You don’t have to hold a first class degree in Economics or be a top HSBC analyst with a $5 million annual salary to predict that Hong Kong’s property prices will continue to rocket in 2015 and for many years to come.
Each time China’s central bank announces its own quantitative easing program, you may smile, as any property you are now sitting on has risen at least another 10 percent.
It is simple arithmetic. If China launches 1 trillion yuan to boost its economy—a magic trick it has learned from the US—that sum of newly printed piles of banknotes is expected to be pumped into a new round of infrastructure construction. New highways, new bridges, new high-speed railways, and of course, new shopping malls and empty apartment blocks that could end up as “ghost cities” in a few years.
But the Chinese QE is not quite the same as its counterparts in the US, Britain, Europe or Japan. QE in the western sense means all newly issued cash will flow into private banks and the markets to fill up holes in account books or stimulate employment. But in China, which boasts a more successful and efficient “Beijing model” in which the Communist Party dictates all powers, at least 30 percent of that sum can be expected to be channeled into the private pockets of Communist Party officials at all levels. The West calls it corruption, but in the Chinese cultural context, it is normal lubrication of all components in a single-party power engine, guaranteeing the efficiency of urban constructions.
When this 300 billion RMB begins to cramp pockets, it will have to be urgently redirected into safe reservoirs. Officials can deposit some in their local banks where the managers are their cousins or nephews, or simply store a part of it underneath the floor of their luxury house—Xu Caihou, a vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission who has just been locked up and purged, had a ton of cash in different currencies dug up in his home.
In general, it is highly risky to hide your cash in China. Hong Kong is the nearest reservoir to the deluge of the Chinese rivers. There are underground conduits to help to channel out the cash, which flows to nowhere but property. It goes to Hong Kong, Sydney, Vancouver, Los Angeles and London, where young rich Chinese scions are also sent to boarding schools. But in Hong Kong, being the biggest Chinatown, property prices take the lead.