"It's going well; the situation is excellent."
In Villa No. 1, Zhao Lichun spoke with great excitement, recounting the market trends he had analyzed from recent international financial newspapers. On paper, things certainly looked great: the forced interest rate hikes and cooling measures in Japan had not lowered housing prices as expected; instead, they continued to soar.
However, only those truly living in Japan understood that while prices were indeed rising, properties had become difficult to sell. The days when any property listed at five percent below market value would be snatched up by major speculators and hoarded were gone. This was because the country's biggest players were frantically spreading false information to stimulate the economy, aiming to offload their own properties quickly to cash out and flee.
Chapter 458