California retiree fund investing in China real estate
By Kenneth Rapoza, Forbes
How awful is China real estate? Apparently not bad enough. CalPERS, the pension fund for California state employees, pledged to invest around $530 million in two new China real estate funds.
The funds are run by ARA Asset Management, an Asian firm that specializes in management of publicly traded real estate investment trusts as well as private real estate funds. “We believe foreign investment in the Chinese real estate market will continue to grow over time, notwithstanding near-term challenges and some price volatility along the way,” Moses Song, CEO of ARA’s principal investments division, told China Daily last week.
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or CalPERS, has high performance standards for its managers, so ARA is “certainly expected to deliver results”, he said.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics said that of the 5.08 trillion yuan ($800 billion) invested in Chinese real estate between January and July, only 22.8 billion yuan came from foreign investment funds, down 54.3 percent from the same period in 2011 as foreigners shun the China real estate bubble.
The monthly average of foreign-fund investment in Chinese real estate through this year’s first seven months was 3.26 billion yuan compared to 6.78 billion yuan from Jan 1 to July 31, 2011, and 6.63 billion yuan during the same period of 2010.
Wrong! CalPERS is not the retirement system for California teachers. Why all the teacher bashing?
Please get the facts correct.
How many things did you buy this month that were Made In China? The US of A invests in China every day.
Mike,
We have fixed the Forbes story.
I guess how you define bashing we will be doing so to all the other state employees by fixing it.
Kathryn Reed, LTN publisher
Chinese made goods have enabled poor people to have access to items they never could have afforded before. WalMart and China have reduced the price of goods and increased the standard of living for millions of Americans. Rural poor could not have afforded TV’s or even toys for kids 40 years ago, now look.
It is not a stretch to state that being anti-China is anti-poor.
You have to buy products from china because union made American products are damn expensive and only the wall street brats can afford that.
I hit Carson city once a week,plus gas so much cheaper,”it’s worth the ride,plus escape the Tahoe blues of know it all sure nice.
The people down in the valley are friendly compared to the shop owners in South Shore.Not my imagination either.
I hitchhiked from the East Coast to California once in 1970 and drove back and forth numerous times on different routes, including one trip on the old Rt. 66. Every region, every state, every town, large and small, had a distinct personality. Starting in the 80’s the sell-out of the working middle class to the corporations started to change the landscape of America. What you would see today on those same trips is an awful soulless braindead sameness. A Walmart super-duper store, the fast-food poison choices, nothing but wingnut hate on the car radio and people struggling against the race to the bottom on wages/benefits, profits before people forces of the 1%ers. Bought and paid for legislation and trade policies by these oligarchs have destroyed us. It is not a stretch to say that being pro-China/anti-worker is despicably un-American. The fact that CalPers even thinks of investing in Chinese real estate is a result of corporate greed brought to you by the 30+ yr. failure of reaganomics.
You can’t buy USA products if shoe stores, like the one in the factory outlet mall, don’t carry any. I asked about their inventory and they said all china made except 4 styles made in so. america, no USA made.
Lou, why would you care? If you can obtain the product for a lower price then fine. That is how capitalism works.
There are two big deals here: First, Chinese people are starting to want to make money and the cost of labor is skyrocketing. So the market is correcting itself, it always does. This is no different from Japan in the 1970’s.
Second, try to open a manufacturing business in California today. Can’t be done because the corporations such as the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and Sierra Forest Legacy will sue because under CEQA. The one percent in the extreme environmental corporations get to make all of the rules because they can control the law suites. I am not talking about wanting clean air, I am talking about those extreme corporations picking and choosing what they want and suing what they dont. CEQA is run amock.
Yea Lou, why would YOU care if millions of American manufacturing jobs are outsourced to slave wage countries as long as YOU can get cheap crappy products. Who cares about the little people? Get on the free market bandwagon man, we’ll have another decent standard of living for the majority in a generation or two.
Funny Teatotal, so tell me, how exactly is big government supposed to go about keeping those jobs here. Government take over manufacturing? Or we prohibit other countries from exporting goods, while they quit importing ours? How is this supposed to work TeaTotal? Or maybe we stand on a high horse shaking our fingers….yeah thats it, I feel much better now.
Gov’t never controlled manufacturing when we were the gold standard for products worldwide and were #1 in exports. Common sense gov’t regulations and trade policies worked in partnership with the private sector and everybody made a buck. Maybe we should return to tariffs, they worked successfully protecting our plants and our workers for years. Maybe the greedheads shouldn’t make a gazillion dollars and use tax policy they wrote to avoid taxes. Maybe the pendulum should swing away from the failure of “Me the People” theft by the few and back to the majority of citizens that actually work for a living instead of manipulating money for profit. for starters. Walking down to the mailbox to get your dividend checks is not a job.