Source WeChat official account: Jiubian has been authorized to reprint
As you may know, Ma Huateng shared my article the other day:
This is the article:
Talking about layoffs
This article was written by me a few days ago when I was driving through the Qinling Mountains and charging in the service area from a meeting in Sanya back to Beijing. At that time, it was quite hasty, and I didn’t expect the results to be very good. Sometimes it can be quite awkward, but what is written casually is actually very effective, and what takes a lot of time to write is actually average.
A few days ago, I talked about two real estate articles, and I said that in the future, real estate will gradually become like cars: the vast majority of cars will depreciate upon purchase, and the more they are used, the cheaper they become. Only a few can maintain value, and very few can appreciate. At that time, everyone will no longer hoard houses, just like no one is hoarding cars now. In the future, everyone’s money will mainly be used for consumption to improve their lives, improve their quality of life, and drive the economy, forming a positive cycle, similar to Europe and America.
Spending money on consumption may seem absurd, but it is almost the only way out for the economy. The future economic engines will be the two carriages of household consumption and foreign trade exports.
Of course, many people are not satisfied with that article because it may have caused Stockholm syndrome due to the abuse of high priced housing. Many people feel that the current sour state is very good. The funniest comment is:
Why not eat minced meat now that the author is getting more and more popular? Have you forgotten that the common people have a demand for asset appreciation?
Can I not know this? Who doesn’t have a need for this? The problem is that it can be achieved with demand? So everyone has a need to pay wages without going to work, should we also legislate to solve it? So by the way, can we solve the problem of being single for all 30 million singles?
Demand comes from demand, and there has never been a saying in this world that ‘demand can be achieved’, especially when certain needs are already collective anxieties of the majority of people that cannot be solved or do not need to be solved.
However, it should be noted that others may have exploited this anxiety to achieve asset appreciation. Over the years, people have probably seen a lot of these things.
The most successful investment for ordinary people is probably the real estate investment in recent years. However, without any surprises, you can see that most houses in places are now about to fall back to before the 2016 housing price surge.
Some residential areas may see decent housing prices, but in fact, that’s the transaction price of the surrounding first-hand houses. Secondhand houses have not been sold for a long time, and when you go to sell a house, you find that you have to offer a 20% or even 70% discount on the current price to sell it. Even many houses in Beijing are like this. Nowadays, the cheaper the houses in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, the more they cannot be sold, while the more expensive the houses, the more they appreciate in value.
There is also the more insidious “Huanjing”. At first, too many people wanted to buy houses in Beijing for appreciation, but Beijing did not allow them to buy, so they all flocked to Huanjing. Later on, as we all know, the circumcision of Beijing is no longer a waist chop, but a knee chop.
That is to say, too many people are superstitious about “appreciation” and have some hard-earned money in their hands. They feel that if they go to retirement, they will not be enough. They still need to find the next investment opportunity, and it is best to act like “speculating on currency”, earning a hundred times or a thousand times the return, and almost all of them will fail miserably in the end. Even before, there was a big financial scammer who said that without the slogan of “asset preservation”, many relocated households would not have spewed out their money. The vast majority of their needs had already been met, and the only thing that was not met was to earn more money.
This corresponds to the statement of a scammer who ran to the United States before. He cheated a lot in China and went there proudly, saying, ‘You were deceived because you had a problem with your brain. What did you invest in if you had a problem with your brain?’? Now this scammer tells you that you are not suitable for investing. You don’t have the resources, the brain, or the willpower. Don’t mess around, the more you mess around, the poorer you become. There is also the famous swindler Zhai Tianying who once said, ‘With your level of thinking, if you’re not deceived by me, you’ll have to be deceived by others. It’s better to gain a memory from me.’.
Why must I be deceived once?
To put it bluntly, people are unwilling to acknowledge the limitations of their abilities and do not accept the reality of being ‘ordinary’. At the same time, I did not realize that the threshold for “asset appreciation”, “value preservation”, and “successful investment” was extremely high, mistaking many of the anomalies of the first thirty years for the norm.
And in reality, we all have a common misconception that ‘90% of people think they are special, they should be in the top 10%’. Since they are so impressive, it’s time to engage in non mainstream operations. Then there was a struggle, and finally there was a sense of loneliness, with the pension money also included. Of course, if you are really impressive, that’s not part of this discussion.
Overall, the difficulty of making money by investing is similar to that of making money at work. If you don’t make money at work, the investment probability is also not high. If you can earn money by going to work, you may also have to pay for investing, because the distance between industries is like a mountain, and one foot is a big hole. It’s easy to get into trouble by going straight on the road without attending a driving school, and there are still tens of thousands of kilometers of driving distance from the old driver after attending a driving school. The investment field is even more brutal, perhaps playing for many years and still being a novice.
And in recent years, observing the investment experts around me, I have found a characteristic that they rarely seem to be able to fully retreat. Later on, I heard a big shot say something, ‘The God of Gambling never leaves the table,’ and it felt like that was the case.
What does it mean? That is to say, if a person is gambling, stock trading, or other random probability games, if they keep going smoothly, they will definitely not leave the gambling table because they can achieve a strong sense of achievement and self actualization at the gambling table, and will definitely play until they lose everything before stopping.
I have also seen many people who have already stopped playing at high positions and can’t bear it after a year or two of rest. They are too addicted and have great confidence in their own abilities. Keep playing, but in the end, I lost my shirt and ran out of money if I wanted to play.
This mentality, upon careful consideration, is actually like many people who have some money in their hands, such as tens to millions or even tens of millions, and others may think they are quite good. But they were anxious in their own hearts, because everyone was probably in the middle of the circle, staring at people who were better than themselves every day, and the more they thought about it, the more they felt like trying again.
So I went gambling, oh no, I invested, and in the end, I invested in loneliness. After losing the money, looking back, I felt like I was really a brainchild at the beginning. I was holding that money in my hand, and I couldn’t do anything at will. Why did I have to gamble.
Maybe some friends want to say, but what do you mean is that no one should invest?
Not really, writing this article is not about teaching people how to behave, but rather about saying that asset appreciation is not the norm, but rather a low probability event. If you speculate on a low probability event, it may not have a good outcome. When gambling, everyone should know that not everyone can do that. And we ourselves are probably ordinary people, and ordinary people don’t have a high chance of winning in that game.
I know many young friends disdain the term ‘ordinary person’ and believe that our natural talent must be useful. Once we succeed, our bones will wither, and we will be the same. The people around us are all that bone. Until 80% of people in their thirties achieve nothing, they realize that they are one of the countless white bones lying on the ground. Almost all shareholders have also come this way.
Admitting and accepting this is not a shame, and many people even do better after accepting their ordinary setting. When their minds are going crazy, they can remind themselves that ‘why should such a good thing be in your turn’, which may avoid a big hole. Of course, if you are skilled and courageous, nature is not a problem.
More directly, the benefits that most people can easily earn are actually the annual GDP growth rate, or the interest earned by depositing into banks.
This part of passive income belongs to natural growth. If it is more, it is taken from others. It belongs to the zero sum game. This part of income is naturally risky.
In real life, we often overlook the bank’s interest rate of around 3%. After all, with that profit, we cannot double our money in the next life. Why not invest? So he went for high-risk operations, and after losing money, he cried for his father and called for his mother. Even running to the government’s doorstep and demanding justice, isn’t that funny? What good results do you expect from high-risk operations?
Now that this trend has spread to real estate, many people will be forced to face the reality that their house prices are constantly falling and even losing liquidity, which means they cannot sell even if they want to. The last illusion of Chinese people’s wealth preservation will also burst.
Many people say that this is a government conspiracy to deliberately make the middle class feel uncomfortable, but in fact, it is not. This is the basic economic principle, where there are excess returns, a group of people will naturally squeeze in, and in the end, everyone will drink soup together. Of course, those who enter early, leave high, and watch everyone play cards have a great advantage. They often make money, but can we ordinary people do it?
Now think about it, the era of frenzy has given many people unrealistic illusions or fantasies that the economy can continue to move forward at a high speed, housing prices can steadily rise for twenty years, and wages can also rise year by year. In fact, these are all special situations during special periods. I recently conducted a survey on Headline, with 60000 people participating. Half of the people’s income has decreased in the past two years, only 20% have increased, and the rest have remained unchanged. It is highly likely that this will be the norm in the future, with a few people experiencing an increase in income and the vast majority maintaining stability or decline.
Speaking of this, there must be some friends who want to ask, how will the people live in the future?
Of course it’s work, isn’t that common sense? In fact, even the vast majority of elderly people in China now rely on themselves to support themselves and live and work until they are old. Retirement is a treatment for very few people in this society, and the vast majority still have to make a living on their own. Even fewer rely on investment income for retirement. In the future, the country’s elderly care system should become increasingly sound, but the vast majority of people still have to rely mainly on themselves.
In the previous article, it was said that in the future, the economy will mainly rely on consumption to support the decline of real estate, and many people are still dissatisfied.
In fact, when you think about it carefully, most houses lose their financial attributes, and although they cannot increase in value, they will definitely not become more expensive. The pressure on young people to buy a house has actually decreased. In the future, people can use more income to spend, and the real way to enhance happiness is through consumption.
For example, buying a switch for your child, the whole family going to restaurants several times a month, buying more clothes every month, spending money in these areas, and promoting these industries. Isn’t it good for these industries to absorb more labor after they grow?
To be honest, I don’t have much hope for the government to rescue the real estate market. If the restrictions on purchasing are lifted now, the first line may be able to keep it, because the people have indeed saved a lot of money in the past two years, the vast majority of which is owned by wealthy people.
If the Chinese people still have faith in the frontline, it is likely that they will flock to the frontline. Let’s assume that a wealthy person in Guiyang would have obtained the right to purchase a house in Beijing without any reason. What do you think he would do? Of course, hurry up and buy a house, or you may sell the extra houses in Guiyang to catch up with the first line.
In the end, it is likely that the first line has been saved, and other cities will continue to suffer, even worse, due to a large amount of exchange selling. The problem is that first tier cities are not rare for those who sell land money, as they have super enterprises that can collect taxes. If the wealthy in second and third tier cities are also absorbed into the first tier, it is very bad for the overall balance.
If we don’t lift the first tier purchase restrictions and only open up other cities, it may not be of much use, after all, is it because people don’t buy houses now?
Obviously not, I’m just uncertain about the future situation and worried about a high level takeover. Moreover, ordinary people may not be able to leverage, that is, borrow money. The widespread rise in housing prices requires everyone to leverage together. This is also my belief that even if we rescue the market, we cannot save anything because the leverage space of ordinary people is already very small. The more places we need to save, the less we can save.
End:
At the end of the article, it should be said that the era of frenzy has come to an end, and the era of debt development is likely to have also come to an end. In the future, there is a high probability of entering a stable state of development, and many logics will have to change.
In the era of rapid growth, the more aggressive, faster and more aggressive people are likely to win. However, in the era of slow growth, pushing hard may lead to a marginal decrease in returns, focusing on one’s own inner self while also balancing physical and mental health. Only by living long can one become a winner. Similarly, in terms of asset appreciation, anyone who dares to add leverage in the past is superior. As Wang Jianlin said, Tsinghua and Peking University are not as bold as others. In the future slow times, the more radical it may be, the more losses it may suffer.
After suffering losses several times (it is estimated that many people have had enough in recent years), they gradually stop thinking about the matter of becoming rich, knowing that it is usually not their turn. In fact, since people have been frantically squeezing the system in recent years, it can be seen that the vast majority of people are starting to seek stability.
The purpose of writing this article is not to say that everyone should stop investing in the future, but to have an expectation that investing will definitely become increasingly difficult, and that the assets of ordinary people have not been naturally preserved. They have all been preserved, so why not go to work?
Realizing one’s limitations and not taking fearless risks in unfamiliar fields may lead to long-term gains.
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