The Yellow Peril retreats, for now

The life of a realtor is not an easy one

Chinese buyers for U.S. real estate would now prefer not to.

Capping a five-year real-estate binge, Chinese nationals surpassed Canadian snowbirds as the top foreign buyers of U.S. homes for the year that ended in March—the most recent annual data—scooping up everything from $500,000 condos in New Jersey to $3 million vacation homes in California to $13 million Manhattan condos.

But in recent weeks, some Chinese buyers have started to pull back, scared off by China’s stock-market selloff, slowing economic growth, currency devaluation and tightened restrictions on capital outflows. On Friday, China’s benchmark stock index fell by 5.5%, its biggest daily slide since August, as Beijing authorities stepped up a crackdown on the securities industry.

Chinese and other foreign buyers have helped reshape the American real-estate market, driving up prices for homes in Southern California suburbs, skyscrapers looming over New York’s Central Park and residences in such college towns as Cambridge, Mass., brokers and economists said.

Buyers from mainland China, as well as those from Hong Kong and Taiwan, spent $28.6 billion in the year that ended in March on U.S. home purchases, according to estimates by the Realtors. While that accounts for just over 2% of American home purchases by dollar volume, the percentage is much greater in the high end of the housing market in such cities as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and, increasingly, Miami, according to the association.

Chinese residents began buying American homes in large numbers about five years ago, driven largely by growing wealth and a desire to safeguard savings against political instability, brokers and economists said.

American homes looked like a bargain after the real-estate crash, drawing busloads of Chinese buyers to see properties in California and Manhattan. To many, it seemed “a gold mine everywhere,” said Calvin Lo, a real-estate agent at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices in Southern California.

To sate that demand, U.S. real-estate brokerages now hold conferences with thousands of attendees in China, and such Chinese property portals as Juwai.com, advertise U.S. properties and other country listings. “Over the long term, the stock-market gyrations reinforce preference for international investment,” said Simon Henry, co-founder of Juwai.com.

Chinese individuals are limited to annual overseas investments equal to about $50,000. For years, Chinese have surpassed that limit, in part, by funneling money through relatives and employees. In recent months, the government has made it tougher to transfer money abroad, said real-estate brokers in both countries.

“It’s like barbarians at the gate,” said John Chang, a real-estate broker with Re/Max in New York City. Chinese families want to buy, he said, “but they just can’t get the money out.”

 

Google proves it’s smarter than every Democrat on earth

Parents, demand your tuition payments back

A low hurdle, admittedly, but Glenn Reynolds reports that “Google has  deemed Bernie Sander’s economic plan a “phishing scam”

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernard Sanders’ economic plan triggered Gmail’s “phishing scam” antenna, with the mail system saying the senator’s liberal campaign promises — including lower prescription drug prices and free college for all — sound like frauds.

“Be careful with this message. It contains content that’s typically used to steal personal information,” Gmail said in a bright red warning box that appeared at the top of a message sent by Mr. Sanders’ campaign Friday, laying out his “Agenda for Working Families.”

“This message could be a scam,” Gmail says in its page explaining why it flagged the message as a “phishing scam.” Phishing is a specific type of spam email that scammers use to try to entice users to disclose bank accounts or other sensitive information. . . .

Ira Winkler, president of Secure Mentem and a cybersecurity specialist, said the campaign likely triggered Gmail’s filters because it included phrases that spammers use to try to sell prescription drugs and by offering things free of charge — in this case, the promise to pay for education at public colleges and universities.

Reynolds: “Those bots may be onto something. People who promise you lots of free stuff are usually running some kind of scam.”

Hypothesis disproven

Hard at work at the fieldstone School

NYC Ethical Culture Fieldstone School to 6th Graders: “The swastika is a symbol of peace”

Outside school:

“Masked men attack cyclist, carve swastika in his forehead”.

Make that Eleven

Top ten reasons to vote for Ted Cruz

Mike Bloomberg: Ted Cruz says some of the stupidest things I’ve heard.

Thank you

There are a couple of problems with this

Welcome to our country – can we build you a mosque?

Not Thanksgiving, at least at the Fountain household, where John was able to come across the Casco Bridge and celebrate at Nancy’s. We had a good time laughing, reminiscing , and enjoying each other’s company, and a great meal.

No, I’m talking about our fearless leader, who yesterday claimed that this country’s Pilgrims “were refugees too” , invited to shore by friendly savages, and that therefore we should bring in a million Syrians or so and welcome them in turn.

The idea that the Indians welcomed the Pilgrims has been denounced by the Left for decades, and there’s no doubt that, had Donald Trump been on the shores of New Haven to greet them, we all would still be speaking Dutch in the Old Country or our few survivors would be grunting in Squanto.

But let’s ignore that, and go with our leader’s argument: A group of people fleeing oppression come to a foreign land, carrying with them their own culture and values and religion, and set about imposing them on the people they find; they convert the natives when they can and kill the rest. They breed like rabbits and spread across the land;  (if we had a perfect parable going, the Pilgrims would have, in addition to all that, demanded that the Indians tax themselves to support a life of leisure for the new “refugees”, but never mind).

So where are the Indians today? Pushed from their land and dumped in isolated, desolate camps where they’re drinking themselves to death and breeding generations of papooses suffering from fetal-alcohol  syndrome.

Obama thinks we should repeat this process, to ourselves? What is he, an enemy of our country?