alon_honig

The problem with recovery rates is that they different by orders of magnitude across different borrowers and credit products (for example car loans are around 70%, industrials are a bit loweer at 40%-50%, and high yield credit cards are single digits) so if you have a random sample of credit products in a portfolio it will approximate 40%. What generally happens is that the bank will sell it off to a specialist distressed investor long before the bankruptcy event so 40% is both wrong and not a horrible number to go by.

And they still don't have clean tap water. Like anywhere. Even tier 1 cities. Outside of a few routes The high speed trains are less convient than airports (but due to subsidies much cheaper). Quality of construction is horrible and by local standards house prices are extremely high. Basic Healthcare is pretty good but many procedures (i.e. hospitalization) are out of reach for the majority of the population. White collar Fraud is rampant (my friend had his bank account frozen because his name sounds like someone else). Their top tier apps are often crashing (seriously Chinese people have all sorts of tricks to force reboot an app) and overall not up to western standards.

China is great but it is still a middle income country like Thailand or Malaysia. It's sheer size means that there will be pockets of innovation in a sea of what is overall suboar by western standards. There is definitely things that the west can learn from china (like the value of hard work and getting things done) and some of their tech (like batteries ) is leading edge but we have to put things in perspective. Every civilization will have it's advantages and disadvantages. There is no superior system. For the west (especially Europe) we need to embrace change. That is something that the Chinese truly lead the world.

I think people are putting far too much of an ideological lens on this ruling. As a "matter of law" this seems like the right decision. The supreme court is not a board of dictators making societal decisions based on their flavor of the day. Their job is too see if the ruling is consistent with all other laws we have and the normal function of a modern society. Pushing the envelope one way or another is not their job even if they end up doing that. At the end of the day the (elected) state governments have decided to create a policy that reflects what their constituents want. The supreme court job is not to question the logic of that. They did not run for office or win elections. They just need to make sure that what being done is reasonable and not violating any existing laws. As a tech guy I think these laws are stupid but this case was not the right hill to die on. What needs to happen is that these laws get enacted, costs and unintended consequences happen and THOSE parties sue on the supreme court on that basis

A similar thing happened to our condo. Fannie and Freddie wouldn't touch it despite no obvious outstanding issues. We didn't have a problem finding lenders who would give us a non conforming loan.

This is incorrect. Singapore is not a high censorship/low freedom society. You should visit countries before you trash them.

They probably got tipped off by something else that triggered a deeper investigation. It is not economical to do x-ray spectrometry on every single machine part leaving HK.