Gongol.com Archives: August 2016
August 26, 2016
China's real-estate bubble...in downtown Los Angeles
The Los Angeles Times notes that Chinese companies are developing at least half a dozen large real-estate projects in the city. By the time something like this makes it into the newspaper as a "trend" piece, it's almost always at the full-strength bubble stage. Capital is incredibly cheap, and that's the root cause of all this. But it's also highly speculative, as all real-estate development tends to be. Always contrast investment in categories like real estate with those made in directly productive things like heavy equipment or labor-force training and development. Those latter categories have been sluggish, and that's a bad sign.
Cigarette stores turning to fresh produce
A company executive at Kwik Trip/Kwik Star says "Tobacco products are not part of the future". And capitalism rolls on, evolving to meet changes in consumer demand. Kwik Star runs some excellent stores in northeastern Iowa, and their entry into the Des Moines market will make some already fierce convenience-store competition something to really behold.
Why conditions in Syria may get even worse
It's already a vast humanitarian crisis that will weigh on the conscience of civilization for decades to come
Wall Street Journal can't find any former White House economists that support Donald Trump
It's no surprise: He has embraced outrageously high barriers to trade, makes promises with no regard to their consequences, and has talked about making our entitlement programs even more insolvent than they are already. Plenty of economists may decline to endorse anyone, but they'd be mad to let their names get tied to an economic goulash like the one Trump (seemingly without any self-awareness) has proposed.
Uber loses $1.2 billion in the first half of the year
Wonder no more about why they're pushing so hard to get to the model of self-driving car service
