op misbehavior (found to be completely false by the interior department’s inspector general); after leaked news reports that Milley considered resignation (promises, promises) to signal his anger at Trump in summer 2020; after his dismissal of the 120 days of rioting, 28 deaths, 14,000 arrests, and $2 billion in damage as mere “penny packet protests”; after his “white rage” blathering before Congress; after the collapse of the U.S. military command in Kabul; and after his premature and hasty assessment of a U.S. drone strike that killed 10 innocent civilians as “righteous,” Woodward’s sensationalism may not sound as impossible as his usual fare.
Milley should either deny the Woodward charges and demand a real apology or resign immediately. He has violated the law governing the chain of command, misused his office of chairman of the Joint Chiefs, politicized the military, proved inept in his military judgment and advice, and may well have committed a felony in revealing to a hostile military leader that the United States was, in his opinion, in a crisis mode.
Yet, Milley did not act in isolation. Where did this low-bar Pentagon coup talk originate? And who are those responsible for creating a culture in which unelected current and retired military officers, sworn to uphold the constitutional order and the law of civilian control of the military, believe that they can arbitrarily declare an elected president either incompetent or criminal—and thus subject to their own renegade sort of freelancing justice?
As a footnote, remember that after little more than a week of the Trump presidency, Rosa Brooks, an Obama-era Pentagon appointee, published in Foreign Policy various ways to remove the newly inaugurated president. Among those mentioned was a military coup, in which top officers were to collude to obstruct a presidential order, on the basis of their own perceptions of a lack of presidential rectitude or competence.
We note additionally that over a dozen high-ranking retired generals and admirals have serially violated the uniform code of military justice in demonizing publicly their commander in chief with the worst sort of smears and slanders. And they have done so with complete exemption and in mockery of the very code they have sworn to abide.
Two retired army officers, colonels John Nagl and Paul Yingling, on the eve of the 2020 election, urged Milley to order U.S. army forces to remove Trump from office if in their opinion he obstructed the results of the election—superseding in effect a president’s elected powers as well as those constitutional checks and balances of the legislative and judicial branches upon him.
We know that these were all partisan and not principled concerns about an alleged non compos mentis president, because none of these same outspoken “Seven Days in May” generals have similarly violated the military code by negatively commenting publicly on the current dangerous cognitive decline of Joe Biden and the real national security dangers of his impairment, as evidenced by the disastrous skedaddle from Afghanistan and often inability to speak coherently or remember key names and places.
In short, is our new freelancing and partisan military also in the process of becoming Afghanized—too many of its leadership electively appealing to pseudo-higher principles to contextualize violating the Constitution of the United States and, sadly, too many trying to reflect the general woke landscape of the corporate board to which so many have retired? Like tribal warlords, our top brass simply do as they please, and then message to us “so what are you going to do about it?”
The Constitution as Construct
How paradoxical that the United States has sent teams of constitutional specialists to Iraq and Afghanistan to help tribal societies to draft legal, ordered, and sustainable Western consensual government charters that are not subject to the whims of particular tribes and parties. Yet America itself is descending in the exact opposite direction.
Suddenly in 2021 America, if ancient consensual rules, customs, and constitutional mandates do not facilitate and advance the progressive project, then by all means they must end—by a mere one vote in the Senate. It is as if the centuries of our history, the Constitution, and the logic of the founders were analogous to a shouting match among a squabbling Taliban tribal council of elders.
Junk the 233-year-old Electoral College and the constitutional directive to the states to assume primary responsibilities in establishing voting procedures in national elections. End the 180-year-old Senate filibuster. Do away with the now bothersome 150-year nine-justice Supreme Court. And scrap the 60-year-old tradition of a 50-state union.
Impeachment was intended by the founders as a rare reset of the executive branch in extremis. Now it is to be a pro formaattack on the president in his first term by the opposite party as soon as it gains control of the House—without a special counsel, without witnesses and cross-examinations, without any specific high crimes and misdemeanors or bribery and treason charges. And why not from now on impeach a president twice within a year—or try him in the Senate when he is out of office as a private citizen?
When private citizen Joe Biden is retired from the presidency, will his political enemies dig up his sketchy IRS records alleging that he never paid income taxes on the “big guy’s” “10 percent” of the income from the Hunter Biden money machine?
American Tribes
We may think virtue-signaling pride flags, gender studies, and George Floyd murals in Kabul remind the world of our postmodern sophistication. Yet, in truth, we are becoming far more like Afghanistan in the current tribalization of America—where tribal, racial, and ethnic loyalties are now essential to an American’s primary identity and loyalty—than we were ever able to make Afghanistan like us.
When we read leftist heartthrob Ibram X. Kendi’s endorsement of overt racial discrimination or academic and media obsessions with a supposed near-satanic “whiteness,” or the current fixations on skin color and first loyalties to those who share superficial racial affinities, then we are not much different from the Afghan tribalists. We in America apparently have decided the warring badlands of the Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks have their advantages over a racially blind, consensual republic. They are the model to us, not us of the now-discredited melting pot to them.
How sad in our blinkered arrogance that we go across the globe to the tribal Third World to teach the impoverished a supposedly preferrable culture and politics, while at home we are doing our best to become a Third-World country of incompetency, constitutional erosion, a fractious and politicized military elite, and racially and ethnically obsessed warring tribes.
About Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.
And:
Check out this Article from AmericanThinker https://www.americanthinker.
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Utterly impudent Milley who went behind Trump's back to collude with China feels no shame, no remorse for treason
Unfortunately, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military, Gen. Mark Milley, has completely and irreparably disgraced himself within just a matter of weeks – the final touches to his shameful actions being on Friday when he brazenly defended himself over revelations that he went be ...
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The current Democrat Party and it's radical, lying leadership seem not to care about the rule of law nor the constitution. Their views of the law and what should be seem to dictate.
O'bummer had a pen and cell phone, Biden is following in his footsteps but may not be mentally competent enough to know where he placed his pen so why do we need a SCOTUS?
Can Stephen Breyer and Amy Coney Barrett Save the Supreme Court?
The two justices share one opinion: The Court is in trouble.
By Daniel Henninger
At the start of each sitting of the U.S. Supreme Court, the participants and gallery hear this prayer: “God save the United States and this Honorable Court!” With court-packing in the air, one may ask: Does God think the Supreme Court is worth saving?
God’s opinion remains beyond reach, so we’ll fall back on the authority of Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Stephen Breyer, who both have worried aloud lately that the Supreme Court’s status may be falling fast in the American firmament.
“My goal today,” Justice Barrett said in a speech at Kentucky’s McConnell Center, “is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”
Delivering the Scalia Lecture at Harvard, the liberal Justice Breyer wondered whether Americans have come to see the justices as “a group of junior-league politicians.”
One may imagine with confidence that the last place Justice Breyer thought he would find himself is in the same political boat with Ms. Barrett or Justice Brett Kavanaugh, but that’s where he sits—getting shelled by Democrats. As “moderate” Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar said recently of Justice Breyer: “If he is seriously considering retirement, do it sooner rather than later.”
Speaking to the Journal recently, Justice Breyer suggested, “It isn’t really true that I was born on Pluto and don’t know what’s going on in the world. I think I do.”
What’s going on is that the left wants the old man and his fogey liberalism to get out of the way so they—excuse me, President Biden—can put one of their own on the Court.
Here’s a guess: If Justice Breyer thought Mr. Biden would nominate someone holding his views of the high court’s role, he would consider stepping down. From what we’ve seen so far of Mr. Biden’s presidency, the likelihood of extending Justice Breyer’s pragmatic liberalism is zero. Mr. Biden’s Supreme Court nominee will be closer to the ideology of the Squad, Congress’s minicaucus of left-of-left activists.
In their remarks, Justices Breyer and Barrett are expressing what many serious Americans sense, that the political system is sliding off the rails.
It’s obvious that many, if not most, Americans now think the Supreme Court is totally politicized, that contrary to Justice Barrett’s assertion, judges today look first for a result and then assemble precedential fig leafs to support that result—on abortion, gun rights, gender and the rest.
Until recently, most politicians would pay lip service to the notion that the Supreme Court’s independence and integrity are important. Today, give the political left credit for honestly arguing that they think this is hooey, that Democrats should kill the filibuster and pass Sen. Ed Markey’s bill to add four justices so they, with Joe Biden in tow, can create a high court that will rubber-stamp their politics.
Justice Breyer’s complaint against packing the court, described in his Scalia lecture, is that it would destroy, after 200 years, what’s left of the public’s habit of respect for the legitimacy of Supreme Court decisions.
In my view the court-packing posse is overwhelmingly about one thing—Roe v. Wade. That’s the lesson of the left’s meltdown over Texas’s anti-abortion law, giving private citizens a right of legal action against abortion providers. Progressives must recognize this means some conservatives are willing to adopt the left’s legal philosophy: Do what ya gotta do to get a judicial outcome, notably regarding abortion.
Justice Breyer says, “It is wrong to think of the Court as another political institution.” But he surely must understand how that happened.
When for example in 1969 the Supreme Court decided in the Tinker case that high-school students wearing black armbands had a constitutional right to protest the Vietnam War, Mr. Breyer was 31, a bit too old to be a founding participant in the counterculture, though today’s see-no-evil progressive prosecutors are the children of those system-wrecking founders.
Ever since, the courts have been in the business of calling balls and strikes on local school-discipline rules. Those decisions, like Roe v. Wade, extended the high court’s authority deeply into matters formerly reserved for smaller political jurisdictions and personal responsibility.
The Supreme Court’s willing dive into these matters came during a period begun in the 1960s when the broader culture was already eroding traditional authority, mores and values. The Supreme Court came to be seen as complicit, no matter how often its members argue there’s nobody here but us law-reading clerks. Justice Breyer recently wrote the decision for an 8-1 ruling in favor of an f-bomb-wielding high-school cheerleader. Arguably he is right on the law. But still.
For decades, politics, the culture and the courts have combined to spread a pandemic of doubt about our “system.” After all this, Stephen Breyer is refusing to quit the Supreme Court under pressure from that culture. He is now the little Dutch boy alone with his thumb in a leaking dike. He could use some help, from his friends.
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I have been writing and posting articles about the CCP's ploy to get foreign investors to sink money into Chinese real estate developers which would eventually bankrupt, wipe out foreign investors and allow China to sell the projects to their citizens on a refinanced basis.
The pace of this has quickened and we are now beginning to see actual events:as China'sEvergrande Developers teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.
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How Beijing’s Debt Clampdown Shook the Foundation of a Real-Estate Colossus
China Evergrande’s looming collapse and its ripple effect on the economy will pose a test for the government’s campaign to keep housing affordable for the masses
In a risky race against time that ran for two decades, China Evergrande Group turned billions of dollars in borrowed money into the dream of homeownership for millions of Chinese citizens.
It launched project after project in every Chinese province, selling apartments years before they were completed and scratching together enough cash to stay just ahead of massive interest bills.
The party has ended. Years of aggressive borrowing have collided with Beijing’s crackdown on debt, leaving the giant developer on the brink of collapse. Construction of Evergrande’s projects in many cities has stopped. The company has faced a litany of complaints and protests from suppliers, small investors and home buyers who sank their savings into properties the company promised to deliver.
Cash is so short that this summer, the developer said it began paying bills to contractors and suppliers with unfinished apartments instead of actual money. A paint supplier based in the southeastern province of Fujian said Evergrande recently paid off the equivalent of $34 million in bills with three unfinished properties, which the supplier is trying to sell. At a construction firm in Wuhan, more than 200 employees have been forced to take pay cuts because some of Evergrande’s bills are past due, a manager at the firm told The Wall Street Journal.
Former and current employees say layoffs are adding up, and free meals that Evergrande used to provide for staffers at its headquarters have been canceled. In central China’s Hubei province, Evergrande has asked the local government to take over homeowners’ funds held in escrow accounts so they can’t be seized in legal disputes with creditors, according to people familiar with the matter.
Evergrande didn’t respond to the Journal’s requests for comment. The company said on Sept. 14 that its apartment sales have slowed markedly since June, its asset-disposal plans haven’t materialized, and it has hired financial advisers—a move that brings it closer to a potential debt restructuring.
The looming collapse is a microcosm of China’s overheated housing market, in which prices have been climbing for years. Evergrande’s problems—and their ripple effects on the economy and social stability—are the biggest test of Beijing’s rejuvenated campaign to end debt-fueled speculation and stop home prices from surging while the government tries to lower inequality and keep housing affordable for the masses.
Karen Li, a 37-year-old in the southern Chinese metropolis of Shenzhen where Evergrande is headquartered, said she paid the full purchase price of 1.4 million yuan, the equivalent of about $216,800, three years ago for a roughly 400-square-foot apartment in one of its high-rise developments. Ms. Li, who works in retail sales and has yet to take ownership of what would be her first home, said she was notified last month that construction has been delayed.
“I thought it was reliable because it was a major corporation,” she said, adding that the property giant’s worsening cash crunch has thrown the project’s completion date into doubt. “For each ordinary family, this is a disaster.”
Evergrande said on Sept. 13 that it was facing unprecedented difficulties, and was doing everything possible to restore normal operations and to protect customers.
Market participants increasingly believe that Beijing will let Evergrande fail and inflict losses on its shareholders and bondholders, but find a way to protect the many people who have paid for unfinished apartments.
Research firm Capital Economics estimates that Evergrande has presold more than 1.4 million apartments valued at $200 billion that it has yet to finish, and said one outcome could be a managed restructuring in which other developers take over the company’s unfinished projects.
The company had $89 billion in outstanding debt at the end of June, about 42% of which comes due in less than a year, according to its most recent financial results. Evergrande’s total debt burden is the biggest for any publicly traded real-estate management or development company in the world, data from S&P Global Market Intelligence shows.
“It would send the wrong message if [authorities] were to step in at this stage to prevent a default,” said Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist at Capital Economics. “It seems very unlikely that they would help a private firm…that’s in a sector that they’re trying to rein in,” he added.
The 25-year-old conglomerate was the epitome of China’s housing boom and corporate debt binge. It opened for business right when the country started to introduce private homeownership, and built homes that were mostly targeted at individuals with modest incomes. Many people queued up for hours for the chance to buy an Evergrande apartment, often making full cash payments upfront for homes that took years to complete.
The company’s founder, chairman and biggest shareholder, Xu Jiayin, grew up in an impoverished village in central Henan province. He studied hard, went to college, and later worked at a state-owned steel company. He set up Evergrande, whose Chinese name means “constant” and “big,” in the southern city of Guangzhou when he was 37 years old, and became known professionally as Hui Ka Yan, the Cantonese phonetic spelling of his Chinese name.
Former employees and others who previously worked with Mr. Hui described him as a workaholic with high expectations and a propensity to take risks and make bold bets. He was also well-connected with wealthy individuals in Hong Kong’s business community who were active buyers of Evergrande’s stock and debt.
When the company was going public in Hong Kong in 2009, it told potential investors that “rapid property development” was one of its key business strategies that helped maximize its investment returns.
Evergrande bought hundreds of land parcels and sold more apartments than any other developer, and reported record sales year after year as home prices soared.
“Development is the absolute principle,” Mr. Hui said during a 2017 speech to employees, citing the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. That, coupled with the idea that “cash is king,” had ensured the company’s steady and rapid development, he added. By the end of 2018, Evergrande was building projects with a floor space of more than 33,000 acres across China, triple the amount just four years earlier.
The company borrowed liberally from banks and global investors, paying interest rates on junk-rated U.S. dollar debt that often ran into double-digit percentages. It expanded into theme parks, healthcare services, mineral-water production and electric-vehicle manufacturing. It enlisted Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan at one point to help promote its bottled water, and bought a professional soccer club in its home province.
The developer also financed construction with the help of short-term IOUs, known as commercial bills, that it issued to contractors and building-materials suppliers.
As it piled on debt, Evergrande paid out billions in dividends to stockholders, with most of that cash going to Mr. Hui as its largest shareholder. The payouts, plus the value of his shares, helped him become one of China’s richest men. He has received more than 34 billion yuan, the equivalent of $5.3 billion, in dividends since October 2018. In 2019, he declared that the company would start producing electric vehicles and aimed to become the world’s largest player in the fast-growing industry.
Problems started to emerge for Evergrande last year during the coronavirus pandemic, which caused lockdowns in China that damped property sales for months.
Evergrande had regularly offered price discounts on its apartments, and launched more aggressive promotions—in some cases up to 30% off advertised prices—to keep cash coming in the door.
It also encouraged its own employees to buy its apartments. In a campaign branded as “wealth creation” for its workers, Evergrande created a lucky draw where winners were picked to buy apartments with a 50% discount.
The company managed to chalk up yet another record year of sales, reporting the equivalent of $112 billion in contracted sales for 2020, up 20% from the previous year.
Trouble was brewing elsewhere. Last fall, Evergrande’s shares and bonds tumbled in value after documents circulated online that warned of a looming cash crunch at the real-estate giant. The documents appeared to show Evergrande’s communications with the local government warning about potential risks if it was unable to complete the planned listing of a flagship subsidiary.
The company had some years earlier sold stakes in its flagship property-development unit to various strategic investors, and promised them the unit would go public in Shanghai by early 2021, or it would repay them up to the equivalent of $19 billion.
Evergrande decried the documents as fake, and subsequently said most of those investors had agreed not to force it to cough up the funds.
Its troubles weren’t over. China’s authorities last year laid down what came to be known as the “three red lines” for real-estate developers—specific leverage ratios to avoid—all of which Evergrande had breached. The rules prevented the company from taking on new debts.
This past June, worries about Evergrande’s finances resurfaced, sending its bond and stock prices tumbling again. Internet users shared posts describing deep discounts to apartment prices offered by Evergrande. The company said it wasn’t offering widespread exceptional discounts.
On July 1, Mr. Hui made a public appearance at the Chinese Communist Party’s centenary celebrations in Beijing. His presence at the country’s most important event of the year was supposed to signal goodwill with top Chinese leaders and assuage concerns about his company, some political observers said.
Evergrande posted photographs of the 62-year-old chairman smiling in a navy jacket at Tiananmen Square on its website, extolling his more than 35 years as a party member. He was quoted saying he would continue to manage his business well and dedicate himself to public welfare.
How do you see the Chinese economy changing in the next year? Join the conversation below.
The stock and bond selloffs deepened over the summer. Evergrande’s liquidity problems worsened, forcing it to start paying some of its suppliers and contractors with flats it hadn’t sold. In mid-August, financial regulators summoned Evergrande’s top executives and told them to fix the company’s problems without disrupting the financial and property markets.
The company is trying to offload other assets to raise cash, and is in talks to sell part of its electric-vehicle business, whose market value has declined by more than $80 billion from a recent peak.
Stephen Sum, who runs a real-estate agency focusing on China’s Greater Bay Area, said Evergrande’s troubles have hurt the wider property sector. “It’s like the game of Monopoly,” he said of the developer’s survival strategy. In the real-estate board game, players that are short on cash have to sell their properties to avoid becoming bankrupt.
Business at Mr. Sum’s Hong Kong-based firm—which markets homes from many developers—has fallen by half since bad news about Evergrande dominated headlines. He said the news has made people more wary about buying properties in general.
—Quentin Webb contributed to this article.
Write to Xie Yu at Yu.Xie@wsj.com and Elaine Yu at elaine.yu@wsj.com
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the September 20, 2021, print edition as 'China Curbs Hit a Big Developer.'
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Natural gas prices are soaring because of three things:
a) Biden's interference in energy development
b) Hurricane's that disrupted what drilling was on going
c) Foreign demand has increased leading to prospective shortages and rise in prices.
Everything Biden touches turns into a disaster. Why? Several obvious reasons:
a) Biden has been in government since birth, never had a job in the private sector and is incompetent.
b) Democrats do not understand and/or hate capitalism and disrupt the operation of markets.
c) The Biden Administration is basically staffed by O'Bummer holdovers who are academic types, totally bereft of practical experience and operate from a vantage of believing big government is preferable to free markets . Some even go so far as hating this nation and wanting to bring it to it's knees. Even O'Bummer told us he would transform America and we never asked or cared to ask "to what?"
d) Democrats have it in for deplorables and Neanderthals and generally, when you disrupt what works with what historically does not work, failures mount. This is too logical for those lacking experience, who do not live in the real world and possess addled brains.
e) Finally, Biden and his handlers hate Trump because he threatened their power base and have run our government on a platform of undoing what Trump proved was successful. They are too arrogant to see this is a failed way of doing things so they keep digging their own and the nation's grave.
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