When China's luxury bubble collapses
- By Robert Phoenix
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Global Times, June 21, 2011
Chinese speculators bought up top-end Bordeaux last year, causing the French wine to outperform not just equities, but gold and crude oil. The Guardian reports the Chinese are not just buying Bordeaux by the bottle and case - but by the vineyard as well.
Chinese are also buying up real estate around the world. The UK's largest homebuilder told Bloomberg that 42 percent of the residential units it sold in London this year were to Chinese buyers.
The Chinese art market is now the second largest in the world, edging out Britain for the first time. It expanded by a whopping 40 percent last year.
Chinese demand is driving up prices for luxury goods around the world.
It's good to be in a country experiencing an economic bubble. A friend from Washington, D.C. just told me he is thinking of moving back to Beijing, because jobs are hard to come by. I told him I just quit mine here in Beijing, and work seems to be flooding to me.
I've experienced these good time bubbles twice before.
Once was in Tokyo, in the early 1990s. Japan seemed to be buying up America at the time. English teachers were making up to $70 an hour. As a proofreader at an English newspaper, I was able to dress in Armani, Missoni, and Polo - taking my fashion tips from the copy of American Psycho I was reading. That bubble popped, of course, and Japan still hasn't recovered.
The next time was in New York at the turn of the millenium. I left my job at a wire service for a position at the dot-com division of CBS News. My supervisor hinted an IPO might be in the offing, and we would probably get stock options. We shared an office space with MarketWatch.com. I was told that they had gone public, and many of the writers there were driving Porsches.
My roommate at the time, a tabloid journalist, invested $10,000 in American Online (AOL). A mutual friend warned him of a stock bubble, but my roommate just pointed to the way the stock kept rising and rising.
Literarily half of the CBS newsroom got laid off one day. My roommate lost his shirt on the AOL stocks. There had been whispers and increasingly credible predictions the bubble would burst for months, but somehow we didn't expect the pop would affect us personally.
Here in Beijing, a friend is looking to invest in yet another apartment. I warned her that we are obviously in a price bubble. At current prices, she would have to rent out her house for six decades before it would pay for itself. (That's not to mention that the property reverts to the government after 70 years, becoming effectively worthless).
"You don't understand China," one Chinese friend explained to me. "It's different here. Everybody has to own a home." For this reason, prices can supposedly never go down.
I agree China's run up in prices is different than most. Because when it pops, people are going to start asking where all this money for rare wine and luxury goods is coming from. And when they find out, a lot more will collapse than this bubble.
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