The good news is, and the bad news is:

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Bad news is more are forced to rent when rents are rising must faster than inflation.

The good news is the days of "no-money down", "balloon mortgages", "liar loans" etc. is over. Not now building another housing bubble collapse.
(Current bubble is in equities with Fed's printing press money finding a home there when interest rates are non-competitive as held historically low by Fed.)

 

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The Corruption Perceptions Index ranks countries and territories based on how corrupt their public sector is perceived to be. A country or territory’s score indicates the perceived level of public sector corruption on a scale of 0 - 100, where 0 means that a country is perceived as highly corrupt and 100 means it is perceived as very clean. A country's rank indicates its position relative to the other countries and territories included in the index. This year's index includes 177 countries and territories. See map at: http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/results#myAnchor1. Sorry table post stragely as a column. I'm too lazy to spend and hour or so fully fixing that.
Top and bottom 10 in corruption table and rankings:
Rank,
Country
Score,
Surveys Used CI: Lower CI: Upper
2012 SCORE
1 Denmark

91

7

87

95

90
1 New Zealand

91

7

87

95

90
3 Finland

89

7

86

92

90
3 Sweden

89

7

85

93

88
5 Norway

86

7

82

90

85
5 Singapore

86

9

82

90

87
7 Switzerland

85

6

81

89

86
8 Netherlands

83

7

80

86

84
9 Australia

81

8

79

83

85
9 Canada

81

7

77

85

84
...........


167 Yemen

18

6

14

22

23
168 Syria

17

4

11

23

26
168 Turkmenistan

17

3

12

22

17
168 Uzbekistan

17

6

14

20

17
171 Iraq

16

4

12

20

18
172 Libya

15

6

10

20

21
173 South Sudan

14

3

11

17

0
174 Sudan

11

6

5

17

13
175 Afghanistan

8

3

3

13

8
175 North Korea

8

3

2

14

8
175 Somalia

8

4

5

11

8

 

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During the boom years of double digit GDP growth the SOEs over expaded capacity.

This "bad news" is really "good news" in the long run as low economic efficiency State-Owned-Enterprises, SOEs, waste a lot of capital and have been propped up by China's government for years as they employ many, so are hard for the government to let die. Bankrupcy is a cleaner of overcacity.

Also, the SOEs were great ways for the managers to become rich - centers of corruption. Now however, the CCP is serious about reduction of corruption - even sending some of TPTB to jail for corrupt practices.

Now that China is wealther and has a labor shortage it is not so politically hard to terminate uneconomic jobs. I have more than one old post pointing out that the SOEs were really an alternative to the US welfare system. I.e. instead of paying 100% of the economic necessities of unproductive person, the CCP let him work in an SOE perhaps making fans which sold for 100 yuan, but his salary, per fan made, was 120 yuan. He did not know he was not pulling his own weight - just that he had a low pay job. He had a "work ethic" and taught his child to study hard so he could get a better paying job. In US's welfare system the work ethic is destroyed, and the kids are taught how to "scam the sustem" to collect even more welfare.

SUMMARY: This "bad news" is "good news" for China's future.

 

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You could just delete the crap and leave the link.

Wow, the USA got a score of 73.................maybe I'm just a tad too skeptical, I'd have given them/us(?) a score of 10 or 15?
I see corruption almost every day that I bother to look.
A recent example: The Iowa DNR decided to equip it's park rangers with ar15s.
Why the dnr thinks it necessary to equip it's park rangers with military grade assault rifles is a mystery. However:
The corruption is that they are "paying one thousand four hundred dollars per weapon". The same weapon can be purchased at the local sporting goods store for about $700.00 retail.
So why does the dnr pay twice retail while buying in bulk?
If that ain't indicative of corruption, my name is Dorothy and i'm from Kansas.
And, you thought OZ was a tad on the strange side?

 

And the good news is that as more people move to cities they are getting apartments, which often make more sense to city dwellers.

Good! We had enough of that nonsense in 2008.