China’s National Peoples’ Congress (NPC) meeting kicked off today with Premier Li’s announcing its first Government Work Report. It’s definitely an interesting day for all China watchers and investors, as we are all looking for clues in China’s upcoming plans to prop up an economy that is grappling with deflation, a property market slump, heightened debt […]
Originally published December 2022. Investors should be concerned about socio-political development in China as it has profound economic and geopolitical implications that will reverberate around the world. The acts of public defiance in China witnessed a couple of weeks ago might have caught many commentators and investors by surprise, but what is more flabbergasting to […]
Originally published October 2022. How it could elevate role of Vietnam and robotics in global supply chain China’s population reached 1.45 billion in 2022 and is forecast to plateau around these levels early next decade, according to the UN projections. Thereafter, China will join the bulk of the developed world in population decline, which poses […]
How an obscure US firm profited from triggering the Indian giant’s price plunge. A few weeks ago, Gautam Adani was indisputably India’s richest man. Now his fortune is slipping away as the stocks of his many companies crash, thanks to the efforts of a relatively obscure US company named after the 1937 Hindenberg disaster (in which […]
Originally published August 2022. Published in 1946, the novel Orphan of Asia, by Taiwanese author Wu Zhou-liu, tells the story of Hu Tai-ming. Born in Japan-occupied Taiwan, brought up in the Chinese tradition, Hu is forced into the Japanese educational system. Eventually he finds himself excluded by the Japanese, and witnessing the horror of the […]
Originally published June 2022. (Even though it might eventually cease to exist.) Japan’s death rate exceeds its birth rate, prompting speculation that the country could eventually cease to exist if nothing is done to change this. In addition, Japan’s ageing and shrinking population may also raise questions about the long-term prospects of its economy. However, […]
Somewhat quiet on the (Far Eastern) front The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, beginning 24 February, has turned the Russian energy trade upside down. Meanwhile, McKinsey estimates that Chinese demand for gas will double to 526 billion cubic meters (bcm) by 2035. In this blog post I will review Sino-Russian energy in 2022 with an emphasis on […]
Implications for real assets demand. The repercussions of Covid-19 will continue to be felt long after the final phases of the pandemic are over. Assumptions that are underpinned by real assets secular demand drivers require revising. At CBRE Investment Management, we describe ourselves as structurally driven investors. Simply put, we look for long-run structural changes […]
On 30 June 2022, purchasers of Hengda Longting apartments in Jingdezhen City, Jiangxi Province, issued a public notification of intending to stop paying home loans (qiangzhi tingdai gaozhi shu). The notification represented over 900 purchasers of the apartments. It disclosed that building work had stopped since 1 June and construction workers had been paid only twice in 2022; […]
Marunouchi: the quest for perfection Perfectionism is very important in Japan. In the collective national quest to slowly achieve the immaculate, Tokyo’s Marunouchi district may come close to that goal. Whenever designers sketch out future business districts, the idealised result might look like Marunouchi today. During my stay there last week, I saw what looked […]
