- In the past year alone, Chinese investment in Australia's overall agricultural sector has skyrocketed threefold, from $300 million to $1 billion — an unprecedented investment boom.
"We're very excited about this agricultural boom that is starting to happen now, not only in the wine sector, but in so many agricultural industries," says Taylor. "And I really believe it's due to having that access of being on the same time zone as China, and being able to provide that clean, green, positive image that Australia presents."
And for Chinese companies, this presents a way to feed the world's largest and fastest-growing consumer class. "Chinese investors want a piece of that action," says James Laurenceson, economist at University of Technology Sydney.
Last year, Chinese home-buyers bought up to a quarter of the new housing stock in New South Wales. In the past few years, Chinese companies have either purchased outright or bought significant shares of the Australian ports of Darwin, Melbourne and Newcastle.
The same reasons they're buying oil fields in Nigeria, condos in North America and farmland in France: They are oligarchs in a command economy running out of gas and they're sheltering their wealth everywhere they can. The Chinese middle class is bigger than the population of the United States and their wealthy are truly wealthy. It's the same reason they're 80% of all bitcoin transactions.
Okay. Well, the commercial that follows every reverse mortgage commercial says it is and now's the best time to buy and gold investments should be a cornerstone of any strong retirement plan. Joking aside, I knew reverse mortgages are bullshit, but I seriously thought gold was up. That said, I'm not dumb enough to buy a $150 coin. I'd buy those flat little bricks with the fancy purity stamp or whatever it is. That is if I had money and was dumb enough to buy gold.
Kinebars. I've been tempted by kinebars a time or two myself. here's the thing you need to know about goldbuggers - they fundamentally believe either (A) the world is about to be disrupted along the lines of the German depression (B) economics is fundamentally and irrevocably wrong and has been since the invention of fractional reserve banking in the Italian Renaissance (C) both. Obviously you can speculate on gold if you think everyone else is crazier than you but as a market, precious metals are predatory. The cash-for-gold guys are rapacious, and that's on top of the fact that the market price of your precious metal is about 1/5th what you paid for the jewelry it got made into. And crypto nerds are goldbuggers with an aversion to physical things.
Wow. I looked them up on Wikipedia and apparently they're stamped and certified by UBS. I've read some pretty nasty things about them in the past, like fraud and money laundering and stuff. Gold is gold, but that association makes Kinebars seem sketchy too all of the sudden.
Hey, man. Fanta was created so that Coca Cola could stay afloat in Nazi Germany. UBS is only marginally more evil than you would expect a money-laundering multinational headquartered in a tax haven to be. You know you want 'em.