Laura He China's real estate crisis could threaten growth into 2022.

---------- Construction at Evergrande Cultural Tourism City, a mixed-used residential-retail-entertainment development in China’s eastern Jiangsu province has been halted. China's growth is seriously slowing down as the country lurches from one economic threat to another. And while some of the biggest pain points appear to be easing, an unfolding crisis in real estate is emerging as one of Beijing's toughest challenges in the coming year. The country's GDP grew at its slowest pace in a year last quarter, expanding just 4.9% from a year earlier. Compared to the prior quarter, the economy grew a mere 0.2% from July to September — one of the weakest quarters since China started releasing such records in 2011. Disruptions due to the global shipping crisis and a massive energy crunch contributed to the slowdown. Shipping delays and mounting inventories in China have hit smaller manufacturers that are now hurting for cash, resulting in lost orders and production cuts. And factory output has been dented in large part because of power shortages, a result of high demand for fossil fuel that has clashed with a national push to reduce carbon emissions. But some of the most significant concerns for growth are now rippling through the real estate sector, which is suffering from the energy woes along with a government drive to curb excessive borrowing. Real estate-related activities — including cement and steel production — registered steep contractions last month, as did property sales and new construction projects. That has led to reduced property investment, which contracted in September for the first time since March 2020. On Wednesday, the National Bureau of Statistics announced that average housing prices in 70 major cities dropped slightly in October from the previous month. Goldman Sachs estimated the month-on-month drop at an annualized rate of 0.5%, the first decline since April 2015. While the power crunch has undoubtedly weighed on the real estate sector, Beijing's crackdown is also taking its toll. Fearing the property market had become overheated, the government last year started requiring developers to cut their debt levels. It has also pledged to tame runaway home prices. Since then, companies like embattled conglomerate Evergrande have been grappling with major debt problems, triggering worries about the risk of contagion for the sector and the broader economy. Beijing seems unlikely to do much to ease its tight curbs on the real estate sector, according to economists at Société Générale — "possibly because they are attributing most of the blame to the power crunch, which has now eased but is not resolved." "To our mind, housing is the key and there seems nothing substantial in the near term to mitigate the downtrend," wrote the firm's Wei Yao and Michelle Lam in a Monday report. They added there is a "very strong consensus among policymakers that housing is at the root of China's many structural problems." A real estate downturn will almost certainly continue to weigh on economic growth. Oxford Economics, for example, cut its forecast for fourth quarter growth to 3.6% from 5%. The firm recently trimmed its 2022 GDP forecast to 5.4% from 5.8%, mostly due to concerns about the real estate sector, power shortages and Covid-19. "Stakes are high in managing the property slowdown," wrote Louis Kuijs, head of Asia economics at Oxford Economics, in a Wednesday report. He added the "relatively large economic footprint" of the real estate sector in China — it comprises about a quarter or so of GDP — means even a gradual or "managed" slowdown would "significantly" affect the economy. A 'key' challenge long-term The housing crackdown is China's "key long-term challenge," according to Aidan Yao, senior emerging Asia economist with AXA Investment Managers. He downgraded his forecast for GDP growth this year to 7.9% from 8.5%, partly because of Beijing's firm stance on controlling debt in the property market and elsewhere. Meanwhile, he also sees some downside risks to the 2022 forecast of 5.5%. Chinese President Xi Jinping's desire to control the housing market is no secret. In 2017, he famously announced that "housing is for living and not for speculation." But Beijing's campaign has gained additional momentum during the coronavirus pandemic, as the government became concerned that too much cheap money was flooding a sector that was already highly leveraged. That worry led authorities to force developers last year to trim their debt levels. This year, Xi has also ramped up promises to close what he sees as a worsening wealth gap, saying "common prosperity" would be a top government priority. That pledge has been reflected in tightening rules on all sorts of industries, including tech and other types of private enterprise. But it's also apparent in real estate, as Chinese state media outlets blame soaring housing prices for worsening income inequality. As all of this unfolds, a liquidity crunch has worsened among the real estate sector's weakest corporations. Evergrande — which is China's most-indebted developer — has repeatedly missed interest payments and warned it could default. The company's crisis has unsettled global investors in recent weeks, who worry a bankrupt Evergrande could lead to a domino effect. Other property firms, including Fantasia Holdings and Modern Land, have already indicated they are struggling to pay their debts. Chinese authorities have tried to assuage fears about Evergrande. The People's Bank of China said Friday the company had mismanaged its business but risks to the financial system were "controllable." Yao, from AXA Investment Managers, said Beijing isn't likely to change its course on regulation. While there may be "further fine-tuning" of housing market policies, he sees "no reversal to the overall tightening stance." Laura He, Reporter & Digital Producer, CNN Business Laura He is a reporter and digital producer for CNN Business. She covers news about Asian business and markets from Hong Kong

Another reason for US to support Taiwan 🇹🇼 Independence against Chinese Communist Imperialistic Aggression! Taiwan is not a Chinese colony!!!

How much of this weapons development was aided & abetted by Clinton’s sale of classified military technology to China during his Presidency? How much $$$ did he & Hillary get for betraying US? Is Biden also getting Richer by selling US to China? What’s a Hunter painting really worth?, …about as much as his business acumen, for which the Chinese & others paid millions…? I’m Still…Waiting for KARMA TO CHECK IN!

In a throwback to the arms race of the Cold War era, U.S. intelligence was surprised to learn last week that China had conducted tests on a new nuclear-capable hypersonic missile that circles the globe before heading to its target. American officials might have underestimated the advancements of China's military. Given the rising challenge China poses to the United States, this is not something we can afford to miscalculate. What makes these new missiles so much more dangerous than those that already exist? Hypersonic weapons can travel around five times faster than the speed of sound, reaching about 3,850 mph. This makes them incredibly difficult to defend against and highly lethal. Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) recently joined "Washington Watch" to discuss China's successful test. She believes that the United States needs to catch up -- and fast. She said, "We have significant resources in [the National Defense Authorization Act] to develop the hypersonic capability ourselves. They're already in the process of researching it, but we need to further move this along as well as to have a strong national defense to be a deterrent against China for ever having to use it or considering using it against us or our allies." While China continues to build up its military capability, it continues its aggression towards Taiwan, a flourishing democratic society over which China would love to seize control. But the freedom-loving people of Taiwan resist any "reunification" with China because they know that those who suffer the most at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party might very well be Chinese citizens themselves. In recent years, China has made a name for itself as an egregious human rights violator. Yet, China has a seat at the United Nations Human Rights Council. Other bad actors on the Human Rights Council include Cuba, Eritrea, Pakistan, Somalia, Venezuela, and others. The power that notorious human rights abusers have on the U.N. Human Rights Council is exactly why the Trump administration wanted nothing to do with an international body they believed had strayed from its mission. But last week, the United States was elected to and will officially rejoin the U.N. Human Rights Council in January. Bob Fu, president of ChinaAid and FRC's senior fellow on international religious freedom, called the council "dysfunctional." He stated on "Washington Watch" that the Human Rights Council has not only "failed to live up to human rights values, but it has become a covering for the world's worst human rights abusers such as China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela." But perhaps what the Human Rights Council is most known for are its relentless attacks against Israel. Fu noted, "After its founding in 2006, the human rights body has passed over 80 condemnation resolutions against Israel, but not a single one against those human rights abusers like China, Russia, Cuba, and Uzbekistan." The mission of the U.N. Human Rights Council is noble, but in practice, it has failed to confront prominent human rights abuses and gone out of its way to bully the small country of Israel. Now that the United States will have a seat at the U.N. Human Rights Council, American officials must use every opportunity to hold human rights violators accountable, investigate abuses, and take strong public stances on issues that matter, such as China's ongoing genocide against Uyghur Muslims. China is powerful, but it still shouldn't be able to bully the U.N. into silence concerning its abuses. At every opportunity -- inside and outside of the U.N. -- the United States must lead the way in taking a stand against China's mounting human rights violations and military aggression.

DON’T BLAME ME, I VOTED FOR TRUMP!

Kamala Harris, Other Top Biden Officials Missing In Action During Crises Photo of Jonathan Davis Jonathan DavisOctober 18, 2021 80,647 OPINION: This article contains commentary which reflects the author's opinion Several of President Joe Biden’s top officials and Cabinet members have been missing in action during some of the country’s biggest emergencies and worst crises thus far during his short tenure. This past week, for instance, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was ripped by critics following reports he has been out of his office for about two months on paternity leave after he and husband Chasten adopted two newborn children while a burgeoning supply chain problem rose to the level of a national emergency. Fox News has more: As the Biden administration has juggled crises in Afghanistan, the southern border and the national supply chain, key officials, including the president himself, have declined to make visibility a top priority. The media wasn’t notified until two months later that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had taken a parental leave in mid-August to care for his newborn twins. Buttigieg’s office told Politico on Thursday that he was “mostly offline” for an entire month “except for major agency decisions” and that his activities had been ramping up in recent weeks. The former South Bend, Ind., mayor who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination last year did not appoint an interim secretary in his absence, though the country’s supply chain issues worsened and store shelves grew sparse and even bare in some parts of the country. Meanwhile, container ships by the dozens on both coasts sat idle outside of ports for days on end waiting for a spot to open up so they could be offloaded ahead of a holiday shopping season that can often be make-or-break for smaller retailers. Worse, Buttigieg told CNN on Sunday that the disruptions are only going to get worse for the time being and last well into 2022 ahead of next year’s midterms. “Certainly a lot of the challenges that we’ve been experiencing this year will continue into next year,” Buttigieg responded. “Look, part of what is happening isn’t just the supply side, it’s the demand side. Demand is off the charts. Retail sales are through the roof. And if you think about those images of ships, for example, waiting at anchor on the West Coast – every one of those ships is full of record amounts of goods that Americans are buying because demand is up because income is up because the president has successfully guided this economy out of the teeth of a terrifying recession.” “Our supply chains can’t keep up,” he continued. “And of course, our supply chains, that’s a complicated system that is mostly in private hands, and rightly so. Our role is to be an honest broker, bring together all of the different players there, secure commitments, and get solutions that are going to make it easier.” Republicans have pounced on the issue. “Pete Buttigieg was completely unqualified to serve as Secretary of Transportation,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., tweeted Monday. “Now, Pete is absent during a transportation crisis that is hurting working-class Americans.” “PETE BUTTIGIEG has been MIA,” Politico noted Thursday. Buttigieg isn’t the only ranking member of the Biden administration who has been MIA during a number of other pressing issues. In March, Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris to be his government’s “border czar” as illegal immigration reached a fever pitch with record numbers of encounters with federal border authorities, a problem that continued to worsen all summer and into the fall. But Harris has only taken one high-profile trip to the border: She visited the El Paso Sector in June, though illegal immigration has not been a problem along that section of the boundary. And earlier this month, she was missing from a top meeting with Mexican officials regarding border security.

Finally, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was nowhere to be found as the Taliban were sweeping through Afghanistan and into the capital of Kabul ahead of a then-pressing deadline for all U.S. forces to leave the country. “Secretary of State Antony Blinken was vacationing in the Hamptons just before the fall of Kabul on Aug. 15, when Taliban insurgents completed their retaking of the country 20 years after their ouster,” Fox News reported. And Biden himself, along with “first lady Jill took a trip to Rehoboth, Delaware, for a quiet weekend of church service and bike rides” August 29, a day before the deadline, Fox News reported, adding: “The president largely avoided cameras during the initial drawdown, watching the Aug. 15 fall of Kabul unfold from the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.”

‘San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities (The Libtardian Way)

’ Charles Fain Lehman 'San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities' by Michael Shellenberger / harpercollins.com San Francisco has a poop problem. Between 2011 and 2019, reports of human feces on public sidewalks quintupled, rising from roughly 5,500 to more than 30,000. Incidents have been on the decline since the COVID pandemic began, but residents still reported an average of 76 turds per day in the first half of 2021. The Golden Gate city’s intestinal troubles are not news—conservative commentators have made a joke, and a talking point, out of them for ages. But they are metonymic for a dysfunction increasingly apparent in America's big cities, from the West Coast to the East. Many major municipalities are marred by violent crime, homelessness, uncontrolled mental illness, and general disorder. This all in spite of an ever-advancing cadre of progressive leaders, who promise their latest tax hike will finally target the "root causes" of the breakdown. Why are these big, blue cities breaking down? Climate scientist and Berkeley, Calif., resident Michael Shellenberger tackles the question in his latest book, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. At core, Shellenberger’s answer is political. Though he takes pains to assure the reader of his liberal bona fides, Shellenberger insists that big cities, particularly San Francisco, have been captured by a too-progressive ideology. City leaders have begrudgingly embraced the priorities of the activist class that staffs the various NGOs providing key services, including support for the homeless, the mentally ill, and the drug addicted. The result is urban disaster. Shellenberger covers the vogue for "housing first" policy, which emphasizes placing homeless people in housing without sobriety or medication requirements, and which he argues does not consistently reduce the pathologies that lead to homelessness. He discusses the "harm reduction" approach to drug policy, which can mean providing users with the materials to use without "coercing" them into treatment. And he outlines the rising skepticism of policing and public safety, alongside decarceral reforms, which have created an atmosphere supportive of criminal offending. Of course, disentangling cause and effect in policymaking is hard. But California is one of just a handful of states to see dramatic increases in its homeless population over the past decade, and the state’s deliberate reduction in the punishment for minor property offending is associated with a spike in shoplifting. And the Golden State is proudly progressive—a progressivism doubtless even more common among the people who staff the NGOs that actually manage its big cities' streets. As far as a liberal's case to liberals against the excesses of liberalism goes, San Fransicko is a useful contribution to the genre. It suffers from some of the usual flaws of popular nonfiction: Some chapters seem unnecessary, and one suspects the whole thing could have been slashed down to a 10,000-word essay. But the book does well the thing it is meant to do: set out the key contradictions in contemporary liberalism, as underscored by the governance failures of the places it is most common. One of the peculiar features of American liberalism is the selectiveness of its paternalism. Liberals are happy to embrace coercive policies that affect the average citizen—vaccine mandates, say, or soda taxes. But when it comes to the least of us—the drug addicted, the mentally ill, the chronically homeless, the repeated victims of crime—it adopts an inexplicably laissez faire stance. This approach, sociologist Neil Gong has argued, is dramatically at odds with how those with means ask to be treated. While the mentally ill rich seek maximum paternalism, the mentally ill poor are afforded the freedom to be mad. This tendency runs in apparent contradiction to the left's usual statist bent. The anti-psychiatry movement, the push to deinstitutionalize and ban compulsory drug treatment, and of course the movement to defund the police, are all basically libertarian, inasmuch as they work to reduce the capacity of the state to regulate certain kinds of antisocial conduct. These regulations are considered per se illegitimate, because they fail to target the "root causes" of this behavior—racism, sexism, capitalism, etc. Such "root causes" thinking is, of course, fallacious: Nothing about a cause’s proximity to an effect makes it more or less suited to policy intervention. But more important, it confuses the question of whom it is fair to manage—average citizens are fair game, whereas the oppressed are oppressed enough as is—with whom it benefits society to manage. The public dispute becomes over how to be compassionate to the schizophrenic (where compassion is always synonymous with license), wholly obviating discussion of the harms done to society by his camping out on the sidewalk, harms for which we increasingly lack moral language. The sort of policies Shellenberger endorses at the end of the book—a statewide psych authority, expanded conservatorship, a more carrot-and-stick approach to mental health and drug abuse treatment—would probably benefit their objects. But they would also benefit the other members of society, who are entitled to be free of antisocial behavior. That entitlement, of the average American, has fallen out of fashion. But it is the entitlement at the core of the social contract, and governments of all sizes forget it at their peril. San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger Harper, 416 pp., $28.99 Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. He was previously a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon

Biden White House on High Alert:

  Effective Senolytic drugs found to act as a "smart bomb" to “take out” Marxist Socialist Democratic dysfunctional politicans & their operatives attempting to destroy America and it’s way of life!  CDC to develop a vaccine ASAP!

The Marxist Socialist Democratic Regime’s Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost…

Nancy Pelosi will need extra gin after she got news about about this bombshell new poll October 12, 2021 in Congress, Elections, Joe Biden Nancy Pelosi made a claim about Justice Amy Coney Barrett that left Americans furious

When Democrats took control in Washington, D.C., Nancy Pelosi figured it was her time to shine and to push through every Leftist piece of garbage legislation she could. Unfortunately for Nancy, things haven’t been as smooth as she might have hoped over the last year. Now Nancy Pelosi will need extra gin after she got news about this bombshell new poll. Joe Biden and his Democrat team can’t get it together and they continue to destroy the country. Nancy Pelosi had high hopes for the next few years, believing she could do pretty much anything she pleased. But from vicious Democrat infighting to Joe Biden’s numerous disastrous moves, Democrats dreams of a Leftist utopia are quickly fading. Now, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are in free fall and more Americans are demanding answers from the administration on when they plan to stop messing everything up. And with just a slim majority in the House, Nancy Pelosi is finding it hard to enact much of the nightmare legislation she’d dreamed of inflicting on the American people. For Nancy Pelosi it could be just the beginning of a rough road to the 2022 midterms. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that Nancy Pelosi’s time as Speaker of the House could be over. According to the poll, Republicans have a lead of 46% to 34% over Democrats on the generic ballot. A generic ballot serves as a gauge of the current political climate by asking which party a voter would choose for the House of Representatives in the upcoming election. This does not look good for Nancy Pelosi. Quinnipiac has been known to overestimate in favor of Democrats in their polls, and if that holds true, 2022 looks really bad for Pelosi. Polling from Quinnipiac had Biden winning Florida by three in 2020 – Trump won the state by four. It’s also likely the generic ballot is overstating the Democrats’ strength, which could lead to the bloodbath many are predicting in the 2022 midterm elections. Democrats in swing states are nervous and Nancy Pelosi is desperate to not lose control. But with Joe Biden dragging down the entire Democrat Party, it doesn’t look good for Pelosi and her dreams of forever controlling the United States of America.