YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE

You don't have to be Chinese to overpay.

But in this case it helps. Especially if one is talking real estate, expensive cars for your kids and bloated-over-valued American college tuitions.

Check home prices around SoCal. The sellers? Who knows? The buyers, in many cases Chinese. The deals, nearly always all cash.
  
The bigger the price, the better.

Starwood Hotels, which owns 11 brands including Sheraton, W Hotels, and St. Regis, spread over nearly 1,300 hotels & resorts in 100 countries, announced today that an unnamed “Consortium” has made an all-cash offer to acquire the hotel group for $76 a share, or $12.8 billion.

That consortium is trying to spoil Marriott’s party. Last November, Marriott agreed to acquire Starwood to form the world’s largest hotel behemoth with over 1 million rooms.

Marriott in turn came out today and announced that the consortium was in fact led by Anbang Insurance Group in China. On March 11, Starwood had approached Marriott with the news of the unsolicited offer and obtained a waiver to pursue the new deal. The breakup fee is $400 million. So if Anbang gets Starwood, it would pay a total of $13.2 billion.

Anbang has been busy recently. It acquired the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan in late 2014 for a record $1.95 billion from Hilton, at the time majority-owned by Blackstone, after having acquired office buildings in New York and Canada. It also acquired South Korea’s Tongyang Life for $1 billion.

 Not all deals worked out. Its €3.5 billion bid for Novo Banco, a teetering Portuguese “systemically important” bank, sank into the quicksand of politics. But Anbang keeps slugging. Over the weekend, word leaked out that it had agreed to acquire Strategic Hotels & Resorts from Blackstone for $6.5 billion. According to Bloomberg’s sources, Anbang paid $450 million more than Blackstone had paid for it three months ago!

Let's see if memory serves, we recall Blackstone back at the early part of the 2008-9 downturn buying up 35,000 individual, single family homes in the U.S.that they recently bundled up--it's packaging not perception--and unloaded. Probably to some big institutional fund managers like your
your state run retirement fund.

They like to invest at market tops too.

But don't fret for those Chinese buyers. Maybe their kids can participate in the huge student class action suit that our government just cleared the way for students to file.

wolfstreet.com/2016/03/14/chinese-money-in-record-us-deals-starwood-strategic-hotels-peak-7-year-boom/

www.wsj.com/video/posh-cars-for-wealthy-chinese-students-in-the-us/0F07D213-FCE6-4173-905B-81296DD1A9FB.html?mod=trending_now_video_1

www.marketwatch.com/story/the-government-paves-the-way-for-students-to-file-class-action-lawsuits-2016-03-14