I Have Just Read Your Latest Message Urging People To Tighten Up Security With Their: Fill & Download for Free

Spoiler Alert. I’m seriously pissed off.The pithy answer would be to say that it was because he got more votes however, thanks to the absurd way that America elects its president, that’s not actually true.There are two distinct reasons for Trump’s victory and I’m at a loss of which one to begin with if only because I’m tired of the abuse I’m getting for holding unpopular opinions. Still, I write on Quora and in general in order to foster debate, so trolls? Troll away.As Sheldon Cooper once said“I warned you thusly.”I began writing on Quora in earnest around the time the primary seasons were kicking off. It dawned on me, quite slowly that I could help disseminate ideas in ways I never had before. Many of my ideas are too radical for mainstream publication and although I made some inroads in academia, especially in writing books on political philosophy (Thank you royalty cheques I love you thusly,) the fact of the matter was that reaching large numbers of people overseas is never easy. I specialized in U.S. politics for a very good reason. I have no vested interest in your politics which helps me take a step back and think at least somewhat objectively.Three answers stand out in my mind as having achieved this.https://www.quora.com/Who-will-win-the-2016-U-S-presidential-election-and-why/answers/22797498https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-people-from-Europe-want-Bernie-Sanders-to-be-the-President-of-the-United-States/answer/Ian-Jackson-16https://www.quora.com/Who-should-be-the-next-president-and-why/answer/Ian-Jackson-16In the first answer, I warned that Trump might win. In the second I offered a view of America as seen from Europe, a place far more progressive than the U.S.A has ever been. In the last, I set out — in considerable detail for a Quora answer – an economic philosophy that lead me to conclude that Sanders was the logical choice. He was the logical choice for two reasons.Firstly, he wanted to at least attempt to fix the things that needed fixing and secondly because I thought he would be very difficult to beat. People in American were craving change. That’s what Obama was about, but Obama had failed to deliver.Trump represented change. A horrible dystopian change, sure. But change none the less.1. The SilentMost of the answers listed above had a common theme and that theme was, and remains that economic inequality in the USA is out of control. I’ll try not to go over too much old ground here but a few salient points must be considered.The amount of money required in order to have economic security in the USA is set at $15 an hour over a full time working week. You know the drill, work 8 hours, sleep 8 hours, play 8 hours.I didn’t set this number by the way, it comes from the department of labor.In post truth America if you voted for Obama you are expected to give him an A+ which would be absurd score to give even Roosevelt. If you voted for someone else, you are expected to give him an F- which is equally absurd. Both sides of the political spectrum behave in equally delusional ways. Neither side wants to listen, compromise or admit any failings whatsoever.So, when Liberals congratulated themselves on having created so many new jobs and conservatives tried to downplay them by adding people who retired to their figures in order to dilute them we created two separate post-truth realities, neither of which described what was actually happening.So let’s do that now.The annual earnings for a full-time minimum-wage worker is $15,080 at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25. Full-time work means working 2,080 hours each year, which is 40 hours each week.And for all your toil, pretty much the only thing that Washington will prevent happening to you is starving to death. They fear that scenario and if you want to know why, type ‘Goldstone Economic Stress’ indicators into Google.The reality of the job market on the ground was massively different to what either political party was espousing because nobody was talking about what kind of jobs were being created. At minimum wage an adult would need to work 8 hours, sleep 8 hours and then work another 8 hours in order to feel secure. That’s not good enough.Part time workers and zero-hour contract workers were no better off, even if they were paid a little above minimum wage which many of them were not. In total 42% of your country earns less than $15 an hour and yes, that includes salaried workers. Do the maths if you’re not convinced, it’s not difficult.The U.S. Census Bureau reported in September 2014 that: U.S. real (inflation adjusted) median household income was $51,939 in 2013 versus $51,759 in 2012, statistically unchanged. In 2013, real median household income was 8.0 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the latest recession.So yeah, you’re poorer under Obama and the fact that you would have been even poorer under Romney isn’t good enough. And don’t even bother in the comments whining to me about the numbers I’m using. I’m so past the post truth BS. So i’ll say again, Obama, the cool dude that I’d love to hang out with made you all poorer with a song i like to call “Tax cuts for the rich and other SNAFU’s.” He voted to renew the Patriot act — you know the one that he opposed as a senator — and now look see! Donald Trump can read the emails of his enemies! Hurray! How To Protect Yourself From State Surveillance Once Trump Takes Over (Video)Obama made the same promises Clinton was making and he didn’t deliver on many of them. Worse, he betrayed liberals with his support of TPP, a bill that not only grants corporations the right to sue your country in secret courts but will also devastate certain industries. And the Patriot Act. Did I mention that Trump will be able to listen into phone calls too? If I were Rosie O'Donnell right now, I’d be scared.Don’t get me wrong. Free trade is good. But it’s also fundamentally and unavoidably asymmetrical in composition. The absolute key to effective free trade is that those on the downside of the deal are compensated. From the perspective of a Liberal thinker this is non negotiable. I’ve covered my objections to TPP elsewhere but suffice to say that Obama knows it will devastate certain industries but his belief in the power of the market and reliance on vested interests means he can do nothing about it.Go ahead and read it, they don’t deny it, they juts use flowery language in order to bore you to death.So, let’s look at that from a different — yet to happen — perspective first and then move on to what happened to the USA in recent decades.There are approximately $3.5 million truckers in the USA.And they are all fucked.The median annual wage for a trucker that works for a private fleet, such as a truck driver employed by Walmart, is $73,000, according to ATA. The Labor Department pegs the median annual salary for all truck drivers at around $40,000. That’s over double the minimum wage, so these truckers have economic security, if only just.As of 2012, in the United States: the total number of taxi cab drivers is 233,900; the average annual salary of a taxi cab driver is $22,820. These people have no economic security but it doesn’t really matter because they are fucked too.It’s Google’s fault.Well, sort of. Because the reality of driverless cars is almost upon us.The jury is out, some say 2020 some say 2025, some later and some earlier. Regardless, they are coming. The technology will improve over time and commercial fleets will be seduced by the cost savings. Automated taxis might be scary at first but they will force the human driven competition to its knees regardless. And then they will jack the price back up to where it was when they had to pay drivers.What to do with these people representing around 3% of your workplace. What do we do when they all find that the only thing they are trained for is no longer needed?Washington’s solution, GOP and Democrat alike is simple. Obama, Clinton, Bush, Bush, Clinton, (Gore,) Reagan, Carter, Nixon, it really makes little difference.They think these people can go fuck themselves.OK, maybe not Carter…The ex truckers can sit in shanty towns drinking rain water for all the political elite care. Whole towns can become overgrown piles of manure and when despair leads to drink and drugs these people can be policed. The 1994 crime bill should do nicely for that. Another piece of right-wing Democratic legislation.They will read their emails and their tweets and pass bills that allow police to enter premises without warrants. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. The shit the British were pulling in the run up to the 1776 ‘referendum.’Now, you cannot stop the march of technology, so being a Luddite about it is no good. Truckers will find the competition tighten; they will be asked to work longer hours for less pay. There will be layoffs and strikes and news stories and op-ed pieces but the end result will be the same. A slew of men – and it is mostly men—with no training in anything else, having worked jobs that left little room for savings will be left virtually destitute. With one eye on French Revolution’s food riots, the government, will give them food aid but little else. There are already over 50 million Americans on food stamps.In the richest country in the world.We know that this is how they will be treated because this is how other industries have been treated. Coal, Steel, car manufacturing. It all dried up; in some cases, the fault lay in NAFTA, the trade deal sponsored by Bill Clinton.The people effected were left to stew in their memories. Lacking any real political education, they came to some false conclusions. They looked at net immigration and said“Aha, they took our jobs!”And we called them racists, and deplorables, even though, deep down we knew that most of them were not. What the hell were you all thinking? Was calling people names your go to place as an effective way to convince people of the rightness of your ideas? The left were too busy being outraged by any and every opinion that did not precisely match their own to pick up a book by John Stewart Mill on the virtues of debate. Debate was stifled. Some people don’t like gay people. My dad doesn’t like gay people! I don’t throw shit at him, I talk to him about it and when I fail to change his mind I walk away and try a different line of debate the next time it comes up.Clinton would just call him a deplorable.And so he’d vote for Trump.Donald fucking Trump!We just gave the power of the CIA, the FBI, NSA and other agencies to a revenge-obsessed, misogynistic, racist with an ego the size Olympus Mons.The left focused on the culture war almost exclusively. Vote Clinton because she would never say the word ‘pussy.’ not in public anyway. Vote Clinton because she cares about Lesbian marriages or at least she has done since 2013 when she changed her mind because she wanted lesbians to vote for her. Vote Clinton because people have accused Trump of being a vile womanizer. A democrat would never act liek that. Inless his name is Weiner, or Kennedy that is. Unless his name is Bill that is.Oh, yes, LGBTQ not TPP, never that. Never mind too big to fail; we congratulated ourselves on the fact that gay marriage was a ‘thing’ now and that we had an African American in office. A guy that we liked that we voted for.Look-see, how can we be racist? We voted for a Black man! Never mind the fact that the true racist position is being OK with the fact that African Americans have the the lowest median income in the country (At around $35,00)Oh no, there’s nothing racist about the fact that their average income is only just above the poverty line. Never mind that Democrats under Bill Clinton passed the the $30 billion crime bill that put an addition 100,000 police officers on the streets and continued the trend toward increased incarceration that began in the early 1970s, and quadrupled in the ensuing four decades. (A two-year study by the National Research Council concluded that the increase was historically unprecedented, that the U.S. far outpaced the incarceration rates elsewhere in the world, and that high incarceration rates have disproportionately affected Hispanic and black communities.)That’s not racism! That’s just the way shit falls man. It’s not like somebody said the N word or something!Well it’s not good enough.I’d honestly rather vote for a guy who uses the N word and want’s to do something about the number of Black people locked up for no good reason than someone like Clinton who prances about on stage with ethnically diverse celebrity endorsements without so much as addressing the elephant in the fucking cell.If you meet a racist it’s your responsibility to talk to them, to debate with them, not just fling mud and get them fired from their jobs. That might make you feel better but it’s not how the left works and if you really really want to play that game, well; you can always have Donald ‘I’m going to nuke Isis’ Trump as president if you want.Because it seems to me that that is exactly what Democrats want. They want to be self righteous far more than they ever want to be right. They’d rather re-post a meme on Facebook and share pictures of organic couscous with each other than actually do something about the reality on the ground. You know what? If half your country is either unemployed, underemployed or underpaid and thinks that Immigration is to blame then that is your problem too.Unless you want Donald Trump to appoint KKK sympathizers to your government that is.The rich soaked all the wealth up like a sponge and ignored the lessons I used to teach as part of politics 101. Leave as much and as good.John Locke. Give him a read.The urban poor were angry and were mocked for the lack of political education that they had never been given. Liberal American demurred. Some saw their plight but most did not. They were ‘hicks’ white trash scum, deplorables who were just not modern enough to be taken seriously.It was almost like living in piece of shit towns with poisonous water, intermittent electricity, little or no job prospects and no access to the internet had isolated them from cultural elitism. Who would have thought? which genius decided that despite numbering in the millions, that it didn’t really matter what happened to them?We have a word for these people in politics. We call them the subaltern. The subaltern are often on the fringes of society and are often reviled. They are modern lepers, mocked for their mullets, clam shell cell phones and lack of education. Few of us noticed that the subaltern began to expand as wealth was sucked into the top 1%.Sanders noticed. I noticed.The DNC and the majority of its supporters did not.We put things in place all right, stuff that needed to be addressed; statutory rights came first and quite right too but we didn’t stop there. If anyone said something that smelt even slightly of Islamophobia we pilloried them, fired them. We hounded them like they were some kind of sex pests instead of engaging them in an actual debate. We never considered that they were minsinformed or even for the briefest second that they had a point. We won the culture war and any distention from that was lynched on social media.Freedom of religion? Give me a fucking break. What freedom did we give people to criticize religions they didn’t like? None. We were too scared what people might think.Personally i think all religions, Islam and Christianity included kind of sucks. Watch people unfollow me for saying so. i Could care less at this point.And so, these forgotten people stopped complaining. They knew what they would get if they did. But they waited for an opportunity to act. The majority of Trump’s supporters are not racist I mean, sure some of them are and yes, they supported one in Trump that’s true; but the fact remains that they were desperate.As we squabbled with them about bathroom rights it never occurred to them that we might just accept that the idea of a transgender person in a bathroom upset some people. No compromise was offered. nobody suggested that we have a sit down ad talk about it. No we just hurled more insults at them because we were just so-much-more evolved.It’s not like this was the only thing that mattered anyway. i mean, sure, put it on the list. But make it a long list that begins with the line“People need to be able to make rent.”Once we got that one sorted we could move onto public restrooms and until ushc a time maybe we could show our solidarity with the LGBTQ community by all having a piss before we leave the house and making it a non-issue.Because pretty much everything other than basic economic fairness has to be a secondary consideration. Unless you want, President Trump that is.Because what other choice did we give them?Oh, yeah.2. HRCNow. Let’s talk about Hillary but before we do, we still have to soothe some oversensitive, delusional minds.I don’t hate her hair or her voice or her sense of dress. I don’t hate her because she’s a woman or because of her husband or because she’s too blonde or not blonde enough or anything like that. I certainly don’t hate her because of her emails. And I don’t hate her because she’s a woman. In a recent list of 8 people who might try to take Trump down in 2020, three were women and I would happily vote for three of them although the third —and god help us if she tried to run again —I would not vote for under any circumstances. You know who I’m talking about.No, I don’t hate her but I am angry at her, oh yes. We simply aren’t and never have been on the same page when it comes to politics. It’s amazing, how many times I was called a misogynist for holding opinions that did not match her worshipfulness.I should also point out that I passionately supported her once Sanders was out of the race. A Clinton presidency would have been preferable to a Trump presidency and the salient point of comfort to me was that having a woman in the White House as president was long overdue.So, I supported her. I urged people to vote for her and got flack from all sides. Bernie fans thought me a traitor, Trump supporters thought me a madman. The day of the election Liberals were mocking my warning that Trump was going to win.Ah well.Here’s the thing about Clinton. Actually, it’s two things and some of you are not going to like either of them. But that’s OK too because this election has taught me a lesson.Some people cannot be reached. Your country is at the cutting edge of a post truth political world and if you have not come to the conclusion that HRC was as deeply flawed a candidate as you could have fielded, then you are lost to tribalism and there’s little I or indeed anyone else can do to break you from your reverie.I have zero sympathy for her. None. And I have little patience for those who do. She should have been so much better.To begin with.With all the crap that was going on in America, you decided to run with a corporatist. You decided to run with one of the most unpopular candidates of all time. You decided to run with a woman who had been cozying up to Wall Street her entire life. A woman who openly admitted in her speech to Goldman Sachs that you had to lie to the plebs with a public and private positions and we all said.“Oh man, c’mon, Lincoln did that too, she’s just being a politician!”Well buckle up; people are sick of the whole ‘being a politician’ thing.I say ‘you’ but i really mean the DNC. They had tried to plant a Clinton shaped hole in the election back in 2008 with their corrupt Super Delegate system but had to give up in the face of overwhelming popular support for Obama.Fuck it they said. We’ll play her again 2016. the fact that nobody seems to like her? That’s their problem!It’s true that Clinton got an unfair shake of the stick by the right-wing media who despised her but it’s a huge mistake to think that that is the only reason people disliked her. She was a hawk, not only voting for Iraq but pressing for foreign action whenever the opportunity arose. She parsed every sentence she ever uttered; her concession speech was one of the few times we got to see her speak from the heart. She lied when she didn’t have to, was secretive to the point of paranoia. Everything she did was calculated to help her win the office of the president and yes, I know she was a woman living in a man’s world and thus had to overcompensate but she overcompensated way, way too much.She came across as having no soul. She needed to appeal to moderates or so the DNC insisted and it led to some truly horrific positions.1. She supported the death penalty2. She claimed to be a moderate when speaking to a moderate crowd.3. She claimed to be a progressive when speaking to a progressive crowd.4. She refused to support Gay marriage until the very last minute.5. She called the TPP the gold standard and then decided it wasn’t when she saw the wind change.6. She supported her husband’s 1994 crime bill famously using the phrase Super Predators.7. She supported the repeal of Glass Steagall and thus contributed to the 2007 financial crisis.8. Rather than trying to appease the left with a Sanders, Warren or Al Franken choice for VP she tried to please her Wall Street buddies with the short stack of pancakes that is Tim KaineI could go on… no honestly I could, I’ve been saying this for years. Seriosuly Hilalry fucking Clinton? Was it a joke? Were we being trolled? Nobody liked her for god’s sake! She was too upset to give a concession speech on the night itself. I suspect she hadn’t bothered to write one. Either way, ‘Boo-Hoo’ I couldn’t care less.If she had a drop of integrity she would have dropped out when she saw her popularity ratings. ‘Go for it Sanders’ she would have said, ‘the most important thing is stopping that plate of fried chicken with busy hands from taking the White House.’ If she had any — excuse the phrase — balls at all she would have told Wall Street to suck them and picked Warren or Sanders for VP in order to unify the two wings. But oh no, she had to scrape the creme out of an Oreo and shove it into a suit in order to reassure her paymasters that if she keeled over mid-term they wouldn’t have to deal with a president who had a soul.“Look everyone, it’s Tim Kaine, isn’t he beige?”Yes he is. He really is.The great thing about being as rich as Clinton is is that Trump’s vile ideology won’t affect her in any way shape or form. She can go by herslf a huge chalet in Switzerland if things get real bad but even if not, medicare, cuts to the minimum wage, mass deportations. Not actually her problem thank you very much.Hillary Clinton is way, way to the right of Theresa May, the British, conservative Prime Minister in almost every way and we are supposed to think she’s a progressive? I could concuss myself with face-palms just thinking about it.i think I might.And none of it matters because Clinton is entitled to all those positions and beliefs. It was the attempt to appeal to the middle and the left simultaneously whilst secretly being right of center on most non-culture war issues.And that’s not the worst of it.Actually, yes, it was rigged.The DNC have an important job to do. They have to facilitate the election of political candidates and not just for presidential races either. That’s a big job and it involves a lot of work that we won’t go into here but suffice to say vetting, fundraising, grass roots campaigning and so on take up a lot of time and a lot of energy.What they are not supposed to be doing is selecting the candidate themselves. That’s one of those vote things.The DNC doesn’t like this idea at all which is why they have a Super Delegate system in the first place. They are a little bit scared of the idea of an ‘excess of democracy’ where the people of the party might select someone a little too ‘off message.’ Somebody who might do what is good for the country as opposed to the oligarchy.Someone like Sanders perhaps? Can’t have that, nope.And you took it! I mean c’mon people, do you not see the super delegates for what they are? Do you need it spelled out to you? It’s the Democratic parties way of keeping you at arms length. ‘Oh give me a group hug people and we’ll tell you who to vote for while we huddle.’Come along and vote people, we have to, you understand, stack the deck though, we cannot have you ‘shitmunchers’ make any actual decisions, laws no.I had to watch Clinton act in mock outrage when Trump suggested the election was rigged.“That’s horrible.” she said.Yes, it was. But then it was horrible when you rigged the primaries too.Of the 4,765 total Democratic delegates, 714 are superdelegates, which are usually Democratic members of Congress, Governors, former Presidents, and other party leaders and elected officials. They are not required to indicate preference for a candidate. In total 570 of them voted for Clinton and just 44 for Sanders. Now, 27,834,835 people voted in the Democratic primaries which means that Clinton’s husband — as a super delegate himself — was granted the equivalent voting power of 5,841 grass roots activists. He’s worth nearly six thousand times what you are. What does the DNC have to do? Stamp the word ‘Pleb’ on your foreheads?How the people who kicked Great Britain’s ass in 1776 over questions of representation can be satisfied with this without using their own socks as a sick bag is genuinely beyond me.Now, Clinton could have beaten Sanders fair and square. He’s not a perfect candidate, there’s no such thing y’all.There are areas that an astute politician could have exploited and taken him on head to head . In fact, his main advantage, indeed his main USP is his integrity. Sanders meant what he said and even if Congress had blocked much of what he tried to implement, even if you disagree with his politics, few would deny that he’s an honest guy.Did Clinton confront him on the issues?Did she hell.Oh, she emulated him when she thought it prudent to do so. What was it the leak email called it? Oh yes.In January 2016, in an email exchange, Clinton speech writer Dan Schwerin worried that Clinton was failing to connect with younger voters stating that they needed to:“…Disaggregate Bernie’s voters from Bernie himself, so the former feel like they can keep shaping the party even after the latter rides off into the sunset … None of this changes the basic problem that compared to Bernie we’re never going to be the ‘change candidate’ and so we’re either confident in our own identity or we’re chasing him and offering ourselves as a pale imitation.”The pale imitation. The ‘we cannot be the candidate of change.’I guess that means that we’ll just let Trump win then!Because Sanders never stood a chance. They never gave him one. In leaked emails, they openly mocked him. They gave Clinton sneaky peaks of debate questions. Did she call the police? Did she stop the moderator in her tracks and say ‘I’m not answering that because CNN gave it to me two weeks ago?’ Did she forward the email to Sanders with RE: In the interest of fairness written on it?Did she hell.During the debates, she was given preferential treatment. This isn’t even speculation, these are facts.In an answer, I wrote last march when discussing the Florida debate that took place that month I wrote:Hillary's speaking time total: 1409 sec or 23:29 | interrupted 10 times (not including clarification/follow-up)Bernie's speaking time total: 1071 sec or 17:51 | interrupted 25 times (not including follow-ups)Hillary spoke 32% longer, moderators interrupted Bernie 150% moreNow this itself does not demonstrate media bias, it only shows that the moderators were not treating both candidates equally; they are fallible and it's not like they could control Clinton half the time. But if examples like this all we had to go on then I'd suggest that we were all suffering from a good old case of paranoia; suck it up I'd say, they asked her some tough questions too.Little did I know that she had a heads up on the ‘toughies.’You’re all deplorable in the eyes of this elite which is why you need to take control of the DNC back. I’ll tackle that in another question.Had Clinton beaten Sanders fair and square, I honestly believe that the ‘Never Hillary’ camp would have been something of a mewling kitten. Some would have sulked I’m sure but most would have just accepted it as politics and moved on to support Clinton.Would she have won?We’ll never know.What we do know is that Clinton’s treatment of Sanders confirmed what many of us suspected. She was establishment in the worst possible way.The DNC have learned nothing from any of this. Indeed, they already seem intent on repeating the mistakes of 2016. there are calls to field Tim Kaine in 2020.For general musings or indeed if you want to contact me / yell at me or ask for my phone number, you can contact me via Twitter. You can also read my work at Progressive Liberal or my medium page and for a break in politics, or if you just want to enjoy my British accent I host a regular podcast called the Sanfu Revue where I discuss having forced myself to watch terrible movies so that you don’t have to.Disclaimer, this answer links back to some relevant articles I wrote.

“Is China's Evergrande Group too big to fail?” Thanks for the A2A.In China there’s no “too big” or “too small” to fail. It all depends on the political circumstances and ramifications of the moment. This is a complicated topic but I’ll try to simplify it as best as possible.For those who are not aware, Evergrande Group is the second largest property developer in China by sales. The largest is Country Garden.Now let’s take a look at the Hurun Top 10 Richest Chinese List (I’ll explain the reason and connection below):What do almost all of these companies have in common, besides being some of China’s biggest “private” companies? No, not just government connections, every company in China has government connections, big deal. Government business, that’s what they have in common.Take Evergrande for example, what’s its daily business operation? 1. Secure state-owned bank loans → 2. Buy land from local governments → 3. Develop property (primarily residential) in accordance with local government blueprints → 4. Sell property complying with government guidelines on price per meter (i.e. prices have to fall under predetermined pricing bands. Also, if they are going to charge 60,000 rmb per meter on one project, they have to charge 30,000–40,000 rmb on another).In essence, these companies are “quasi state-owned enterprises”. Another example, China Pacific Construction is a private company, but its business is all government infrastructure projects. Parenthetically, the founder Yan Jiehe stepped down a few years ago and appointed his (then) 26 y.o. son Yan Hao as Chairman & CEO. Can’t make this stuff up.But wait, Tencent and Alibaba and Baidu are quasi SOEs? Well, read this, China’s Tech Giants Have a Second Job: Helping Beijing Spy on Its PeopleTech Giants Feel the Squeeze as Xi Jinping Tightens His Grip (Btw, Pony Ma of Wechat regularly holds CCP membership drives at his headquarters in Shenzhen)Back to Evergrande, how well are they doing? Not too well, here’s the latest: Chinese developers to cut prices as market cools, hits economic growthIs that important? Oh yeah. “Property sector contributes 25 per cent of China’s domestic economic output”.Ok, but is that important at the individual level? Well yes, if 74% of your assets are in homes (think 2008 US crisis x 2):So Evergrande (and companies like Evergrande) will not be allowed to “fail” per se. Restructure them, merge them, even make them state-owned, yes.Has this happened in the past? Oh yeah, remember this guy? Chinese tycoon who bought Waldorf Astoria jailed for 18 years (I urge you to read the whole piece)Chinese insurance regulator takes over Anbang Insurance GroupNow we come back to why I said in the very beginning “It all depends on the political circumstances and ramifications of the moment.” This guy is a direct invention/beneficiary of the CCP. He married Deng Xiaoping’s granddaughter (kid you not), his first business partner was a PLA founding member’s son, he started his life as a car salesman, but his first deal was with Sinopec. He then went on a buying spree overseas and domestically (with state-owned bank loans of course), to the tune of $300 billion(!), including a $14 billion bid for Starwood in late 2015, when Anbang was already in trouble.Now, the problem with these “private” companies, is that when there is trouble, it’s a huge loss of face, and potentially a source of social unrest, for Beijing. Because, the Chinese public is not stupid, it knows that these companies are the “creation” of the CCP. So they’re thinking, “you created these multi-billionaires, but my life insurance is worthless and/or my homes and net worth took a dive?”If you take one message from this answer it should be that there are no Sam Waltons and Jeff Bezos in China. All these top companies and people were created by, and serve at the pleasure of, the CCP.