[beiller]

All sounds very plausible, but where are the effects of this? We should be seeing many people holding mortgages at HSBC not able to pay. Are there no public stats showing how many lack of payments being made to HSBC? Is HSBC going to hold on to these properties taking massive losses? For how long? It has definitely helped the run up of prices here. It will also help the collapse of prices as well, either that or the collapse of HSBC. Maybe the effects take a very long time to manifest. Lets hope it's not too long :)

[timr]

The article suggests this is money laundering. It would make sense to have fake borrowers with fake incomes as part of a layering operation.

Someone wants to get $large_sum out of China. They can't do this without raising lots of flags in both countries. So they set up an army of fake borrowers, have them take out fraudulent mortgages on real properties in Canada, pay down the mortgages, and sell the property to obtain clean money on the other end.

All the better if the property rises in value in the meantime due to enormous fraud.

[stevenwoo]

Not Canada, but before the pandemic caused rural housing prices to go up, there was a crime syndicate buying houses for marijuana grow operations and having the house pay for itself essentially until they got caught. https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/doj-raid-marijuana-g...

[avidiax]

The article doesn't seem to suggest that the mortgage holders are actually straw purchasers, but the facts seem to suggest this is at least sometimes true. How can a hairdresser service several mortgages without "income" from China?

[ABCLAW]

> We should be seeing many people holding mortgages at HSBC not able to pay.

Not really. Lying about the source of cashflow doesn't mean the cashflow isn't real.

The end objective for a lot of these frauds isn't to sink the bank with fake loans. It's to launder money.

[beiller]

Makes sense I wasn't thinking about the full on laundering aspects. But even so, if the real estate is used in laundering, it will eventually have to be sold to get back clean money. This should still run up prices at the start, and run them down in the end. So I think the majority of the point still stands: there should be an uptick in sales (which there is not). They could be speculating on top of laundering, in which case they are taking some losses. We are -20% from peak. The time will come when they (the launderers) will need liquidity and sell which has not come. Will it ever come?

[oldgradstudent]

- "A rolling loan gathers no loss."

As long as real estate prices continue to rise, you won't see large scale missed payments because they will be able to sell the assets, refinance the loan, or even successfully rent it out.

We've seen this dynamic in 2008 and in the S&L crisis before. Bad loans drive the bubble, the expanding bubble hides the bad loans, but when the bubble stops, there is a massive large scale loan failure.

[faluzure]

Assuming these mortgages are insured through CMHC, would HSBC be on the hook or the insurance system when some of these mortgages fail?

Canadians are certainly paying for social services used by folks who earn income abroad and pay little to no income tax in Canada, and folks who want to buy their first house are harmed by inflated housing prices.

My currently overseas landlord for some reason needed to travel to Canada to give birth, and was very eager to get their health card / banking documents sent to our rental despite it being rented out for several years prior to us arriving...

[crustaceansoup]

CMHC doesn't insure mortgages where the property value is equal to greater than $1 million, which in the Greater Toronto Area essentially limits it to condo purchases.

[cm2187]

I think that's what a lot of people here are not realising (or perhaps they haven't read the article). In this case the main victim is HSBC if these loans were made to individuals who are speculating on foreign real estate without the income to cover the loan. This doesn't look like originate and distribute, i.e. HSBC shareholders will bear the losses.

[empath-nirvana]

No, they won't. It's money laundering. They'll pay the mortgages.

[flamedoge]

HSBC Canada is sold to RBC