Posts by chris
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Polity: A week on from the housing controversy, in reply to Katharine Moody,
More from Vancouver:
In 2002, Canada introduced the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Financing Act, which requires real estate agents and others to report suspicious activity to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (Fintrac). Under the regulations, any large cash transactions involving amounts of $10,000 or more, whether suspicious or not, must be reported.
Duhaime, who heads Duhaime Law, said that reporting is simply not being done.
“During 2010 to 2013, there were 5.6 million real estate transactions in British Columbia,” Duhaime said. “We know from realtors in the luxury real estate market that there are numerous sales that are completed in all cash. Yet during that same period of time, real estate agents and developers in British Columbia reported very few large cash transactions to Fintrac.”
Duhaime warned that evasion can be dangerous.
“Those transactions are reported by banks to Fintrac, who have similar reporting obligations. So Fintrac is aware of situations when real estate agents take large cash payments but do not report it.”
Not reporting a suspicious transaction can result in a fine of $2 million. Not filing a large-cash transaction report can lead to fines of up to $1 million per occurrence.
If there is any dirty money being washed through Vancouver real estate, it’s being done not only secretively but also successfully.
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Polity: A week on from the housing controversy, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I read through that Katharine but I couldn’t find exactly what Tony Alexander means by “foreign buyer ban”. Do you have any idea what he’s suggesting?
He implies some kind of equivalence:
My reply included the point that we deny Kiwi employers access to the world’s potential pool of cheap migrants through migration policy
But buying property needn't involve anyone physically entering the country, so how could such a thing be enforced? His emphasis is clearly on the Chinese yet his vague proposition seems to wrest entirely on successfully policing Chinese culture itself, there is no precedent, successive Chinese administrations and dynasties have fought a losing battle with corruption and grey transactions for millennia.
The risks faced in illegally getting the kind of money we're seeing out of a country like China are considerably greater than anything our Government would impose.
Modern Chinese are accustomed to seeing a single city block developed to house 10,000+ people in the space of a year, there's no question all manner of things can be accomplished with the will. Successive New Zealand Governments have invested what must now be hundreds of millions of dollars on yacht races, and sports tournaments and convention centres, all to turn Auckland into an "international city".
And now the Chief Economist at New Zealand's second largest bank, a bank which offers a specialised Chinese language service for customers both here and abroad to facilitate money transfers, property insurance etc is proposing “foreign buyer ban”?
I assumed he might have had a better grasp of his clientele.
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Speaker: What I learned in Class: Should…, in reply to Tze Ming Mok,
in the 80s and 90s…Metallica
My limited understanding of boganry is that in order to qualify for full status under those parameters one had to have jumped on that bandwagon at any point up to and including …And Justice for All (1988)
Anyone applying later than the release of New Zealand number #1 “The Black Album” (1991)
required corequisite Sepultura, Slayer or Pantera, and tight black jeans.
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OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to Chris Waugh,
“Fucking Chinese! Fuck off back to China! You think you can fucking come here and have your fucking babies!
That’s incredibly distressing Chris. Rather naively, before arriving back I’d anticipated New Zealand might have made some progress.
Yes, we arrived back March 2.
Smack dab in the middle of this:
"He walked over to the [tourist’s] vehicle, opened the door and took the keys out, telling the driver he could collect them from the police station,” Smith said.
The Christchurch man showed Smith the video and the driver was issued an infringement notice for failing to drive within his lane. The rental company was contacted and the tourist’s authority to drive was revoked.
The incident comes as police seek an “agitated and angry” man, believed to be fuelled by drugs, who punched a tourist driver in the head and snapped his keys in Greymouth on Friday.
I hope you and family are acclimatising ok. We’ve had our ups and downs but nothing as repugnant as what you experienced, yet.
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OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Seriously? If it’s possible to do that, then it doesn’t sound to me like there’s any kind of effective ban on taking money out of China at all. Not that I’m saying there should be, of course, only that there isn’t.
You know how it is:
The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law. Virtually there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, one law for the cunning and another for the simple, one law for the forceful and another for the feeble, one law for the ignorant and another for the learned, one law for the brave and another for the timid, and within family limits one law for the parent and no law at all for the child.
George Bernard Shaw
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OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to chris,
The NZ Banking sector is neck deep in all of this.
I should probably add:
Chinese residents to convert $50,000 worth of renminbi to foreign currency annually.
The easiest bypass for that is to send RMB direct via those International money transfer companies you see around the place and convert it offshore.
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OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I don’t think it’ll have an impact on the proletariat for quite some time, they’re struggling to buy homes as is. It will afford the middle class more opportunity, but comparing:
current rules allow Chinese residents to convert $50,000 worth of renminbi to foreign currency annually.
with:
Individuals with net financial assets of at least Rmb1m ($161,000) will qualify for the programme, with total outbound investment limited to 50 per cent of the individual’s net assets.
I doubt it will do as much to stem the illegal transfers as one might expect or hope. From experience, due to the way these types of regulations are enforced or not, it’s easier to get money into New Zealand than to get money out of China – legally. The NZ Banking sector is neck deep in all of this.
The vast majority of the big money of the corrupt ruling elite has already fled.
Or perhaps we’re only seeing the tip of an iceberg.
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OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Thanks for that Katharine:
The most mind-numbing element of this story is the amount of money flooding out of China illegally. The numbers are obscene. Last week the major French bank, BNP Paribas, published an analysis of financial flow statistics for the first quarter of this year tabled by the People’s Bank of China. The French bank concluded that in the first three months of 2015 over $80 billion had been spirited out of China illegally.
It is necessary to question whether the Chinese offshore investment deregulation will create quite as marked a shift as Liam Dann surmised or whether we’re already well into the choppy seas.
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Polity: A week on from the housing controversy, in reply to David Hood,
I wish I knew how exactly they arrived at their number, because it is about 6% lower in 2006 ownership than the households by tenure data.
You're not alone.
I thought I had done a good job. The result showed a long term trend of declining home ownership that was supported by other evidence. But in March this year I got an email from an analyst at Statistics New Zealand, Angela, asking me how I had calculated the figures because their 2006 figure for home ownership was higher than mine. After much to-ing and fro-ing we discovered that we had used different denominators and had placed some variables in different tenure categories for different reasons. Angela recalculated the historical figures according to her methodology – our respective calculations were not too dissimilar until 1996, when our home ownership rates began to diverge – and we agreed that Te Ara would adopt these so we were consistent. The result underlined the productive relationship between Te Ara and Statistics New Zealand. It also highlighted the flexibility of web-based production in being able to make rapid content changes.
http://blog.teara.govt.nz/2014/06/03/the-joy-and-frustration-of-number-crunching/
