There are several ways of printing money without actually printing, for example by IPO/issuing stocks.
If a company has 100 shares, you only need to price 10 share at $10 per share to create a market cap of $1,000.
That’s the essence of printing money – using only $100 to create a fortune of $1,000.
Several years ago, when ICO was popular, it applies the similarly concept – you only need to price a small amount of coins to have a “nominal” market cap that’s tens or hundreds times larger.
This is not finished though.
You need another step to turn paper wealth into actual money – borrow against it.
It’s pretty easy to borrow against a liquid stock. The lender can sell the stock into the market if needed to protect the loan. To minimize potential loan loss, lenders just need a discount – say to lend $60 given $100 stocks, in case of market volatility and liquidity discount. This ratio may change.
Lending against many coins is riskier as many coins don’t have the necessary liquidity market to withstand a large quantity of sale.
At this point, money is printed.
The concept can be applied to the real estate market.
When an apartment is sold to market with a price, the apartment building/complex gets a market cap, and the whole residential area gets a monetary value like market cap.
In this process, a buyer helps create “IPO”, not only for this developer, but also for the local government.
With the help of banking, money is printed with one home sale, just like a share transaction created the whole market cap.
With secondary transactions, a company’s stock gets a new price and the company gets a new market cap.
It’s the same thing for second-hand house transactions.
And you know what, just like share can be bought back by companies, homes can be repurchased.
This is what China is doing.
The question is, share buyback can be an indication of confidence and a source of liquidity. Does home repurchase program want to achieve both goals?
Shares within the same class are created equal, homes are not. How to execute is another question.