The Chinese are coming, The Chinese are coming

Unless you are totally into movies, it is most likely that you haven't heard of a movie called 'The Russians are coming, The Russians are coming'. It came at the heights (depths?) of the Cold War--in 1966. A great comedy, and a great picture at the same time--not merely a slapstick one.


According to this LA Times story, it is literal--the Chinese are coming. And apparently they are coming to buy homes, because prices have dropped so much. It is almost like somebody went to China and advertised a huge clearance sale in California and elsewhere :-)

An excerpt from the Times piece:

The Chinese do have a lot of cash to spend. The central government holds the biggest stockpile of foreign reserves in the world, nearly $2 trillion, most of it in dollars. And the Boston Consulting Group estimates that there were more than 391,000 millionaire households in mainland China last year, up from 310,000 reported the previous year.
....
[Home] prices in the U.S. have fallen more sharply than in China, and many Chinese consider the American market highly alluring as a place to invest and live because of the United States' developed economy.

The purchasing tours in the U.S. grew out of similar trips by well-heeled Chinese back home.

Investors from Wenzhou and other entrepreneurial hot spots were known for chartering buses to visit such cities as Shanghai to shop for apartments. Now some of them are signing up with outfits like Soufun.com, the real estate website that is sponsoring the home-buying trip next month from Beijing to California and Nevada."