Posted on 02/03/2017 5:03:41 PM PST by Lorianne
China has been on a skyscraper-building boom for years, but, we suspect, 2016 may have seen the mal-investment boom jump the shark.
As Goldman Sachs illustrates in the following chart, China was head, shoulders, knees, and toes above the aggregate of the rest of the world in terms of skyscraper completions in 2016...
And a lot of them sit empty, I’ve heard.
yes, watch this video. It is already a few years old, and the bubble since then is just bigger.
On another note, the current US stock market ratio of market value to sales is 2.3, which has never been this high. Our stock market is as big a bubble as China’s sky scrapers, if not bigger.
yeah, chinese regional administrators are rewarded if they keep GDP growth up. GDP goes up that year if they build a skyscraper, regardless of whether anyone’s going to sit in it or not. the fun of central planning!
The bar graph showing number of skyscrapers per country is completely useless for analysis. Most obvious flaw: it’s not adjusted to reflect population differences (e.g. China’s population is 25 times greater than Singapore’s — they have nearly the same per-capita rate of skyscraper starts). There may be a problem here — but, the graph provides zero supporting evidence.
Well this is embarrassing.
In my previous post I said that the population of China is 25 times greater than Singapore’s. It’s actually 250 times greater? I was off by an order-of-magnitude. I’ve criticized the MSM for their innumeracy, many times; and yet here I am — off by an order-of-magnitude. Shame on me.
In my defense, this only serves to show that my original comment didn’t go far enough. The bar graph on skyscrapers is not only useless — it’s completely misleading. Singapore is actually constructing about 10 times the number of skyscrapers as China, on a per-capita basis.
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