A brief touch-down on Planet Earth

Just time for a quick, freakish and nightmarish glimpse of reality to intrude today. A shadowy Mainland conglomerate that no-one seems to own wonders how to cover the US$3.5 billion it blew on some Hong Kong land earlier this year, and find another US$10 billion to build ultra-high-class exclusive concrete boxes upon it.

The conglomerate has US$90 billion in debt already, so you could argue that, hey – it’s just a bit more. But banks are, as the Bloomberg URL puts it, ‘leery’. The apparently anonymous ownership of the murky conglomerate overlaps in some notional Venn diagram with the thuggish totalitarian Communist Party kleptocracy that controls China, which implies that it is fine to lend away. But then again, maybe Beijing has had some tiffs with its mystery moguls who pay bizarre prices for humdrum assets, and is nervous about unspeakable levels of debt in the overall system, so the banks have second thoughts.

One option is for HNA to re-sell some of the land. Since we are indulging in reality here, it would inevitably be for less than they paid for it. In slightly more human-scale terms of tragic humiliation, this would be like a socialite publicly taking a just-bought diamond-encrusted Louis Vuitton handbag to Milan Station because her credit cards were cancelled. Obviously it won’t happen (the article mentions alternatives). And the safe, comforting, usual fantasy-weirdness of Mainland political-business elites, their physics-defying financing arrangements, and extraterrestrial real-estate valuations will resume.

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7 Responses to A brief touch-down on Planet Earth

  1. Land property land property
    Property land property land
    La la la la

    If you could sing it, I’d love the sheet music.

    You honkies crack me up.

    Later honey…

  2. Chinese Netizen says:

    Commies make the world go around
    The world go around
    The world go around
    Commies make the world go around
    It makes the world go ’round.

    A Yuan, a buck, a Euro, or a pound
    A Yuan or a pound
    A Yuan or a pound
    Is all that makes the world go around,
    That clinking clanking Chinky sound
    Can make the world go ’round.

    *small additions here and there. Naturally.

  3. dimuendo says:

    Bring back Know Not, please.

  4. Stephen says:

    The link was a bit of a shock to the digestive system ! Bloomberg Asian American Money Honey’s, in harsh east coast nasal tones, blathering on about how 20,000 mainland Chinese, currently in Hong Kong on work permits, are able to afford a HNA concrete box ! Ladies consider the politics please. If HNA were to collapse would it cause a existence crisis for the CCP? No ? Then move on nothing to see here. Yes ? Then the BOC and others will throw money at it until Xi Dada is stuffed, mounted and displayed in Tiananmen Square.

  5. Donny Almond says:

    See ? That was what I was afraid of: eventually it would become a bad poetry contest. Please, no more ‘poetry’. My constipation is bad enough as it is. Last week -I shit you not- I had a dump that looked like Al Zeman, grinning horse teeth and all.

    No more poetry.

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