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One Thing Colombia and Canada Have in Common
By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at
Driving the back streets of Medellin a few weeks ago I found it interesting to see the various little pockets to the city. In the poor parts of town I noticed on a couple of occasions taxi drives running their vehicles on empty. I've seen this before in countries where there is a lack of sufficient working capital to be able to keep the tank full. Disposable income is low or non-existent...
There are, however, pockets where we found the burgeoning middle class which give credence to the statistical numbers. Here there are delightful tree lined neighborhoods, boutique art stores, restaurants, coffee shops and Land Cruisers beginning to cramp up the streets of Medellin. Colombia has indeed a rising and growing middle class, though there still exists a large disparity in wealth.
One measure used by economists to determine this ratio of rich to poor is the Gini coefficient. A Gini score of 0 would mean a perfect distribution of income and expenditure in a society and a number of 100 represents absolute inequality. This has important ramifications as often there exists a higher propensity for civil unrest as the number gets higher. Conversely the lower this number, the more equal and oftentimes stable a country. Colombia, according to the World Bank, sport a score of 53.5, though this is taken from 2012. I suspect this figure is actually lower today - it's been falling each year since early 2000s.
The trend appears to be going in the right direction...
We've had our eye on Colombia for some time. One reason we haven't jumped in earlier is that we've been cognizant that it's a resource economy and when we first began taking notes we were already a decade into the resource bull market. Not optimum!
Buying into a market without assessing the risks is never a good idea. As we've been discussing for the last 12 months or so there is an underlying trade at work: the unwinding of the USD carry trade which saw capital pour into resources. As the resource bull rolled over, capital infusions reduced and then began to reverse. We're of the opinion that this is still in its infancy.
The collapse of Chinese demand and the dollar bull market has already wiped something like $5 trillion of commodity driven revenues from the global system. The repercussions are only beginning to be felt. This promises to get really interesting!
As recently discussed, Chile is a great example of the risks we're concerned about with respect to all emerging markets.
Chile is tied to copper much in the same way Colombia's economy is tightly tied to oil. When the demand for copper is high then the Chilean economy and peso does well. Chile is a poster child country which saw a lot of people piling into at the top of the resource boom and as such the currency became overvalued even more than it would have if you were to play the currency by understanding copper.
This scared us and never really made sense as all too often what we saw when we looked was foreign buying by retail investors. Retail investors for the most part are unsophisticated, act spontaneously without critical thought and fail to do their own research. This is even more true in markets outside of their own borders. When I see foreign money coming into an economy, and while this isn't necessarily a bad omen, when that foreign money is retail investors it's a red flag and the risk reward is rarely good.
Case in point. I'd often see comparisons made between real estate in the US with real estate in emerging markets without considering differing credit conditions, vastly different cost structures, income levels or political climes, or even more stunningly dumb, comparisons made with agricultural land prices with those in the US on price alone. You just can't do that!
Yield matters, access to capital matters, and you'll find the yields on farmland in developed countries are typically multiples of that in emerging markets. There is a reason that farmland in emerging markets often sells at a discount to developed world farmland. For example, the average dairy cow in the US has a yield 5x that of one in Mexico. Investors who fail to stop to analyse this are doomed to buy into all sorts of silly ideas and end up getting completely hosed.
Colombian peso over the past 2 years...
... and the South African rand during the same period
With that in mind we have been looking at Colombia. What is of interest to us is real estate in Medellin, a city that is growing rapidly and has more infrastructure being built than any other in the country. For me the most important risk is that of the capital markets which translates into the availability of credit and this heavily influences the pricing of risk. Pricing of risk always translates itself into the currency and that is where our biggest risk and greatest potential lies.
Let's Go Back First and Start with the Capital Markets
The 1970s and 80s saw some truly impressive growth in Miami. Swanky condominiums, 5 star hotels, luxury car dealerships - all of these were built on Colombian drug money. Specifically, the Medellin cartel who supplied up to 90% of the US cocaine market and 80% of the global cocaine market. The cartel was so incredibly profitable that it was bringing in more than $70M a day at its height. They were making so much money that they were spending over $2,000 per day on little rubber bands to hold the cash together, with millions of dollars which rotted and were eaten by rats.
Miami was essentially offshore financed by Colombia. The capital flows ran all the way back to the coca fields in Colombia. While drug trafficking still exists today it's a mere fraction of its former self. Today instead Colombia relies on commodities such as oil and coffee with the energy sector accounting for 8% of GDP and 40% of revenues in the balance of payments and about 50% of total exports. What this tells me is that much of this is financed much more by the US. Credit lines today run to NYC not the coca fields of the Medellin cartel. Funding of this nature is true of most emerging markets who enjoy immature credit markets and limited domestic capital. The risk equation is substantially different.
During the resource bull private sector debt in emerging market corporates exploded. Historically it's been unusual for such funding to be conducted in anything other than dollars. Now we have a perfect storm: collapsing commodity prices translating into a collapse in revenues for these corporates. As they pare back exposure they do so by buying back their dollar shorts. As the dollar strengthens they very quickly find themselves unable to pay their debts. It's going to happen! We fully expect a massive blow up in emerging markets. I mentioned recently that Turkey and South Africa looked pretty precarious and this morning I woke to find that Turkey's currency is going into free fall, violence has erupted on the streets and the government has begun arresting journalists. Does it spread?
What This Means for Colombia?
In speaking with people in Colombia I found a complacency amongst most of them. The same sort of complacency that existed in Southeast Asia even as the Asian crisis was taking hold.
When you don't have control over your own credit markets you're vulnerable to global capital flows and this is where Colombia is at risk. The flip side of this is that domestic credit is still nascent. Only 72.5% of Colombians have a bank account and fewer than 3% have a mortgage. During the 2008 crisis Colombia fared very well though if you recall oil hadn't fall out of bed quite so spectacularly so the considerations right now are somewhat different.
The hedge fund manager in Manhattan, Tokyo or London doesn't care much about whether or not Colombia, Chile, South Africa, etc. are sound fundamentally. His VAR (value at risk) models begin to blow out and he hits the sell button. This becomes a self reinforcing cycle. It's quite beautiful to watch.
The risk here, the single biggest risk, is the currency. Get it wrong and it's incredibly easy to be wiped out. I think we've got at least 2-3 more years of devaluation ahead. Oil and the Colombian peso are likely to stay low for some period of time.
At our recently concluded Seraph meet in Medellin we heard from Felipe Campos at Alianza Valores. I was really impressed with Felipe's grounded approach and thorough research which extends beyond the narrow borders of Colombia. His presentation included this chart below which really highlights the dependence on energy that Colombia has. This will continue to be reflected in the peso.
Another really fascinating chart was how closely linked the Canadian dollar is to the Colombian peso. I'd never realised how closely tied the two economies are. This also provides a means of hedging Colombian exposure in the currency markets. The COP is tough to hedge for retail guys and even when you're hedging a $50M+ position, it's still expensive. Hedge with the loonie?
To all those Canadians who suffer under the misguided idea that Canada has a diversified economy, this above chart shows how closely tied both these economies are. The connective tissue? Oil.
As long as oil stays low, the peso remains under pressure.
This will pressure the economy and we expect to find some truly exceptional opportunities in a country that has so many good things going for it in the long term. The time to get your ducks in a line is well beforehand because when the opportunities start showing up two things happen:
- Your emotional part of your brain will tell to stay away, and
- You'll have a tough time raising any capital because people will be looking at terrible headline news and will be reluctant to invest.
We're preparing now. If we're wrong, we'll know within the next couple of years and we'll still be sitting on cash. If we're correct, we will be buying prize assets for cents on the dollar because while we are very very long the dollar right now we're not so naive to think that this will last forever. Like previous dollar bull markets it'll turn around and this time it may not come back as the problems in the US financial position are unsustainable.
- Chris
"Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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Given the quality of the responses, I feel that this was an informative article. I do not really understand its true purpose - buy real estate in Colombia - the author commented that he had not done that.
My South American hands-on experience is in Brazil (20 years and continuing) and Chile and South America.
The guy buying Fincas in Colombia reminds me of a NYC guy, who retired from big group concert tour business at age 32. He bought a run-down property on a beautiful river in a temperate rain forest of Patagonia, Chile. There, he and his girlfriend attempted to "restore" and convert a barn into a large home. He had imported vehicles and machinery to do the work himself - he is so remote and isolated that he could not get a contractor to do the work. Pioneering the land - a very tough slog. I was fly fishing with a friend and camped on the farm on two occasions, one year after the other. The NYC guy had no plan and was teaching himself along the way. The girlfriend tied of the grind and left. What he has there is 1,000 acres of beauty - but something that only a very rich person would buy to build on for a multi-generational hold. There is nothing wrong with what he was doing - he just underestimated the difficulty of the project.
A few years ago Pat Buchannan said that under the NWO, the US economy is destined to become more and more like Canada's, i.e., a natural resources exploitive export economy.....grain, lumber, pulp, mineral ores, etc.
Gist of this article:
I'm stuck with all this unsaleable real estate in a country that is about to become a crushing hellhole.
Come on down and help a brotha out.
We've not yet invested and we're not selling we're getting prepared to invest. Read the article before opening your mouth
Or in the case of Canada, come on up and help a hoser out.
Sorry, eh.
Listen, I have an investment in a small biz in Colombia for 3.5 years, just sold out, lost 30% [vs. 3 years ago] of my pesos in conversion to USD due to this peso meltdown. It's going to get a whole lot worse if oil doesn't turn around.
Putting aside the drug trade, Colombia is not diversified. In no specific order: tourism [down], oil [yikes!], domestic consumption [off only slightly but only because too many Colombians live month to month and can't get any lower] and something almost no one mentions about Colombia... the sale of food and like to Venezuela. Each year Colombia sells over a billion USD equivalent of food to it's self-lobotormized Chauvista Bolivarian Revolution neighbor Venezuela. Venezuela imports over 70% of al consumables and that number keeps going up ever year due to the Venezuelan choices. Venezuelans [with jobs] can't afford to feed themselves or things aren't available anywhere but on the black market. Current inflation I read is hovering at 69%. Venezuela is melting down and it's going to hurt Colombia a lot! Growing food and exporting it is a huge industry for Colombia and employs a lot more people than oil, directly. Oil has financed a huge infrastructure boom but that boom is griding down with oil off previously levels and no horizon in sight on return of oil prices.
Tourism will slow as USA / Canada / Euro economies grind down.
Colombia is an interesting and rewarding place to live on the cheap, some of the hottest women on the planet and you can live a nice life for no more than a 1K USD per month with world class climate BUT as said in the article, real estate in Medellin, has been a function of oil money and recent, newly available credit that Colombians had no access to 10 years ago. Credito, Credito, Credito! In this pueblo we see droves of Paisas riding the 10K USD quad UTVs in from MEdellin to play in the mountains and mud for the weekends. All fun stuff and good for the economy but 70% of Colombians couldn't pay for that ATV with 100% of the entire annual income. Credito, Credito, Credito!
Just 18 months ago our streets were buzzing with teenagers riding motos every night, bike bought on Credito, Credito, Credito! The streets have become amazinging quiet and tranquil for over 9 months. The motos are gone!
The signs are everywhere, sales down 40% from two years ago and have been that way bottomed now for a full year.
Don't be coming down the Pablo's old town thinking you can buy yourself income, that day has passed. Wait another year or two and you should be able to buy stuff on the cheap, so far the Colombians are still in denial. Haven't hit bottom yet. I'm bailing to SE Asia where the food is 10x better and the cost of living is same or even cheaper than here in CO.
About six months ago I ran into a Gringo kid who was buying up fincas, aka farms / ranches up in the mountains, left and right telling me 'look how cheap these farms are! I think this place will be the next San Miguel de Allende!' After he bought two at 15% premiums he had a line of folks trying to sell him more fincas....Hahahah!'
I tried just once to make him think about the conclusions he was making as he had lived his entire life in USA and was comparing everything to the USA on price....what a nice young man but hope he has a deep 401K or a Trust Fund because he ain't getting that money back any time soon...at least not in whole.
Buckle up everyone, this downhill ride is just beginning to pick up speed.
+1
The US dollar is king at the moment so it make sense the fellow buying farms would think they are dirt cheap by comparison but world-wide deflation won't be very kind about allowing any profits on those anytime soon.
Thanks for the insights. These are the type of on-the-ground posts are especially valuable.
Is this the same Colombia with a civil war of 50 years? With thousands of political prisioners? What a bunch of BS.
You need to study your recent history son. Trust me, they have more going for them then just oil.
In a commodity-based economy, only an idiot would keep more than two weeks' expenses in the local currency. If the commodity price falls, you lose your job just as your savings take a hit from currency devaluation. If the commodity price rises, so does your income, giving you a chance to stockpile more hard currency.
Don't open dollar accounts at a local bank either. Banks often shut their doors in a crisis, so you might wait months or years to get your dollars back, and they'll be converted to local scrip at the old exchange rate.
Words in ignorance easy to spew. It'v obvious you have never spent any time in Latin America or like. You think they can run down the bank window at the Banco Colombia and swap out pesos for Franca de Suiz or a couple of Kruggerands... Hahaha.
Duh!
Canada should relace its Maple Leaf on the flag with a Sativa weed symbol.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/no-the-marijuana-flag-isnt-the-...
Change the colour to green.
Yes, Herdee, except change the sativa leaf to the indica leaf, because Cannabis indica was first criminalized in Canada in 1923.
That is currently the logo/flag of the Canadian Marijuana Party:
http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=pol&dir=par&document=index&...
One big diff is Columbian gals are hot! Ask any secret service fellow.
Pal's comment
below concurs:
In Canada, Montréal seems to have the most pretty women, especially since the cosmopolitan variety is awesome!
They forgot about BC BigBud and the huge weed industry that provides weed by the ton to the U.S.
Herdee, while that was the situation previously, especially during the earlier 2000s, that is no longer as much the case now. Once upon a time, pot prohibition in the USA was about three times more intense than in Canada, and so, the price of pot in the USA was about three times greater than in Canada. During those times, there was lots of profit from exporting Canadian bud to the USA. However, that is not nearly as much the case now. Cannabis in Canada became even more criminalized, with more mandatory minimum sentences under the Harper Government, while cannabis in the USA was even sort of legalized in some states. (Of course, there are huge differences in both different regions of Canada, as well as in the USA.) Overall, the price of pot in the USA is no longer so much higher than it used to be in Canada, and therefore, the exporting of Canadian marijuana to the USA has been diminished.
But nevertheless, pot is more popular in Canada than most other comparable countries, and the black market for that is surely greater than ten billion Canadian dollars per year.
I was impressed by that chart correlating the Canadian dollar with the Colombian peso, and I agreed with the view, relatively speaking, that both are a "country that has so many good things going for it in the long term."
BUT, I felt that the conclusion overstated the positive:
"Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca, who also wrote that:
"Increases are of sluggish growth,
but the way to ruin is rapid."
http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.ca/2011/08/seneca-effect-origins-of-coll...
The Seneca effect: why decline is faster than growthhttp://freeonlinesurveys.com/s/ntVxQlDf
When will the population of Homo Sap start to decrease?My intuitive guesses as follows:
The human population would start decreasing around 2030.
The maximum population would get before that is ~8 billion.
Once the Dieoff begins, how long will it take
for ~half the maximum population to die off?
My guess choice I clicked: 11-20 years.
My views are based upon diminishing returns
from exponential growth based on strip-mining,
that will trigger severe human conflicts, & then,
that those human conflicts shall become worse,
related self-fulfilling vicious spirals, that would
go BEYOND objective diminishing returns,
When depletion of natural resources
reach critical thresholds that, OVERALL,
the human population IS DECREASING,
then, the human conflicts driven by THAT
will rapidly escalate to become way worse.
From that perspective, I am guessing
it would be about 15 more years until
the total human population decreases.
Moreover, once things get BAD,
then it is a "Seneca Cliff" time:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sATbjCWqtMM/VTPAaAmr0UI/AAAAAAAAOYY/WjuaeXnxrp...
Presuming that Seneca Cliff is about right,
then I am guessing that the 4th line from
the right of that graph is about in 2030,
and then, 20 years later is 2nd line in.
I wish I was wrong by an order of magnitude or more!
The intellectual problems with such guesses about the future are primarily due to the nature of the exponential growth of the strip-mining of the planet's natural resources, driven by the debt engine treadmills, where the ways that governments ENFORCE FRAUDS by privately controlled banks required that the vast majority of people be conditioned to deliberately ignore the principle of the conservation of energy, as well as deliberately misunderstand the concept of entropy in the most absurdly backward ways possible.
Professor Al Barlett stated:
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
http://www.albartlett.org/
Articles like the one above republished on Zero Hedge, which attempt to provide "actionable intelligence" in order to take advantage of trends, in my opinion, tend to be taking too much for granted the relatively short to medium trends, while not paying enough attention to the longer term trends. Everything we are doing operates inside of nested frames of reference, like Russian Dolls or Chinese Boxes.
ANYTHING THAT SHAKES UP A BIGGER FRAME OF REFERENCE AUTOMATICALLY SHAKES UP ALL OF THE SMALLER FRAMES OF REFERENCE NESTED INSIDE OF THAT!
Population will begin decreasing 2030-2050 due to efforts to rein in reproduction. Barring a general war (an assumption to be sure) there will be no die off.
In any case no die off from reduced resources or ecological concerns.
I hope you are right, MalteseFalcon. I would like to believe that, but I can not. Too bad, but there is very little chance that I would live long enough to find out, since I am old enough now to most probably have died before then anyway.
As my reply to durablefaith already outlined, it is precisely because I believe that there SHALL develop various kinds of increasingly out of control wars, triggered by a slew of different overlapping problems, those are the main reasons while I have dismal expectations for the future. My predictions for the future are primarily based upon human beings continuing to primarily behave in ways based upon evil stupidities.
Rm. I am confused. Did you sell your at account to a troll? The global population will of course begin to drop by 2030 but not because of natural processes or resource scarcity. It will drop as global governance flexes its depopulation tactics under the flimsy moral cover of the 2030 vision that is being launched this month.
Overall, durablefaith, I agree that is NOT simply an issue of natural resources, but rather, of how those are perceived by people, which has had a long history. That history has become profoundly perverse. Social successfulness became based on backing up lies with violence, which now is primarily governments ENFORCING FRAUDS by privately controlled banks.
I regard the human artificial selection systems as necessarily operating within the natural selection systems. (An aspect of the degree to which those artificial selection systems have become psychotic is the degree to which many people do not perceiving things that way.) I am not sure there is that much of a difference. The natural pressures are channeled through human systems. The more intense the natural pressures, the more intense the human pressures. What were chronic political problems inherent in the nature of life, which drove there to be scarcities, since population tends to grow until those points are reached, morphed during the industrial revolutions to become systems of artificial scarcities, inside systems of artificial selection, all of which were based on legalized lies and violence. (E.g., criminalizing cannabis, or alcohol prohibition, etc., etc. ...)
THE BIG PROBLEMS now are the entrenched psychological and political habits that everyone, from the ruling classes to those they rule over, have so deeply ingrained. Whatever the theoretical alternatives may well be (& there seem to be an abundance of them) NONE of those can actually work without changing the death controls that back up the debt controls. However, since the currently established combined money/murder systems are ALREADY based on the maximum possible frauds/deceits, and those systems of debt slavery, backed by wars based on deceits, have driven there to ALREADY be debt insanities, where so much of the public "money" supplies were made out of nothing to gamble with, and collectively those bets add up to at least a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the actually physical economy, the potential for severe social storms to blow through, and psychotic breakdowns to overlap, is TREMENDOUS.
I AGREE with you, durablefaith, that Agenda 21 is apparently being pumped up by the Agenda aimed at 2030. Both of those are the work of professional liars and immaculate hypocrites, with evil ulterior purposes. Therefore, in some senses, I agree with you that there is NOT an absolute, objective, lack of resources, but rather, a lack of resources able to keep the established social pyramid systems growing in the ways that they were accustomed to, and want to continue to do ...
But nevertheless, the ruling classes ARE carrying through their agenda, which is based on them continuing to control civilization through being able to back up their lies with violence. So far, there is nothing substantial to demonstrate that they are not going to continue to try to do that. Therefore, as we run into relative diminishing returns of the natural resources that they need to keep their systems growing, their "solutions" to those problems are to mass murder the majority of the human population.
That will NOT happen, as you appear to say, durablefaith, due to some absolute lack of alternatives, but rather, due to most other alternatives being politically impossible to actually implement. Some of the reasons for that continue to be that the controlled opposition groups that surround the ruling classes do NOT provide realistic solutions based on better death control systems, but rather, tend to promote the impossible ideals which assert there should be be no death control systems, or none that human beings are consciously aware of operating.
In order to develop and implement any genuine solutions to the problems, there would necessarily have to be alternative death control systems, at the central core of all other alternative systems. Hence, while there appears to be an abundance of creative alternatives, the continuing political impossibilities of negotiating better death control systems results in the chronic default back to the worst systems, based on the successfulness of the maximum possible deceits and treacheries with respect to those systems.
Anyway, with those qualifications, I agree with your criticisms, durablefaith. I did not mean to imply that there was some absolute lack of resources, nor any absolute lack of creative alternatives. Rather, what I was predicting was based on the practical, politically impossibilities of actually implementing anything significantly different than the already existing systems based on evil stupidities.
Although I do not know much about the political situation in South America, I do know a lot about the political situation in North America. I know that the current Canadian elections provide NOTHING in the ways of genuine creative alternatives, but only a range of different brands of the biggest bullies' bullshit. It is politically impossible to change anything significant in Canada, due to the degree to which the established systems are locked into their vicious spirals through the POLITICAL FUNDING being overwhelmingly dominated by tiny minorities, while the vast majority of the people continue to act like incompetent political idiots.
There is no doubt that the vast majority of "We the People" in North America act like Zombie Sheeple, who are being fleeced to exhaustion, while they are being set up to be slaughtered. As far as I can tell, it is politically impossible for any genuine opposition to the established systems to be able to emerge, because of the degree to which not only would the ruling classes do whatever they could that was possible and necessary to prevent that, but also, the vast majority of those being ruled over do not want that kind of change either, but rather, want to continue to indulge in believing in bullshit.
Therefore, more and more I conclude that we are running out of time to change in any better ways, rather than default down through crazy collapses into chaos, when the runaway debt insanities provoke runaway death insanities. It seems to me that the most significant preparations for that are those being made by the ruling classes to strive to remain in control, even through those death insanities. I would like to indulge in the political science fiction that there may emerge opportunities for better death control system to emerge out of that, however, that mostly seems like political fantasies, SINCE, WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING IS STILL BASED ON STRIP-MINING THE PLANET'S NATURAL RESOURCES.
NOBODY knows what happens to systems of globalized electronic frauds, backed by atomic bombs, when those self-destruct, as runaway debt insanities, provoking death insanities. Many Zero Hedge articles are worthwhile in perhaps getting a few more people to think about the established monetary system, and how completely crazy and corrupt to the core that system obviously becomes, IF one thinks about it, rather than continues to take it for granted. However, as long as there are not enough people able and willing to face that facts that money is measurement backed by murder, then there can not be enough realistic resolutions to the real problems.
So why are you telling everyone else about it?
This is disinformation and propoganda paid for by Wall Street.
If the economy collapses, it won't be because of China like this author claims, it will be because Wall street has looted the public purse and needs a scapegoat, and presstitutes such as this author will gladly sell out the public for a few measley bucks, pathetic.
Wall Street has no mechanism by which it can "loot" my belongings and wealth. Only governments can do that. Perhaps you were refering to Wall Street using government to loot?
Please be specific. My bank has never stolen anything from me, my government steals from me on a weekly basis; I believe you have your enemies mixed up a bit.
Which pill was that?
For example, Hank Paulson was a Wall street looter placed in Government to rescue insolvent banks under threat of martial law.
Specific enough for you?
You made his point. In the abscence of government that theft would not have happened.
Hopefuly, Hank will find himself buried 10 feet deep in solid ice on the 7th level of hell remembering that he helped freeze millions of Americans out of their pensions, stock values & dreams.
That FX chart must just be coincidence...
Garbahje.
Any body who says Canada's economy is not diversified and compares directly with Columbia's is grossly misinformed.
You're right, Canada's economy does not depend on oil. We also have a great real estate boom, which is pumped up by... oh wait.
A real estate boom now underpinned by a falling currency. Prices are crashing skywards in Vancouver.
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/metro+vancouver+detached+home+prices+rise+proportion+diminishes/11336238/story.html?__lsa=6af2-b8e3
In relative terms, there is an unlimited amount of Chinese and Indians that want to move to the GVRD.
...until China/India implement stricter capital controls and all of a sudden, there will need to be 200 names on the property title instead of 20. This is the final blow-off top before the collapse of the HAM (Hot Asian Money) primed real estate bubble in Canada, Australia, NY, LA, London, etc.
Chinese investors looking for an unregulated place to launder their ill-gotten gains?