Apartment Choice

Is a market with hardly any liquidity a market? Look at property in Hong Kong, where housing is the least affordable in the world and prices keep climbing in the face of official curbs. Up and Away Hong Kong home prices have paused in the past month but have been climbing for more than 10 years Source: Centaline Property There's very little buying and selling of old homes in the territory. Painful loan-to-value rules mean second-time buyers of property valued at more than HK$10 million ($1.3 million) -- just enough to bag an apartment of less than 500 square feet in Central District -- can only borrow a maximum of 40 percent; it's 50 percent for transactions below that level. An increase in stamp duty last November set the transaction tax at 15 percent of the cost of a resold home for permanent residents, and double that for foreigners (mostly those from mainland China). According to JLL, as Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. is known, transaction volumes in the secondary market have ...

We’re pleased to share the prelude, titled Freundschaft, of Kristen Ghodsee’s upcoming book Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism. In Red Hangover Ghodsee reflects on the lived experience of postsocialism and how many ordinary men and women across Eastern Europe suffered from the massive social and economic upheavals in their lives after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This text is not final, but we hope it gives you a taste of this impactful new book, to be published in late October. Two pairs of earrings, four bracelets, and a mixtape inspired me to write this book. I was in the Stadtmuseum in the German city of Jena, peering into the various display cases of an exhibit called Freundschaft! Mythos und Realit ät im Alltag der DDR (Friendship! Myth and reality in everyday life in the GDR [German Democratic Republic]). The exhibit ruminated on the official and unofficial uses of the word “friendship” in the context of communist East Germany between 1949 and 1989. In one c...