In its latest effort to maintain an annual economic growth rate of 8%, China announced new plans to stimulate the country’s ailing real estate sector.

Beijing said the new stimulus package will benefit 7.5 million low-income urban families and 2.4 million households located in the more remote countryside.

China pumped $387.5 billion into real estate development over the first 11 months of the year, up 22.7% from the same period in 2007. However, residential sales fell 18.8% year-over-year, despite the investment.

Beijing is now trying to reignite the once red-hot real estate sector by implementing the following reforms:

Owners who have owned their home for two or more years can now sell it without paying business taxes. Owners previously had to wait five years before selling their home tax-free. Owners who have owned their home for less than two years will now only be required pay taxes on their profit, not the total sales price. ...

Consumer credit could be the next “aftershock” of this financial crisis, says Jason Simpkins. Banks have suffered big losses on mortgages, and are now looking to reduce their exposure to credit card debt. This could be the death knell for the American consumer, and deepen the US recession in 2009.

This from Money Morning:

U.S. consumers are already losing their jobs at an accelerating rate.

The same thing is now set to happen to their credit lines.

But with so many Americans already losing their main source of income – their jobs – at an ever-spiraling rate, will an economy that derives two-thirds of its power from consumer spending end up mired in its worst funk in decades because those same consumers are now losing their charge accounts?

Before you dismiss the possibility, consider this: The U.S. economy weakened across all regions since the middle of October as it became

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strongThe Guardian - Comment is Free /strongbr /br /emA slide in the value of Russian currency has led many to cash out their modest savings and punt for either dollar or eurobr / /embr /br /strongBy Jason Corcoran/strongbr /br /guardian.co.uk, Wednesday November 19 2008 20.00br /br /The financial crisis is quickly transforming Russia into a nation of desperate currency speculators due to a slide in the rouble's value and a deposit run gathering pace at the banks. br /br /For many ordinary Russians, it's a game of roulette as they cash out their modest savings and punt for either dollar or euro.br /br /The cards are stacked in favour of a dollar bet as Russians have a love affair with the greenback dating back to last financial crisis in 1998, when a rouble devaluation wiped out their savings. br /br /Pensioners tuning into national TV last week may well ...

Losses in equities worldwide top $25 trillion. What say ye, Obama?… Japan, eurozone enter recession, Gulf bourses continue to tumble… Turning fear into profit: A special volatility report, and plenty more…

The bloodletting continues.

On Friday the 15-nation Euro-zone announced that it is officially in a recession. GDP contracted by 0.2% for a second consecutive quarter over on the continent with Germany and Italy leading the way backwards. France narrowly escaped an “official” recession – two consecutive quarters of negative growth – by the narrowest of margins, posting 0.1% growth.

It has been 15 years since the last time Europe experienced such a large-scale downturn. Back then, of course, each country was able to act independently on monetary policy. Now they must seek permission from EU executive before rushing to save their own behinds. We wonder how the bureaucratic behemoth is taking the news and, more to the point, how it will react.

Socialist

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Why We Should Take a Solutions Approach to the Crisis and Look at Some Things DifferentlyBy Peter Schiff, President of Euro Pacific Capital, Inc. Author of The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear MarketsI don't think we're going to see any light at the end of the tunnel until we have a clear, objective understanding of how we got into this mess in the first place. There is a tendency whenever major problems occur in the economy to place blame on external factors and to assume that the external factors can be prevented from causing similar problems in the future by expanding the government's regulatory powers. The problem I have with this kind of thinking is that it makes government bigger and more intrusive without ever getting at the root of the problem, which is usually the government ...

It’s a buyer’s market in Dubai, where mansions on coastal developments, such as Palm Jebel Ali and the Palm Jumeirah, are selling at up to 40% below their peak.  But that’s lead to government concern, and now, intervention.

From Sunday’s Financial Times:
The Dubai government on Sunday formed a high level committee to tackle the impact of the widening financial crisis on the emirate’s once booming property market.

Amid signs of a deepening real estate correction, Mohammed Alabbar, chairman of the region’s biggest developer, Emaar Properties, said the committee was exploring various options to restore confidence in the market. Real estate agents report a slump in sales activity and price reductions in some developments of as much as 40 per cent.

Emaar Properties, the main driver behind the property market boom in Dubai since foreigners …

The BBC reports that Russia's economy, especially the construction and real estate sector, is grinding to a halt... But below Prime Minister Putin continues to insist that everything is peachy. RA has commented that the word "crisis" might be made illegal quite soon in the Russian media.

India’s central bank yesterday (Monday) unexpectedly lowered its base lending rate for the first time since 2004 – a move that signals that India Reserve Bank Governor Duvvuri Subbarao sees weaker growth and the credit crisis as bigger threats than inflation in Asia’s third-largest economy. The Reserve Bank of India cut its overnight lending rate from 9% to 8%, according to a government statement issued in Mumbai yesterday. The “surprise move” that came days before a regularly scheduled meeting of its policy board came after India’s central bank reduced the cash reserve ratio by 2.5 percentage points to 6.5% – retroactive to Oct. 11, Bloomberg News and MarketWatch.com both reported. The so-called “repurchase rate” is the discount rate at which India’s central bank lends money to commercial banks to infuse liquidity into the market. India’s rupee ...

An article of mine got published on TCS Daily on the evolving political and business landscape in India. The article can be found here. The article is reproduced below as well -

The decade and a half following India’s economic reforms of 1990-91 has been an exciting and transformational one for India and its people, and has also had a significant impact on the entire world. Much good has happened, with increasing growth and prosperity benefiting millions. The world has observed the rise of a large and vibrant middle-class, an aggressive and innovative private sector, and the growth of a soft culture. It is true that severe challenges still remain, caused mainly by massive disparities in income and access to resources, which mean that over 300 million people remain desperately poor, and large parts of the country not benefiting from growth.

A lot of India’s growth and stability today has

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An article in the Washington Post reports that the slowdown in Moscow's construction boom due to the financial crisis could begin to create some serious political problems. Polonsky's move, suspending more than 80 percent of his company's portfolio of projects, is one of many signs that the global turmoil that has pummeled the stock markets and banking system here is also beginning to be felt in the rest of the Russian economy, especially a real estate sector that has been soaring for more than a decade. (...) A slowdown in construction growth could present a political problem for the Kremlin, which has made providing more affordable and comfortable homes a priority in a country where surveys show as many as two-thirds of residents are unhappy with their current housing. Most Russians are still living in the cramped, Soviet-allocated apartments that were given to them in the first round of privatization in ...