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Soriek  1yr ago (text post)   1107 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 23

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. I’m increasingly doing more coverage of countries we’re likely to have a userbase living in, or just that I think our userbase would be more interested in. This does mean going a little outside of my comfort zone and I’ll probably make mistakes, so chime in where you see any. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Posting here for better visibility, was posted in last weeks thread.

Today we're going to discus the most exciting topic ever, Canadian real estate!

I'm largely just talking about Ontario, but Vancouver has also had crazy real estate for decades.

Toronto area real estate is famous for being a bit odd. California prices without California salaries. Or California weather.

There's a post on Reddit (circa 2022) showing similarly sized homes in Niagara Falls, ON and Niagara Falls, NY. 11 minutes apart. The US home was listed at $69k. The Canadian home was listed at $1.18M. That was about 900k USD at the time. That house was a bit of an outlier, but average sale price in Niagara Falls, ON was $617,100 (445k USD) vs $215.3K in Buffalo, NY.

And Niagara Falls is outside of comfortable Toronto commuting range, where the high paying jobs are. To get to downtown Toronto for 9AM Google maps recommends leaving at 6:10AM. Median household income in the city is $74,500 (54K USD).

When you get closer to Toronto, things get worse.

So how did we get here?

First cities learned that taxes on new construction were an easy way to get money without upsetting current residents. A new detached home typically has $186,300 (135k USD) in development fees*. I've heard people argue that it's higher if you calculate interest accrued due to government delays, often caused by no hiring someone with connections to work the system.

Combine that with high immigration and there's a significant structural housing shortage. Toronto has 360 housing units per 1000 residents. The US has 427, France has 540* all 2020 numbers.

Next there's the foreign investment issue. Some of the details here aren't proven since they aren't knowable for obvious reasons.

25 years ago China was less stable but getting richer. It was difficult to move money out of the country but wealthy Chinese could buy a home in Vancouver if they were frequently there for business or a condo for their kids studying without upsetting the CCP. This turned into smuggling money into Canadian real estate as a safe nest egg, and the Canadian government told regulators to turn a blind eye.

Things escalated into serious money laundering.

Again, I'll admit this is unproven before anyone jumps on me...

But Mexican narco gangs produce fentanyl in Mexico with precursor chemicals from Chinese companies. The fentanyl is sold in the US. The US government watches for big unexplained transfers of money going back to Mexico or to the Chinese chemical companies.

So they are using Canadian real estate to close the loop. The chemical companies sell the debt to a broker. The broker finds families in China who want to pool their money and get it out of the country. Then he connects with the narco gangs to transfer the money to be used in a home purchase by one of the family's kids studying in Canada.

But back to better grounded discussion.

The constant rise in home prices made house flipping and rental properties common. Airbnb became a driving force behind tiny expensive condo construction.

Then covid hit.

Canada had some pretty extreme covid lockdowns. This drove up home prices even more. And home flippers started buying home far from Toronto. Prices in small towns exploded.

However, the rental market in cities was hurting as living in a small apartment when everything is shut down for months is not fun. However a lot of federal politicians have invested in rental properties. The previous minister in charge of affordable housing owned two rental properties with hefty mortgages.

So the feds came up with a way to turn the city rental market around fast. In 2019 they had issued 404,000 new student visas. In 2022 they loosed up restrictions on employment as a student and brought in 551,405 new students.

No thought was given to where these 150k additional new students would live. See the housing deficit since 2020 as above.

Or work, as they all (and a big chunk of the other 400k) came in with the promise of being able to work 20 hours a week and assumed they could all land a part time IT job at least.

There are mass line ups for fast food jobs and stories of rented homes with 10 students living there.

But back to real estate.

A few things happened in 2023.

Business have been phasing out work from home, and commuting from that small town where they bought a house at the peak of the market in 2022 isn't manageable long term.

Interest rates have spiked. This is worse in Canada because mortgages typically renew at the current interest rate every 5 years. With the rate spike your mortgage payment can double or more.

Airbnb income has collapsed due to economic fears. This is happening across the US as well.

The Chinese economy is in trouble. So many people want to dump their investment properties in Canada because they need the money at home.

What's the result? A total shit show.

First there's the pre-construction market. A buyer puts a 20% down (35% for non Canadian resident) and is obligated to buy the house / condo when it's complete.

People were buying these to flip before closing. It was seen as a safe and easy way to make money. They couldn't actually afford the mortgage on the new place, but figured they couldn't lose money.

The risks were significant. If they don't close the builder does an assignment sale and the original buyer owes the builder for any shortfall from the agreed purchase price.

A quick Twitter search for an example turns up an assignment sale where a 2.2 million dollar home (1.6M USD) is being sold at a 332k (240k USD) loss after agent fees.

It's not an isolated example.

The new ultra luxury condo building at 1 Bloor West, marketed as "The One", has entered receivership with $1.2 billion in loans already in default (870M USD).

The normal sale market isn't doing well either. Ontario is in a weird situation where there's a glut of luxury homes but still a severe shortage of homes people can actually afford. Everything has been renovated and flipped. I don't think they've built a two bedroom starter home in the past 30 years.

There are some good Twitter accounts tracking real estate price crashes:

https://twitter.com/jasongofficial

https://twitter.com/ShaziGoalie

Again keep in mind it's just beginning. Investors are still trying to diamond hands it, but the mortgage resets are coming and there just aren't enough people with piles of cash who actually want to live in Ontario. They can't HODL forever.

Go to https://www.realtor.ca/ and search for Toronto homes over 1.5 million. Zoom out. There just aren't that many people in the province looking to buy homes at that price. Especially look at all of the listings in the middle of no where.

People have been joking, with less exaggeration than you'd expect, that during covid speculators purchased the entire town of Bancroft, ON and are now desperately trying to flip it.

First cities learned that taxes on new construction were an easy way to get money without upsetting current residents. A new detached home typically has $186,300 (135k USD) in development fees*

WTF. Are Canadian governments literally retarded? Obviously they get that taxes aren’t an infinite money tap and have second order effects, it sounds like they picked these second order effects because they knew that.

it sounds like they picked these second order effects because they knew that

Non-residents can't vote in municipal elections; native residents have, in essence, already paid the tax by virtue of having a house, since the cost of new construction being artificially raised by that tax in turn raises the value of your home. Which also effectively raises property tax revenue without having to suffer the optics of having to raise the rate (and might even allow the city to lower it, which residents will remember for a long time).

Of course, that's also a massive tax increase against the children of Boomers, since especially with life extension that generation won't be able to inherit the house until they're in their 50s or 60s (women have hit menopause by that point). Obviously the solution is to raise taxes on existing residents, but a democracy that does this won't survive past the next election even if a significant minority agree that fixing the taxes is badly needed.

(Honestly, COVID responses were this dynamic compressed into the span of 2 weeks: people over 60 are scared of the flu, so they impose a 20% inflation to have a 0.001% less chance of dying of it that affects liquid assets, but not solid ones, like land. So prices jump up yet again.)

But why fix the problem for the people living in the country already (who aren't getting rich) if we can just import people who are already OK with living in conditions/environments far better than their home country? It's all in service of this fucking bubble; I wonder if we've passed the South Sea Company in its scope yet?

They do this everywhere they can. The justification in Sweden the municipalities use is that they have to sell the land at "market rate", which of course they are in complete control of...

It seems like the presence of places which do not do this then requires explanation.

I'm not aware of any place where the explanation isn't very simple and also not replicable for places this happens, especially since you become ever more path dependant as the market inflates.

More strictly, I'm not aware of any place that has fixed this issue though policy, and for good reason. The incentives are very strong for everyone that gets a say.

How do red states in the US(which are democracies and not particularly concerned with making life better for renters and young people at the expense of old people and owners) avoid this trap? For that matter, how does France?

During the early industrial era all the old buildings got covered in soot. Most countries tore down the old ugly buildings. France realized that they could power wash them and restore the old lovely architecture.

So the downtown core became a place for rich people to enjoy. When brining in refugees and poor migrants Protestant countries got this idea that the new arrivals deserve to live downtown. France was more elitist and decided to build towers in the suburbs for them.

So there's a long tradition where the government has the power build high rises in cities around the metro core.

Additionally people in Anglo countries refuse to think about HBD crime theories. So, at least in Toronto, people commonly believe that high rises cause crime. It ends up being sort of true, because lefty activists believe it's wrong to evict drug dealers and addicts. As a result it's impossible to build a new high rise and fill it with well behaved residents who happen to have a median income.

So French elitism traditionally protected the downtown while ensuring housing gets built outside the core.

In red states it's just that there is a lot of cheap land and no scenic views to be disrupted. So people don't fight new development.

In my experience of living in multiple Red areas that were (or are) undergoing development booms, it's that Red Tribe people generally are effectively YIMBY, or at least YIEBYBINMJTTYWTDWYL (Yes in everyone's back yard because it's not my job to tell you what to do with your land.)

As a very strong example, I once lived in a rural area gradually on the edge of becoming suburban. The state and county has long had a policy of "fence me out" in regards to animals. That is, if I have animals, and you don't want them to wander into your property, then fence me out. You can't make me build a fence, it's my land after all. There was a lot of conflict over this with the newcomers, and eventually transplants pushed to change the law. Locals never tried to block the new development, but they did try to block any changes that made things more restrictive or added rules. Eventually they were outnumbered, and now it's pretty typical city government with your standard NIMBY rules, and the culture I love continues to vanish.

It's one of the many reasons people say "don't bring California with you" when people move from more populous areas.

Good post, but I've been waiting for the housing crash for 20 years and have become convinced that it will never happen without massively cutting immigration rates. Enjoy the slightly decreased prices for a season and then hold on for the next run up...

Yeah the only way housing is coming down is if building housing becomes immensely faster/easier/cheaper (which will never happen because homeowners won't allow it) or if the population goes into decline (which will never happen because the powers that be will never allow our Ponzi scheme of an economy to collapse.)

I kind of doubt it's going to happen even then because of internal migration. What I think will happen is that the marginal places might see a crash (or just continual decline) but where you'd actually want to live (IE where there are jobs and services) will at best see a mild decline or stagnate.

This is absolutely true, and if for no other reasons it's because the major cities are so unbelievably undersupplied in housing. This estimate puts it at a need for over 4 million more housing units in San Francisco alone being needed: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing-gap-cost-affordability-big-cities/672184/

Yeah the housing bubble was supposed to be popping in Vancouver back in ye olde 1980s when interest rates pushed a nice place down to like $100K -- for a few years, then a steady climb until the mid naughties, now that place is a couple of million.

Forgot to put it the last week's one in the last thread, but Finland:

BOOZE LIBERALISATION: Alcohol legislation tends to frequently be an important subject in Finnish politics, at least compared to many other countries. There is a history involved. Finland was one of the few Western countries to experiment with Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s, with similar results to US (i.e., a lot of booze smuggling by organized crime), and even after it ended, the Finnish state has remained worried about the citizens’ wish to booze it up and has attempted to find ways to control this activity strictly.

Thus, during the Cold War era, at least the stereotypical visit to a bar would include the whole crew buying a sandwich between them just to satisfy the requirement that “alcohol can only be served with food”, the implication often being that the sandwich would go to the trash uneaten. After 1969 it was legal to sell alcohol drinks with 4,7% or less strength in stores, but before that, one would have to go the government-owned alcohol monopoly stores, the Alko stores, to do that. Alko still is the only place that sells (all but the very weakest of) wines and strong drinks.

However, ever since the 80s, these laws have been liberalized, both to appeal to voters and in recognition to the continuing liberalization of trade regimes generally and the increased possibilities of the citizens to just buy booze abroad (first by visiting, now also by mail). The new government has, thus, issued a fresh set of proposals, include not only increasing the top limit of alcohol strength for store selling (increased previously to 5,5 %, will be increased to 8,0 %), but also allowing the domestic online sales of alcohol. Probably the most controversial aspect is that it would be possible to order alcohol straight to one’s house through Wolt or Foodora or some other similar delivery service, panned for the potential that low-paid delivery workers would obviously not check the age or the general condition of the persons they’re selling to.

I had literally no idea Finland had a prohibition era, or that it lasted so long into recent history, that’s fascinating. Is the stereotype of Finland as a hard drinking country a recent one, or just totally off base?

Should be noted that the "actual" prohibition ended in 1931, but yeah, tight alcohol policies have continued for a long time.

Finnish alcohol consumption is actually lower than in many European countries per capita, but that's also because the stereotypical Finnish drinking pattern is "sober on weekdays, blasted on weekends", instead of tippling throughout the week (ie. nightcaps, wine or beer on working lunch, having a beer while watching TV after work). (This is the general Nordic drinking pattern, as illustrated by this Polandball cartoon.)

The idea that alcohol liberalization would help Finland achieve an "European drinking culture" (ie. replacing wasted on weekends with tippling during the week) has been repeated by liberalization advocates so often it's basically a meme at this point.

I don't know the answer, but I'm trying to understand the logic of the question. You don't think they experimented with prohibition precisely because it was a problem back then?

There are a lot of rules against building houses, and I don't consider building houses ever being a problem exactly. Wouldn't surprise me if Prohibition was similar, just one group pushing their strategically optimal set of values, damn the societal consequences.

Possible, but it felt weird to me that the option "there was an actual problem with alcoholism" was not on the table.

Yeah certainly a fair point, I guess I was imagining more like present-day dry towns and counties in the US which chose those laws as a reflection of their values rather than prohibition era US choosing those laws as a solution to an issue.

Iirc prohibition had some ‘alcohol is a sin’ support but a bigger part of it was feminists who blamed alcohol for domestic violence and ‘good governance’ types who saw alcoholism as a social vice.

Argentina

Argentina held their first round of elections this Sunday with peronist candidate Sergio Massa pulling first place at 36.6%, trailed by now-notorious libertarian Javier Milei at 29.9%. Milei’s share was about the same as he got in the primary, but Massa’s gains were a slight surprise as the center right party JxC was polling a little better and had recently performed well in local elections. Also, like, because inflation is at 140% and Massa is literally the Economy Minister presiding over this.

Not many politicians would stand a chance in an election after overseeing an inflation rate of almost 140%. Yet Massa, who doubles up as economy minister, has used all the tricks in the book to give support to voters who are fearful of losing a cradle of subsidies and social-welfare handouts regardless of Argentina’s unsustainable finances.

Days before the vote, Massa’s campaign posted signs in subway stations and train stops showing the difference in fare prices Argentines would pay under him versus Milei: the present 59 pesos, or 6 cents, compared to 700 pesos without the subsidies the current Peronist administration gives.

These kind of stunts paid off. Massa gained 3 million votes on Sunday compared to his coalition’s third-place finish in the August primary. Meanwhile, frontrunner Milei lost votes.

Massa carved a clear path to the presidency by tapping into the entrenched Peronist network of governors, labor unions and social movements.

“Massa’s results demonstrate that the Peronist political machinery is alive and well and can effectively mobilize voters in key traditional bastions in the north of the country and, crucially, the province of Buenos Aires — even amid apathy,” said Jimena Blanco, head of the Americas research at consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft.

There will be a follow up election on November 19th. It’s hard to predict exactly how things will go. JxC normally has a more free market voter base who you would think might lean more towards, Milei, but he absolutely tore into their candidate Bullrich during the campaign so may have squandered quite a bit of good will. He’s now said he wants to go blank slate and work hand in hand with JxC, which seems to be highly fractured at the moment and maybe will siphon voters to the right (former President Macri, technically still the leader of JxC, seems like he will go for Milei). He’s even supposedly making appeals to ¡los zurdos de mierda! left wing voters so he must be kinda desperate.

I’m not really sure which outcome is weirder, the west’s most chronically populist country empowering a meme libertarian, or re-electing a party that’s demonstrated itself incapable of addressing voters’ most important issue.

Azerbaijan

Time Magazine ran an article Tuesday warning that Azerbaijan may continue with their conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh and actually mount a joint invasion of Armenia, supposedly with the goal of connecting their country fully to their close ally Turkey.

The most evident signs of an impending invasion are the joint Turkish-Azerbaijani military exercises taking place on October 23-25 in Nagorno-Karabakh, to Armenia’s east, and Nakhichevan, another formerly Armenian-populated region to Armenia’s west, with the conspicuous arrival of Turkish F-16 fighter jets in Azerbaijan. Last time such a massive exercise took place, in 2020, it preceded the 44-day war against Armenia-backed Nagorno-Karabakh, preparing ground for last month’s “final solution.”

Another sign of an impending invasion is the reported appearance of “!” on Azerbaijan’s military trucks headed toward Armenia. The symbol roughly resembles a severed Armenia and ostensibly serves as the conclusion of the 2020-2023 “Karabakh is Azerbaijan!” war slogan…

Armenia is the lowest hanging fruit for Turkey's leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is desperate for a show of power. Oct. 29 marks an important milestone for the country—the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Turkish Republic—with no significant planned celebrations…A successful invasion of Armenia would realize the Armenian Genocide-era goal of connecting Azerbaijan and Turkey continuously—something that even Atatürk couldn’t accomplish.

Breathless speculation? It seems a little excessive and reading too much into things to me, but they did just conduct an expansionist invasion a couple weeks ago so it’s not that outlandish I suppose. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has also warned of an invasion into Armenia.

On the other hand, while the world already recognized Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan and, I guess, just didn’t give enough of a shit about the situation to care that the entire place got ethnically cleansed, invading a sovereign nation would be quite an escalation. Also worth noting this is a sovereign nation that has been balancing more towards the United States and has even been conducting joint military drills together. On the other, other hand, America didn’t do anything about Artsakh and is too dysfunctional right now to approve aid for their actual priority countries in Ukraine and Israel, so (if the speculation is true) maybe they’re wagering America is too tied up to care or do much at the moment.

Technically speaking, artsakh didn’t get ethnically cleansed because the Armenians did the smart thing and left on their own before Azerbaijan ethnically cleansed them. Yes, they did this because Azerbaijan didn’t bother to pretend it wasn’t going to do that, but there’s no international law against claiming you’re going to ethnically cleanse people.

Repeatedly and credibly threatening to do bad things to specific ethnicity, and having history of doing bad things to specific ethnicity also counts. You do not get bonus for other side not being dumb and able to predict obvious events.

More interesting is that Armenia expelled Azeris relatively recently, with other rounds of the same stuff.

More interesting is that Armenia expelled Azeris relatively recently, with other rounds of the same stuff.

Yeah it does give the events a very different flavor, not that it justifies what’s happening in the present day.

Venezuela

Last week I reported on America lifting sanctions on Venezuela in exchange for them holding free and fair elections. It hasn’t gotten off to a great start. Venezuela hasn’t yet reversed their decision to [edit: not] allow the popular opposition figure María Corina Machado to run in the election (formally they have until November to do this), and the opposition primary was filled with stories of government obstruction, including voting centers having to be physically relocated due to intimidation:

The election in this South American nation of roughly 28 million people took place with no official government support. Instead, the vote was organized by civil society, with polling stations in homes, parks and the offices of opposition parties.

About 2.3 million Venezuelans turned out to vote, the election commission said, a fairly high number that could indicate how engaged voters could be in a general election in 2024. The government’s telecommunications agency shut down an online guide that showed Venezuelans the location of their nearest polling station, and prohibited radio and television stations from covering the vote — a move that was denounced by the country’s journalists union.

However, the primary did go through and with the ballots counted up Machado won overwhelmingly against the nine other candidates. This follows a trend of her rising popularity and other main competitors bowing out and endorsing her, including the former opposition leader Henrique Capriles. Formal elections will be held sometime in late 2024 that has yet to be agreed upon. Keep in mind she got roughly 2 million votes out of a country of 28 million, and in the last (in many ways unfair) election Maduro got about 6 million, although it’s hard to compare a primary to a general election.

I think you have this backwards. Venezuela won't allow Machado to run and the US wants her to be allowed.

What in my comment sounded like I was saying something else?

Venezuela hasn’t yet reversed their decision to allow the popular opposition figure María Corina Machado to run in the election

Venezuela's decision was to not allow her to run, not to allow her to run. This was very confusing as someone not already familiar with the situation and I had to look up other sources to figure out what you were trying to say.

Ahh I see why that was confusing, my fault for sloppy wording there.

Switzerland

Switzerland held elections this Sunday as well:

Polls suggest the Swiss have three main preoccupations in mind: rising fees for the obligatory, free market-based health insurance system; climate change, which has eroded Switzerland’s numerous glaciers - and worries about migrants and immigration.

The last of these apparently loomed large, with right wing populists as the largest winners in the Assembly, though still nowhere near a majority:

The right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP), Switzerland's biggest political party, increased its share of the vote to 29%, 3.4 percentage points higher than the last election in 2019, according to the final projection by Swiss broadcaster SRF…

"We have problems with immigration, illegal immigrants, and problems with the security of energy supply," said SVP leader Marco Chiesa. "We already have asylum chaos ... A population of 10 million people in Switzerland is a topic we really have to solve."...

Rising health costs also looked set to benefit the left-wing Social Democrats (SP). Switzerland's second-biggest party was poised to increase its share by 0.7 percentage points of the vote to 17.4%, increasing its representation by one to 40 seats.

In contrast, the Greens were expected to see their share of the votes fall by 4 percentage points to 9%, and lose six seats.

The SPP already held two of the seven seats on the Federal Council and there impressive showing in this election will probably not change that. However, that doesn’t mean the Council won’t change: things in the Senate were too close to call between two other parties, the Centre Party and the Radical Liberals, and they will have to hold another runoff election:

a seat in Switzerland’s seven-member consensus government could at least mathematically be called into question: currently, the “magic formula” of seat allocation gives the Radical-Liberals two ministers and the Centre just one. According to final results, the Centre Party came third with 14.6% of the vote, pipping the Radical-Liberals on 14.4%.

Check out @MartianNight’s more detailed writeup on the election here for more detail!

Spain

The Spanish election continues in both tragedy and farce. After the conservative government failed to form a majority coalition, Pedro Sanchez and the left wing PSOE have until November 27. They’ve now formalized an alliance with the far left Sumar, which was expected to happen, and will result in a few standard left wing policy commitments:

This agreement includes measures such as reducing the working day, regulating dismissals, raising the SMI [minimum wage], increasing the public housing stock and expanding birth permits.

But all of this doesn’t necessarily mean anything, because it doesn’t address the alliance PSOE actually needs to be making with the Catalan Independence Party Junts. Junts has not budged on their demand for amnesty for their leader Puigdemont. Without their support the conclusion of this months long saga will just be another election.

Yeah they could really work on the marketing there.

Slovakia

Resurgent populist Robert Fico has now successfully completed an agreement to form a government:

Fico's leftist, populist SMER-SSD (Direction-Slovak Social Democracy) struck a deal last week with the centre-left HLAS (Voice) and nationalist Slovak National Party (SNS) to form a coalition that will have 79 out of 150 seats in parliament.

Monday's pact, which can allow the president to appoint the new government, agreed the breakdown of cabinet positions, giving SMER the defence, finance, foreign and justice ministries….

HLAS, whose presence could blunt any hard policy shifts in the proposed government, will get parliament's speaker role.

Slovakia, a European Union and NATO member, is on course for the highest deficit in the euro zone this year as a result of slower economic growth, higher spending needs and rising costs, with the shortfall seen at more than twice the bloc's ceiling of 3% of gross domestic product.

Fico said he wanted to prevent budget tightening from hurting social standards and to allow space for investments, signalling slower pace of fiscal consolidation than what the outgoing caretaker government has recommended…

Fico said his priorities would include boosting living standards and a foreign policy consistent with Slovakia's EU and NATO membership - but focused on protecting national interests.

He told reporters that what he called the era of non-governmental groups running the country was over.

The largest change for Slovakia’s allies will be reduced support for the Ukrainian War. Slovakia was never a major contributor but does mark the first of the western alliance wearying of support and also comes at a time when America’s own aid to Ukraine looks up in the air.

Nigeria

The Nigerian Supreme Court has finally agreed to hear opposition party complaints about the validity of the last election. The runner ups in the election, the People's Democratic Party & Labour Party, have accused the election of being fraudulent and have demanded that current President Bola Tinubu must step down:

Nearly 25 million Nigerians voted in the February polls in an election that was generally calm, but was marked by delays in counting and failures in the electronic transfer of results.

The final results were widely accepted by the international community, which saw Tinubu declared the winner with 37 per cent of the vote.

No legal challenge to the outcome of a presidential elections has ever succeeded in Nigeria which returned to democracy in 1999.

Worth noting Bola also received the least votes of any winning candidate since 1999. It’s pretty unlikely the election will be overturned but remarkable that it’s even being heard. Legal challenge aside, Tinubu’s tenure has been pretty rocky thus far. It started with cutting off a subsidy for gasoline to better fund other progressive initiatives, but sent gas prices soaring and caused large scale unrest.

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu’s push to reshape Africa’s biggest economy appears to be a case of too far, too fast.

Four months after he took office, inflation is surging and the naira’s street value has slipped to the psychologically important level of 1,000 to the dollar. The national power grid collapsed twice in September and a surge in business confidence that accompanied his announcement of a spate of reforms has dissipated.

The government appeared ill-prepared for the price surge that followed the scrapping of a fuel subsidy, $6.8 billion of forward payments in the foreign exchange market are overdue and a crucial interest-rate decision was postponed after the acting head of the central bank resigned. The new governor’s appointment is awaiting confirmation from the Senate…

There’s no doubt that the measures Tinubu is undertaking are necessary and that Nigeria’s economy will ultimately be healthier when the budget is no longer burdened by an unsustainable fuel subsidy and an unrealistic official exchange rate.

What is in question are his methods, the pace of change and whether he can see them through.

Has the threatened Niger invasion been junked?

Sorry I've been pretty slammed lately. Yes it has been scrapped; Tinubu was very in support of an interventoin but the rest of the government wasn't. Even though his party has a majority in the Senate, the Senate still voted against a military intervention (and ECOWAS intervening without Nigeria is implausible).

As far as I know though the ECOWAS sanctions are still in place, which includes Nigeria cutting off the 90% of Niger's electricity that they provide (if that's changed, I can't find up-to-date info on it). As an aside, Nigeria has been barely able to sustain their own power supply, which has led some to claim the electricity blockade against Niger is mostly covering their own lack of capacity.

China

China has been criticized by various talking heads and analysts for letting its impending economic problems carry out without trying ordinary fiscal stimulus. Well, it seems like they are pursuing stimulus now:

China is set to unleash fresh fiscal stimulus to shore up its economic recovery, drawing on a well-used playbook that relies heavily on debt and state spending but falls short on the deeper reforms called for by a growing number of analysts.

Some government advisers are recommending China lifts its 2024 budget deficit target beyond the 3% of gross domestic product (GDP) set for this year, which would allow Beijing to issue more bonds to revive the economy, policy insiders and economists have told Reuters.

The world's second-largest economy grew faster than expected in the third quarter, improving the chances Beijing can meet its growth target of around 5% for 2023…

China's parliament is set to approve just over 1 trillion yuan ($137 billion) in additional sovereign debt issuance when it concludes a five-day meeting that began on Oct. 20, sources told Reuters.

Such bonds will likely be used to fund water conservancy and flood prevention projects and come on top of an expected front-loading of 2024 local bond quotas…

For those [government economists] looking for structural reforms, the focus is on policies that spur urbanisation and household spending power, reduce the reliance on investment and level the playing field between state-owned enterprises and private firms.

Without such changes, economists warn China could be headed for a long-period of deflation and stagnant growth that fails to lift living standards for the country's 1.4 billion people.

Speaking of intergovernmental debates, another senior CCP leader has been removed; unclear if these are isolated incidents or the beginnings of another shakeup:

China removed its defence minister on Tuesday, the second ousting of a senior leader in three months, raising questions about the stability of the leadership team around Chinese President Xi Jinping.

General Li Shangfu, who has been absent from public view for two months, was dismissed as defence minister and state councillor, according to state media.

China also announced that Qin Gang, who was removed as foreign minister in July, was stripped of his state councillor position.

Li at least seems to have been caught in an affair and just not doing a great job at his diplomatic duties, so maybe reasonable to can him. If there is a common thread here, it’s of course national security:

Both Li and Qin serve among China’s five state councillors, a senior position in the cabinet that outranks a regular minister. Li also sits on the Central Military Commission, a powerful body headed by Xi that commands the armed forces.

Meanwhile, the surprise removal of two top generals has rocked the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, an elite unit set up by Xi to modernize China’s conventional and nuclear missile capabilities, sparking concerns of a broader purge in the military.

Japan

Despite a resurgent quarter, the economy remains stubborn and the IMF projects that Germany will overtake Japan as number 3 in global nominal GDP rankings. Prime Minister Kishida has now released a fiscal stimulus plan involving:

cutting income tax burdens by ¥40,000 ($268) a year while giving ¥70,000 to low-income and elderly households as part of inflation-relief measures.

Japan’s largest opposition party, the center left Constitutional Democratic Party, has been the main source of criticism:

“The ruling parties have been calling for the return of increased tax revenues of ¥15 trillion, preferably ¥20 trillion, in scale. Would this (cut) be for one year only? Is it a permanent measure, and are the wealthy also eligible for an (income) tax cut?” Izumi [leader of the CDP] asked…

Kishida and Izumi also clashed over the issue of a consumption tax refund. The CDP is calling for legislation that will return a portion of the consumption tax bill to those in middle- and lower-income brackets. However, Kishida said the current system directly reduces the consumption tax burden on consumers of a wide variety of daily products, and that the CDP plan wouldn't make consumers feel that the consumption tax burden has been eased…

Izumi also pushed the government to speed up plans to boost the minimum wage in order to compete with labor markets elsewhere, such as in the U.K., France and Australia, for example. Otherwise, he said, Japan’s workers may leave the country in search of higher wages. The government’s current plan calls for increasing the minimum wage to ¥1,500 per hour by the mid-2030s.

Kishida replied by saying he was worried about wage increases not keeping pace with rising prices and how, if left unchecked, deflation would return. He said only that the government would work on closing the wage-price gap as quickly as possible. He promised to return the benefits to the public, but did not offer a timetable for doing so.

Taxes changes are a little sensitive for the ruling party; the LDP spent years under Abe agonizing over raising the sales tax, and they’re torn, then as now, between fretting about not funding their colossal debt on the one hand and wanting to stimulate their stagnant economy on the other. Even some members of Kishida’s coalition have balked at the cuts, so we’ll see if anything comes of it.

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