The rise of great powers: starting from military industry

The Huo family seems to be prosperous, but in fact, the hidden dangers are very obvious.

That is, none of Huo Yingdong's children can compare with Huo Yingdong, including the eldest son Huo Zhenting, who is just an average person.

After Huo Yingdong's death, Huo Zhenting's prestige and ability will inevitably be challenged.

Even under Huo Yingdong's arrangement, Huo Zhenting successively served as the president of the Hong Kong Football Association, Hong Kong Legislative Yuan member, President of the Hong Kong Sports Association and Olympic Committee, and member of the International Olympic Committee.

Most of the time, Huo Zhenting is responsible for the Huo family's external affairs.

But Huo Zhenting is still not the first person in Hong Kong. There are no less than ten people of the same age who are more prestigious than Huo Zhenting.

If the older generation is excluded, Huo Zhenting's own status, influence, and prestige are not even among the top 30 in Hong Kong.

More reliance is on the Huo family!

If Huo Yingdong passes away, those who give face to the Huo family now may not be able to do so at that time.

Even in the mainland, Huo Zhenting's status is far inferior to Huo Yingdong.

In recent years, Huo Yingdong has been more inclined to cultivate Huo Qigang, his eldest grandson, and he has racked his brains and spent a lot of effort on Huo Qigang.

Even Huo Yingdong cultivated Huo Qigang not for business, but for politics, to pave the way for the future.

This is why Huo Yingdong personally selected an Olympic champion as the eldest grandson's wife.

As an old man who has been in the business world for decades, how could Huo Yingdong not see the hidden dangers of the Huo family.

In the 1980s, Huo Yingdong not only tentatively proposed a marriage between the two families to Liu Tao, Huo Qigang and Liu Tao's eldest daughter were engaged, or his other granddaughters were engaged to Liu Tao's son.

But they were all rejected by Liu Tao.

In the 1990s, there were more attempts.

Liu Tao had to make his attitude clear to Ho Ying-tung later. He would not interfere with his children's freedom of marriage, let alone sacrifice their marriage. If Ho Ying-tung's grandchildren were capable, he would support them. If they were engaged or married, then forget it.

In fact, Ho Ying-tung had tried hard. For example, Ho Qigang once sent flowers to Liu Yingqing, but Liu Yingqing just didn't like him. When Liu Jingming went to the United States, Ho Ying-tung's granddaughter went to the United States under the name of studying abroad, and then went to the same school as Liu Jingming. As a result, Liu Jingming didn't like Ho Ying-tung's granddaughter, but fell in love with Feng Nan, who was the same color as Ho Ying-tung's granddaughter.

I can only say that marriage is so magical that it doesn't really matter if the man is talented and the woman is beautiful.

New York.

As Buffett's widely circulated investment motto: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.

If it is to be performed as a play, John Paulson may be the best actor.

It is worth mentioning that the current US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has a similar name to him, but the two people do very different things.

Paulson is working on a fund that specializes in shorting mortgage bonds!

Before this, it has been cultivated.

What's more terrible is that the good news about the housing market is now overwhelming. Optimistic housing market experts and lending institutions keep advocating that housing prices will continue to rise, or that the federal authorities will lower interest rates to maintain the market.

However, John Paulson firmly believes that winter will definitely come.

By then, no matter how prosperous the market is, it will wither away in the bone-chilling cold wind.

John Paulson is in a good mood because he has just received $3 billion in funds and entrusted him to manage and short mortgage bonds.

This shows that there are still people who share the same view as him.

John Paulson did not investigate the information of this fund because he knew that if he wanted to do well in Wall Street and live a few more years, it would be best not to investigate, so as not to find out anything.

He only knew that if it was as he thought, he would get a lot of money.

John Paulson is very confident about shorting mortgage bonds.

Because the North American housing market started to soar in 2001, in order to cope with the bursting of the technology bubble and the market panic caused by terrorist incidents, the then head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, quickly lowered the short-term interest rate from 6% to 1.75%. In the next two years, it continued to be lowered to 1%, which was maintained until 2005.

The low interest rate caused liquidity to overflow. The Case-Shiller index of 20 major cities in North America almost doubled in five years. From the year before last to last year, almost everyone was intoxicated by the market's bright prospects, and all financial institutions were doing subprime loans.

The market was prosperous on the surface, but in fact it was facing great pressure.

John Paulson specializes in subprime mortgage products. Through the mathematical model he established, he found that the housing market does not need to fall, but only needs to drop by less than 5% each year, then the subprime mortgage default rate will rise sharply.

In fact, through the analysis of a large amount of data, it has been shown that the default rate has risen a lot now.

This confirms John Paulson's point of view.

In fact, John Paulson didn't know that the $3 billion was not the only short-selling of mortgage bonds.

In fact, there were tens of billions of dollars in short-selling.

In the US stock market, there were also tens of billions of dollars in funds, using leverage to short-sell some listed companies or sectors.

There were also tens of billions of dollars in short-selling in South America, Europe, Japan, etc.

The short sellers had hundreds of billions of additional funds.

The subprime mortgage crisis and the financial crisis were both crises and opportunities.

Short-selling also became more secretive.

A large part of it is through offshore islands.

These offshore funds are difficult to find out.

There are hundreds of offshore islands under the control of Panshan Group.

This is a rare opportunity. Liu Tao has not had such an opportunity for many years. Now that he has encountered it, he will not let it go.

And it just happens that it can be used well in China.

After dealing with the affairs in Hong Kong, Liu Tao left Hong Kong.

He took a special plane directly from Hong Kong to Beijing.

He had to stay in Beijing for a few days.

First, because the academician conference was to be held, it was necessary to elect academicians. Both the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering needed to hold an academician conference.

Second, it was because of the annual National Science and Technology Award Conference.

Both of these major events required him to attend the meeting in person.

As early as December, there were many reports on the election of academicians, and then there were some disputes, and some people were very dissatisfied with being eliminated.

Every time the academician election was almost the same, there were always people who thought they could be elected as academicians, but they were not elected.

As for the annual National Science and Technology Award Conference, it is the provincial capital of China's science and technology field, and it is also a reward for outstanding achievements and units.

Among them, the winners of the National Highest Science and Technology Award have extremely high exposure, and at the same time have a lifelong honorary nature, which is the highest recognition of the country.

Each of them has fought for the country all their lives, and there are even some who have been anonymous before and are unknown to the outside world. (End of this chapter)