Financial, Economic and Social Mood Update (September 1, 2026)
I traveled for six weeks in the Philippines (Cebu, Bohol, Panglao, Manila and Makati), Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan and in the San Francisco, California Bay Area and made a number of observations.
China is a fully developed country and its massive southeast megalopolis including Hong Kong, Macao and Zhuhai are every much as affluent as North America and Europe. While in Macao I saw one (1) person who could be classified as “homeless.” Most people work at average jobs to make ends meet as do most people all over the entire world. There are also a (not small) number of people who are very affluent or even wealthy. Most of these are business people from the rest of mainland China – the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Life is not much different than in North America or in Europe. The Internet was not blocked where I visited and people lead normal lives. Macao is the most densely populated territory on earth which means that space (real property) sells at an absolute premium. Most people in Macao and in all large cities all over the world reside in “dense” housing such as apartments, condominiums and townhomes. Only a few people or families have the financial means to afford single family homes which are more often than not more like mansions or palaces – huge in size and with at least three floors. In Macao such homes sell for more than the equivalent of USD $100 million or nine (9) figures.
Moving down the ladder or pyramid one finds high rise glass structures where “units” are similar in living space to large single family homes (say more than 3,000 square feet) and these dwellings sell for more than the equivalent of USD $10 million or eight (8) figures in Macao. Most people cannot afford to own and thus rent (as in the rest of the world). The smallest dwellings for purchase are “studio” or one-bedroom units located in much older, less desirable midrise buildings where there are no elevators. These units start around the equivalent of USD $300,000, $400,000 and $500,000 each.
Mansions (large single family homes) in the “Forbes Park” village or subdivision of Makati City in the Philippines sell for roughly USD $16 to $17 million each. More modest or average single family homes in the same neighborhood are not as pricey. The situation in the expanded San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, California Bay Area is not too different (this has been and remains the most expensive metropolitan region in the entire USA which has been the case for more than a century).
The Golden State of California started to boom with the “Gold Rush” of 1848 after the region was taken away from Mexico due to the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). The “Gold” of today happens to be the IPO initial public corporate stock offering often in the areas of high technology and biotechnology. Urban sprawl now reaches into “central” California because employees who must work closer to the core cities such as San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and the expanded Silicon Valley cannot afford to live either there or in nearby older suburbs in counties such as San Mateo, Marin, Alameda and Contra Costa. This expanded urban sprawl reaches all the way to cities such as Stockton, Tracy, Manteca, Merced, Livermore, Pleasanton and Dublin (there is overlap here in terms of county boundaries). The roughly 900,000 net loss in population since 2020 can be attributed to the contracting (upper middle level) of the US labor market. Whereas lower compensation service and retail employment beg for applicants, middle and upper mid-level professional employment is contracting. People who much more recently purchased much newer tract homes in residential subdivisions in central California fit into this latter demographic. When people lose their jobs and cannot replace those jobs soon enough with comparable compensation they often choose to relocate to less affluent and less expensive parts of the USA such as Texas, Florida and beyond.
On the other hand there are very positive signs in a strained American economy. The port of Oakland, California is extremely active and busy and it is nowhere near as large as the ports in much more populated southern California due to metropolitan Los Angeles and San Diego having more population compared to northern California.
Electric and hybrid vehicles are much more common in larger cities and metro regions compared to in the interior of the USA and the former will continue to gain overall market share worldwide which now stands at 28 percent of all new unit sales in the world. Economies of scale in production have been achieved and charging has improved as has driving range. The insanity of the war in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf motivate ever more people worldwide to go electric. An excellent case in point is Denmark which had very few electric vehicles as recently as six years ago. Most recent sales and registration statistics show that one third of all vehicles in use are now electric and in sales of new vehicles this reached 97 percent in July 2026.
