An interesting blog about mortgages: "Mortgages are a manufactured product" https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/mortgages-are-a-manufactured-product/ What he writes is holds in The Netherlands as well. The government sets rules for who can buy, what they have to prove, how much they can borrow. The market is just for who offers the cheapest mortgage.
A graph of housing prices in the Netherlands: https://imgur.com/DAKfRyA The drops may not look disastrous, they had a big impact in many people's lives. A divorce comes with a unpleasant financial surprise if your house has more mortgage than you can sell it for.
China has no such thing as a "fixed rate mortgage" where the interest rate never changes over 30 year span - it is locked in no matter what happens - so that explains why China would keep the mortgage rates low in the whole country - if they did not there would be a few hundred million people knocking on the bosses door as their mortgage payments skyrocketed.
I suppose you’re either enjoying financial freedom from your various endeavours or have parked away enough dough from your prior property investments. If not, you’d be worried sick about your mortgage payments if you’ve just been laid off, your employer is losing money hand over fist or if you have to shutter down your own business due to sales collapsing for a multitude of reasons, the most prominent of which is the business unfriendly attitude of the government.
You are of course completely correct - this is indeed a tough time, both for many business owners and for individuals who have lost their jobs and exhausted their financial cushion. The question is: How many exactly? For example, what percentage of people are in the situation you describe, i.e. those with outstanding mortgages which are out of work? And how many are in actual default? We're not aware of any data on this but it would certainly be very meaningful to find out. As we have written in other recent articles, even though we're still not in a Gordon Chang-style collapse situation, China's economic malaise is real, and for some very concrete reasons.
An interesting blog about mortgages: "Mortgages are a manufactured product" https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/mortgages-are-a-manufactured-product/ What he writes is holds in The Netherlands as well. The government sets rules for who can buy, what they have to prove, how much they can borrow. The market is just for who offers the cheapest mortgage.
A graph of housing prices in the Netherlands: https://imgur.com/DAKfRyA The drops may not look disastrous, they had a big impact in many people's lives. A divorce comes with a unpleasant financial surprise if your house has more mortgage than you can sell it for.
China has no such thing as a "fixed rate mortgage" where the interest rate never changes over 30 year span - it is locked in no matter what happens - so that explains why China would keep the mortgage rates low in the whole country - if they did not there would be a few hundred million people knocking on the bosses door as their mortgage payments skyrocketed.
I suppose you’re either enjoying financial freedom from your various endeavours or have parked away enough dough from your prior property investments. If not, you’d be worried sick about your mortgage payments if you’ve just been laid off, your employer is losing money hand over fist or if you have to shutter down your own business due to sales collapsing for a multitude of reasons, the most prominent of which is the business unfriendly attitude of the government.
You are of course completely correct - this is indeed a tough time, both for many business owners and for individuals who have lost their jobs and exhausted their financial cushion. The question is: How many exactly? For example, what percentage of people are in the situation you describe, i.e. those with outstanding mortgages which are out of work? And how many are in actual default? We're not aware of any data on this but it would certainly be very meaningful to find out. As we have written in other recent articles, even though we're still not in a Gordon Chang-style collapse situation, China's economic malaise is real, and for some very concrete reasons.