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Will the Evergrande Debacle in China Impact Thai Real Estate?
Transcript of the above video:
This video we are making is the result of a recent comment that was put up on one of our other videos and to quote directly from that: "Waiting for your video on the Evergrande Financial collapse and its ripple effect on the Thai real estate market and other Thai economies. Lots of Chinese losing their nest eggs when Chinese Banks start to go under."
This sort of begs the question: "Will the Evergrande debacle have an impact down here in Thailand?" Let me be clear, I am not really a financial analyst; I am definitely not a real estate financial analyst or in an international context an analyst of that type. Now that stated I will say this might be viewed as something of a cop at. Yeah I think it is going to have an indirect impact most assuredly on the Thai economy. Exactly what that means, look the Thai economy to this point although the past year and a half there haven't been any tourists of any kind really; there have been some but very small numbers especially from China but Thailand enjoyed a great boon from the increase in growth of the Chinese middle class especially basically up until a year and a half ago. The decade prior to that as the Chinese middle class exponentially grew, Thailand started seeing a lot of tourists from China and they really brought in a lot of money. I know that is very hard to believe for a number of foreigners especially of Western descent that watch this channel, but yes and I have seen the data on this stuff especially from hotel associations and things, Chinese tourists brought in a lot of money. They did not undertake the same entertainment activities as Western tourists by and large, there was some overlap but they didn't do the same thing so I think a lot of Western expats and Western tourists, they just didn't really fully understand the ramifications of the numbers that were coming in.
So yeah one would presume if and when Thailand gets fundamentally reopened for tourism, one would presume a hit to the Chinese middle class would have ramifications in the tourism sector from that perspective. Now exactly whether or not the Evergrande network if you will or octopus and all of its tentacles had any reach into Thailand I don't know. The thing is the increasing complexity of the overall financial markets, especially in an international context, one thing that doesn't ostensibly seem to correlate or to have anything to do with another thing might in fact have very much to do with it. For example, if assets need to be liquidated to pay off something in one market they may be liquidated in another market for example Thailand. Perhaps an asset owned by somebody in the Evergrande or who was affected by the Evergrande situation, maybe they liquidate their holding in Thailand if that is possible.
Now that said Thailand has serious and significant substantial restrictions on foreign nationals owning property in Thailand so I don't think there is any like direct correlation where Evergrande owned anything particularly to speak of although I don't know that, they could but I doubt that there is any kind of direct impact directly from Evergrande in the Thai Market. Again, it remains to be seen. We will certainly keep folks updated on this channel as the situation evolves.