My first mortgage in the mid 1980's was an adjustable rate moving between 6.5-9.5% for a 30 year contract. 7% doesn't seem that unreal. The difference being that housing prices are up significantly and I am not convinced that wages have kept pace.
They have not. Overal mortgage payments as a percent of income are higher now, by a lot. Most older people refuse to see this and just say we arent working hard enough. Well... i became a migrant construction worker so I could get overtime and higher wages. But guess what? I have no use for a home now because I never go home. Maybe when I've saved some more I will retire early. Who is John Galt?
Not really an oil crises. Supply is there. Trump just got 65 billion barrels from Venezuela. California Air Resources Board has effectively shut down 7 refineries in CA, some of the most modern and cleanest in the world with fines and regulations. California had been buying its refined products from India and S Korea. Hence diesel so high in the west. No refinery built in the US since the 1970’s so this is the long term work done by Green climate terrorists posing as do good NGOs. Paid for by CCP, Soros, Rockefellers and all the people that want you impoverished.
Sorry, Venezuela won't increase pumping for at least another decade. Trump is lying about the numbers. It is also abhorrent that we are effectively stealing Venezuela's oil AND keeping the proceeds. SUPPOSEDLY, they are supposed to get the money AND WE will tell them what to spend it on. Trump has never said how much money or even where it is. Venezuela is now effectively our colony and the Venezuelan people are no better under us whatsoever.
California shutting down refineries shouldn’t increase prices in Texas or Pennsylvania. If anything it should increase the supply of petroleum (and consequently reduce prices) available other states. And yet here we are with high prices throughout the country. Domestically we produce much more petroleum than we consume, so the law of supply and demand leads to cheaper domestic fuel. But since we have opened the export market for petroleum products to other countries, oil prices tend to float based on the international market. And since we have limited need for middle eastern petroleum, if it weren’t for prices floating on the international export market, whatever happens in the Middle East would not have such outsized impact on what we in the U.S. pay at the pump.
Trump has called for a temporary export ban or limitation petroleum on exports which would increase supply domestically and reduce prices. Imagine the boon in our economy if we we dropped fuel price by for example 30%.
Of course then the federal reserve would claim the economy is “heating up too much” and raise the fed rate anyway.
Do you not understand that the GOP has keep deficit spending and deficits feed the National Debt? Trump signed onto the budget-busting Big Beautiful Bill and now he is piling on my deficits spending with his unconstitutional war on Iran. Trump followed his war criminal buddy, Netanyahu, into the Tar Baby, Iran, and now he cannot get loose. He refuses to say he screws up because he's an egomaniac and egomaniacs are never wrong. Inflation is high because the GOP refuses to rein in spending and this is why the Fed is raising rates. I stay home. I approve of neither party and they lie to you to your face. No more endless wars and guess who started one.
"The Fed could fix housing tomorrow by cutting rates."
No Peter, the Fed can't fix housing by cutting rates.
The housing market must achieve rational price relationships to overall ownership costs with the ability of people's purchasing power of the currency (capital cost, bureaucracy costs -permitting-, insurance cost, homeowner association dues costs, property tax costs, maintenance costs).
What you are seeing right now, is the sobering moments where people are realizing that the cost of capital has been artificially suppressed for more than 30 years. Add in the bureaucratic screwing around with underwriting requirements to favor subsidized housing for one demographic over another, then top it off with the sprinkles of mass invasion by people who should not be here with each given $2,000+ per month of taxpayer provided freebees which grotesquely distorted the demand curve, and you have a completely unrealistic pricing structure.
We are seeing that distortion heal itself slowly through price reductions and eventual capitulation to reality. Will it pound boomers and their large, expensive houses they can't sell? Yes.
Will it pound the idiots that bought at the peak and thought ZIRP was going to last forever and paid no attention to demand distortions through fraud? Yes.
Is it mine or any other rational person's responsibility to salve the pain of the real estate fool when we warned them of the dangers of buying into the tailwinds of mania? NO.
Favoritism to certain demographic groups with mortgage lending prior to 2008 was the dynamite. Fraud lending created a ton of it. QE & ZIRP added gasoline. COVID spending plus the inflation reduction act tripled the M2 money supply. All of it created trillions in cash and low cost to borrow it. Spending on housing and vehicles went nuts.
It all launched the inflation we have now.
Culprit? Federal Reserve and the US Treasury under Clinton, Bush, and Obama.
It's an interesting dilemma. Inflation is the culprit. Banks and investors can hardly be expected to loan money long term without rates high enough to compensate for the slow devaluation of the dollar. That same inflation juggernaut has made housing prices go way up.
Inflation is an invisible tax on the people, and we're all getting hurt by it.
Inflation is caused by printing money faster than goods and services increase. Especially fiat money, which is nothing but an IOU from government, backed by nothing.
True. Many don't realize that the rich love low interest rates. It means they can borrow money for next to nothing and put that money to work making even more money. Naturally, they get much better rates than you or I could. The Fed is really just a banking cartel and bankers love rich clients.
Things are hard right now, but we are going into the Fourth Turning as described by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book of the same name. We will emerge even better, we just have to carry on best we can. Many other generations have done it.
Amazing how you view the economy. As if rising food prices, gasoline, diesel (on which everything is carried), and heating oil. No word about Trump's UNCONSTITUTIONAL War on Iran whose only benefit was Israel, not the US. We even got a lie like the WMD in Iraq; a nuclear bomb in Iran, which none of the US intelligence agencies agrees with. You admit that what you called Bidenflation was actually done by the Fed. But apparently there's no Trumpflation. When interest rates go up, housing prices will have to drop. Why should housing prices go upwards forever? The Fed looks at a lot more than the housing market. The same ones whining they cannot afford a house have two new cars, the latest smartphones, and the biggest TV. They probably eat out a lot too. New generations have ZERO idea how to save money. All they know how to do is whine. As for socialism, what we have now is nothing but Crony Capitalism where Big Business passes laws to favor them and protect them from competition. Plenty of socialism in this Administration as they are investing our tax money in stocks like Intel and other companies. A curse on both parties, but you still don't understand they are wings of the same bird. Take off your Trump rose-colored glasses.
Sorry, this is my last comment :) I just get so fired up about this stuff!!
Straight out of 1780, John Adams, and his exact words are chilling when you look at where things stand today:
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."
George Washington doubled down on the same warning in his 1796 Farewell Address.
Washington warned that party loyalty serves always to distract public councils, enfeeble public administration, agitate the community with ill-founded jealousies, and kindle animosity of one part against another. He said it opens the door to foreign influence and eventually leads to a despot who rides the disorder into absolute power.
When you have a unified culture with shared values and sound money, people pull together because thrift and honesty get rewarded. But when the money gets corrupted, the culture fractures right behind it. When the government hands out trillions in printed favors, people stop focusing on producing value and start fighting over political spoils. It becomes an ugly brawl over who gets the printed dollars and who gets left holding the bag.
You cannot single-handedly fix the circus in Washington, all you can do is try and protect your wealth from dollar debasement, don't save in dollars!
The American Founders chose a constitutional republic over a pure, direct democracy because they feared that unbridled majority rule would lead to instability and the oppression of minority rights.
The founders lived through this exact disaster during the Revolutionary War with the Continental currency. They printed paper notes until a wagonload of money could barely buy a wagonload of provisions, which gave us the old saying "not worth a Continental."
That bill right there is why George Washington wrote that unbacked paper money ruins commerce, oppresses the honest, and opens the door to every species of fraud and injustice.
They knew what pure democracy leads to. When a government runs on majority mob rule, politicians quickly learn they can buy votes by promising cheap debt, subsidies, and free favors. James Madison spelled it out in Federalist No. 10 when he warned against a "rage for paper money" and debt cancellation. He called paper money schemes an improper and wicked project because they allow a voting majority to confiscate the wealth of creditors and savers without calling it theft.
That is why the Constitution explicitly restricted states in Article I, Section 10, stating no state shall make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts. They wanted money tied to real, physical limits that politicians could not print to win elections.
What we have today is the breakdown of those constitutional guardrails. Politicians run up multi trillion dollar deficits to promise the public bread and circuses, and the Federal Reserve accommodates them by conjuring fiat currency out of thin air. It is political vote buying financed through the back door. The working man pays the tab every time his dollar buys less food, less fuel, and less square footage.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, followed always by a dictatorship." -Alexander Fraser Tytler
Lowering mortgage rates is not going to fix this. The Federal Reserve and the federal government created this entire mess in the first place by keeping interest rates artificially low and printing money through quantitative easing.
All that did was distort the market and pick winners and losers. If you bought a house for $200,000 with a 3% mortgage, you basically won the lottery. Your house is now worth $400,000, and your monthly payment is around $800. Meanwhile, anyone trying to buy a house today is looking at mortgage payments over $2,000. And seniors or people on fixed incomes in apartments get crushed when their rent doubles, while savers watch the purchasing power of their cash disappear. That is not prices going up, that is our money losing its value.
As the new Fed chair Kevin Warsh puts it:
"This surge in inflation has destroyed the poor and middle class and has taken a divided country and made it more divided".
The Fed needs to stop messing with the market. They need to step back, let the market set interest rates, and run off their balance sheet to pull all that extra money out of the system. Higher rates bring asset prices down, and that is the only way homes will ever become affordable again.
Thank god for Kevin Warsh and the bond vigilantes, they are the only ones that can fix this because Washington simply refuses to grow up and balance a budget!
Actually, FDR and Nixon killed the gold standard, which restrained spending. Nixon was running the Vietnam War AND the Great Society and so France called the US bluff under the Bretton Wood agreement and said they would send a warship to bring Dollars and get the equivalent of gold. Nixon "temporarily" as he claimed, shut the gold window and so now we have fiat currency which can be printed without so much as a toothpick backing it up.
If anyone with a brain did even the most basic research, they'd see how socialism, communism and Islamism are just another suicide pact with the devil. Collectivism never works and historically, there's hundreds of millions dead (apparently white-washed and/or memory-holed by legacy media). Conversely, but worse, Islam is a violent, male-dominated sex cult whose swarms of voting blocs have swept up easy-peasey districts in their quest for power and control as they push their prophet and god-mandated global domination - and BTW, why don't the Christophobics mention that Islam has NO separation of church and state - they are one and the same? Meanwhile, orange-man bad?? LOL!
Islam was tame and bothered nobody until we went into the Middle East and ensured they became radicalized by our actions in the Middle East. We aren't happy unless we believe we are running the world, but there are consequences. Your Orange Emperor went over to the Middle East and is making a royal mess of it. Iran bad? No, they have synagogues and churches over them and Jews and Christians have seats set aside for them in the Iranian Parliament. Of course, this is not what anyone wants to hear, but you did see the synagogue which was bombed in Tehran? Because the Torah scrolls were underneath the rubble, the clean-up crews were asked if they could remove the rubble stone by stone so the scrolls could be recovered. The local Iranian authorities agreed and the scrolls were recovered.
You clearly know nothing of Islam, yet still opine about it, your TDS and a myopic view of a jihadist Islamic Republic that kills its own citizens. Either you're a troll, or a bloviating idiot.
OP, why did you skip the o'biden years 2021-2024? I'd like to see those on your chart. I'm voting Republican no matter what, but I'd still like to see the missing o'biden years.
The GOP does care one iota about you. Nor do the Dems. Neither uphold the Constitution. Your vote is your approval. That's why unless there's a third party or good independent, I stay home. I approve of none of the class of liars running for office today. They chase the good ones like Thomas Massey out because he tells the truth about what happens there. They hate the light because their deeds are evil.
40% of homes do not have a mortgage at all. 56% of actual mortgaged homes have 1/2 equity to mortgage ratio: equity rich. All Those folks have options. Increasing the capital gains exemption would help unlock some of that. $250k max gain for a single person (widow/divorced) is way too low now it has t been adjusted in many decades. So lots of boomers hang on to pass the property to kids in step up basis on death. Eliminating the gain on their property would help unlock some of this. Targeted loan programs for first time buyers are needed, some rate buydowns for a small section of mortgages is better than a one size fits all mortgage rate suppression which investors will take advantage of and prices will rise again. Falling house prices are bad for everyone: tax receipts, lenders won’t loan in falling asset prices, but wages have not kept up with housing (fiat expansion and covid craziness of course) until that catch up happens, a targeted program for first time buyers so they can get a foot on the first run of that ladder, is needed
To what extent (if at all) do you think zoning restrictions are meaningfully contributing to this problem? I've heard it argued that as old style "start homes" (e.g., 1 bedroom homes on a small lot) are effectively outlawed, an environment is created where all builders CAN build are "McMansions." That might not have been a problems when rates were at 3%...but now that they're climbing towards (so I'm told) something closer to historic averages for mortgage rates, young people can't afford the homes.
But could they afford starter homes at these rates if we actually still built "starter homes"?
TDS? Remember, this Iran War is totally Unconstitutional and what instituted by Trump at the instigation of Israel.. Not that it bothers anyone in the GOP. It is always Party over Country. How exactly has Trump made America Great Again? What do we make other than exporting wars and printing money? The views above are fact. If you want to run around and make Islam your bogeyman, feel free. Trump ADMITTED to ARMING Iranians to start an insurgency. So this KILLING THEIR OWN PEOPLE came from the USA. That's right, those weapons were planted by us so we could COMPLAIN about Iran killing Iranians. Yet, we bomb a girls' school and don't even have the human decency to apologize. Which country acts like the barbarians?
My first mortgage in the mid 1980's was an adjustable rate moving between 6.5-9.5% for a 30 year contract. 7% doesn't seem that unreal. The difference being that housing prices are up significantly and I am not convinced that wages have kept pace.
They have not. Overal mortgage payments as a percent of income are higher now, by a lot. Most older people refuse to see this and just say we arent working hard enough. Well... i became a migrant construction worker so I could get overtime and higher wages. But guess what? I have no use for a home now because I never go home. Maybe when I've saved some more I will retire early. Who is John Galt?
I agree. I am still voting republican. Unfortunately DC/ Senate and the House
does not like President Trump or we the people. They are trying to destroy him and. his presidency. Unfortunately.
I was really upset they raised rates into an oil crises.
Not really an oil crises. Supply is there. Trump just got 65 billion barrels from Venezuela. California Air Resources Board has effectively shut down 7 refineries in CA, some of the most modern and cleanest in the world with fines and regulations. California had been buying its refined products from India and S Korea. Hence diesel so high in the west. No refinery built in the US since the 1970’s so this is the long term work done by Green climate terrorists posing as do good NGOs. Paid for by CCP, Soros, Rockefellers and all the people that want you impoverished.
Sorry, Venezuela won't increase pumping for at least another decade. Trump is lying about the numbers. It is also abhorrent that we are effectively stealing Venezuela's oil AND keeping the proceeds. SUPPOSEDLY, they are supposed to get the money AND WE will tell them what to spend it on. Trump has never said how much money or even where it is. Venezuela is now effectively our colony and the Venezuelan people are no better under us whatsoever.
Very true. Most people are clueless about the refinery situation.
California shutting down refineries shouldn’t increase prices in Texas or Pennsylvania. If anything it should increase the supply of petroleum (and consequently reduce prices) available other states. And yet here we are with high prices throughout the country. Domestically we produce much more petroleum than we consume, so the law of supply and demand leads to cheaper domestic fuel. But since we have opened the export market for petroleum products to other countries, oil prices tend to float based on the international market. And since we have limited need for middle eastern petroleum, if it weren’t for prices floating on the international export market, whatever happens in the Middle East would not have such outsized impact on what we in the U.S. pay at the pump.
Trump has called for a temporary export ban or limitation petroleum on exports which would increase supply domestically and reduce prices. Imagine the boon in our economy if we we dropped fuel price by for example 30%.
Of course then the federal reserve would claim the economy is “heating up too much” and raise the fed rate anyway.
Do you not understand that the GOP has keep deficit spending and deficits feed the National Debt? Trump signed onto the budget-busting Big Beautiful Bill and now he is piling on my deficits spending with his unconstitutional war on Iran. Trump followed his war criminal buddy, Netanyahu, into the Tar Baby, Iran, and now he cannot get loose. He refuses to say he screws up because he's an egomaniac and egomaniacs are never wrong. Inflation is high because the GOP refuses to rein in spending and this is why the Fed is raising rates. I stay home. I approve of neither party and they lie to you to your face. No more endless wars and guess who started one.
"The Fed could fix housing tomorrow by cutting rates."
No Peter, the Fed can't fix housing by cutting rates.
The housing market must achieve rational price relationships to overall ownership costs with the ability of people's purchasing power of the currency (capital cost, bureaucracy costs -permitting-, insurance cost, homeowner association dues costs, property tax costs, maintenance costs).
What you are seeing right now, is the sobering moments where people are realizing that the cost of capital has been artificially suppressed for more than 30 years. Add in the bureaucratic screwing around with underwriting requirements to favor subsidized housing for one demographic over another, then top it off with the sprinkles of mass invasion by people who should not be here with each given $2,000+ per month of taxpayer provided freebees which grotesquely distorted the demand curve, and you have a completely unrealistic pricing structure.
We are seeing that distortion heal itself slowly through price reductions and eventual capitulation to reality. Will it pound boomers and their large, expensive houses they can't sell? Yes.
Will it pound the idiots that bought at the peak and thought ZIRP was going to last forever and paid no attention to demand distortions through fraud? Yes.
Is it mine or any other rational person's responsibility to salve the pain of the real estate fool when we warned them of the dangers of buying into the tailwinds of mania? NO.
100% and artificially lowering interest rates again and starting QE would send home prices into the stratosphere.
Favoritism to certain demographic groups with mortgage lending prior to 2008 was the dynamite. Fraud lending created a ton of it. QE & ZIRP added gasoline. COVID spending plus the inflation reduction act tripled the M2 money supply. All of it created trillions in cash and low cost to borrow it. Spending on housing and vehicles went nuts.
It all launched the inflation we have now.
Culprit? Federal Reserve and the US Treasury under Clinton, Bush, and Obama.
Biden didn't help either.
It's an interesting dilemma. Inflation is the culprit. Banks and investors can hardly be expected to loan money long term without rates high enough to compensate for the slow devaluation of the dollar. That same inflation juggernaut has made housing prices go way up.
Inflation is an invisible tax on the people, and we're all getting hurt by it.
Inflation is caused by printing money faster than goods and services increase. Especially fiat money, which is nothing but an IOU from government, backed by nothing.
And both parties do it with glee, as if it doesn't matter. It doesn't, if you had their paychecks.
Yes. Inflation is terribly hard on the poor, who by definition have no assets that would benefit from it.
So the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and the gap gets bigger.
True. Many don't realize that the rich love low interest rates. It means they can borrow money for next to nothing and put that money to work making even more money. Naturally, they get much better rates than you or I could. The Fed is really just a banking cartel and bankers love rich clients.
Things are hard right now, but we are going into the Fourth Turning as described by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book of the same name. We will emerge even better, we just have to carry on best we can. Many other generations have done it.
Amazing how you view the economy. As if rising food prices, gasoline, diesel (on which everything is carried), and heating oil. No word about Trump's UNCONSTITUTIONAL War on Iran whose only benefit was Israel, not the US. We even got a lie like the WMD in Iraq; a nuclear bomb in Iran, which none of the US intelligence agencies agrees with. You admit that what you called Bidenflation was actually done by the Fed. But apparently there's no Trumpflation. When interest rates go up, housing prices will have to drop. Why should housing prices go upwards forever? The Fed looks at a lot more than the housing market. The same ones whining they cannot afford a house have two new cars, the latest smartphones, and the biggest TV. They probably eat out a lot too. New generations have ZERO idea how to save money. All they know how to do is whine. As for socialism, what we have now is nothing but Crony Capitalism where Big Business passes laws to favor them and protect them from competition. Plenty of socialism in this Administration as they are investing our tax money in stocks like Intel and other companies. A curse on both parties, but you still don't understand they are wings of the same bird. Take off your Trump rose-colored glasses.
Marketwatch is already writing today that: 8% mortgage rates are ‘not an impossibility’ as the 30-year fixed rate surges - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/8-mortgage-rates-are-not-an-impossibility-as-the-30-year-fixed-rate-surges-aa202464
Linking your article and theirs today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
Sorry, this is my last comment :) I just get so fired up about this stuff!!
Straight out of 1780, John Adams, and his exact words are chilling when you look at where things stand today:
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."
George Washington doubled down on the same warning in his 1796 Farewell Address.
Washington warned that party loyalty serves always to distract public councils, enfeeble public administration, agitate the community with ill-founded jealousies, and kindle animosity of one part against another. He said it opens the door to foreign influence and eventually leads to a despot who rides the disorder into absolute power.
When you have a unified culture with shared values and sound money, people pull together because thrift and honesty get rewarded. But when the money gets corrupted, the culture fractures right behind it. When the government hands out trillions in printed favors, people stop focusing on producing value and start fighting over political spoils. It becomes an ugly brawl over who gets the printed dollars and who gets left holding the bag.
You cannot single-handedly fix the circus in Washington, all you can do is try and protect your wealth from dollar debasement, don't save in dollars!
The American Founders chose a constitutional republic over a pure, direct democracy because they feared that unbridled majority rule would lead to instability and the oppression of minority rights.
The founders lived through this exact disaster during the Revolutionary War with the Continental currency. They printed paper notes until a wagonload of money could barely buy a wagonload of provisions, which gave us the old saying "not worth a Continental."
That bill right there is why George Washington wrote that unbacked paper money ruins commerce, oppresses the honest, and opens the door to every species of fraud and injustice.
They knew what pure democracy leads to. When a government runs on majority mob rule, politicians quickly learn they can buy votes by promising cheap debt, subsidies, and free favors. James Madison spelled it out in Federalist No. 10 when he warned against a "rage for paper money" and debt cancellation. He called paper money schemes an improper and wicked project because they allow a voting majority to confiscate the wealth of creditors and savers without calling it theft.
That is why the Constitution explicitly restricted states in Article I, Section 10, stating no state shall make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts. They wanted money tied to real, physical limits that politicians could not print to win elections.
What we have today is the breakdown of those constitutional guardrails. Politicians run up multi trillion dollar deficits to promise the public bread and circuses, and the Federal Reserve accommodates them by conjuring fiat currency out of thin air. It is political vote buying financed through the back door. The working man pays the tab every time his dollar buys less food, less fuel, and less square footage.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, followed always by a dictatorship." -Alexander Fraser Tytler
Lowering mortgage rates is not going to fix this. The Federal Reserve and the federal government created this entire mess in the first place by keeping interest rates artificially low and printing money through quantitative easing.
All that did was distort the market and pick winners and losers. If you bought a house for $200,000 with a 3% mortgage, you basically won the lottery. Your house is now worth $400,000, and your monthly payment is around $800. Meanwhile, anyone trying to buy a house today is looking at mortgage payments over $2,000. And seniors or people on fixed incomes in apartments get crushed when their rent doubles, while savers watch the purchasing power of their cash disappear. That is not prices going up, that is our money losing its value.
As the new Fed chair Kevin Warsh puts it:
"This surge in inflation has destroyed the poor and middle class and has taken a divided country and made it more divided".
The Fed needs to stop messing with the market. They need to step back, let the market set interest rates, and run off their balance sheet to pull all that extra money out of the system. Higher rates bring asset prices down, and that is the only way homes will ever become affordable again.
Thank god for Kevin Warsh and the bond vigilantes, they are the only ones that can fix this because Washington simply refuses to grow up and balance a budget!
Actually, FDR and Nixon killed the gold standard, which restrained spending. Nixon was running the Vietnam War AND the Great Society and so France called the US bluff under the Bretton Wood agreement and said they would send a warship to bring Dollars and get the equivalent of gold. Nixon "temporarily" as he claimed, shut the gold window and so now we have fiat currency which can be printed without so much as a toothpick backing it up.
If anyone with a brain did even the most basic research, they'd see how socialism, communism and Islamism are just another suicide pact with the devil. Collectivism never works and historically, there's hundreds of millions dead (apparently white-washed and/or memory-holed by legacy media). Conversely, but worse, Islam is a violent, male-dominated sex cult whose swarms of voting blocs have swept up easy-peasey districts in their quest for power and control as they push their prophet and god-mandated global domination - and BTW, why don't the Christophobics mention that Islam has NO separation of church and state - they are one and the same? Meanwhile, orange-man bad?? LOL!
Islam was tame and bothered nobody until we went into the Middle East and ensured they became radicalized by our actions in the Middle East. We aren't happy unless we believe we are running the world, but there are consequences. Your Orange Emperor went over to the Middle East and is making a royal mess of it. Iran bad? No, they have synagogues and churches over them and Jews and Christians have seats set aside for them in the Iranian Parliament. Of course, this is not what anyone wants to hear, but you did see the synagogue which was bombed in Tehran? Because the Torah scrolls were underneath the rubble, the clean-up crews were asked if they could remove the rubble stone by stone so the scrolls could be recovered. The local Iranian authorities agreed and the scrolls were recovered.
You clearly know nothing of Islam, yet still opine about it, your TDS and a myopic view of a jihadist Islamic Republic that kills its own citizens. Either you're a troll, or a bloviating idiot.
OP, why did you skip the o'biden years 2021-2024? I'd like to see those on your chart. I'm voting Republican no matter what, but I'd still like to see the missing o'biden years.
The GOP does care one iota about you. Nor do the Dems. Neither uphold the Constitution. Your vote is your approval. That's why unless there's a third party or good independent, I stay home. I approve of none of the class of liars running for office today. They chase the good ones like Thomas Massey out because he tells the truth about what happens there. They hate the light because their deeds are evil.
40% of homes do not have a mortgage at all. 56% of actual mortgaged homes have 1/2 equity to mortgage ratio: equity rich. All Those folks have options. Increasing the capital gains exemption would help unlock some of that. $250k max gain for a single person (widow/divorced) is way too low now it has t been adjusted in many decades. So lots of boomers hang on to pass the property to kids in step up basis on death. Eliminating the gain on their property would help unlock some of this. Targeted loan programs for first time buyers are needed, some rate buydowns for a small section of mortgages is better than a one size fits all mortgage rate suppression which investors will take advantage of and prices will rise again. Falling house prices are bad for everyone: tax receipts, lenders won’t loan in falling asset prices, but wages have not kept up with housing (fiat expansion and covid craziness of course) until that catch up happens, a targeted program for first time buyers so they can get a foot on the first run of that ladder, is needed
Falling home prices are not bad for everyone!
To what extent (if at all) do you think zoning restrictions are meaningfully contributing to this problem? I've heard it argued that as old style "start homes" (e.g., 1 bedroom homes on a small lot) are effectively outlawed, an environment is created where all builders CAN build are "McMansions." That might not have been a problems when rates were at 3%...but now that they're climbing towards (so I'm told) something closer to historic averages for mortgage rates, young people can't afford the homes.
But could they afford starter homes at these rates if we actually still built "starter homes"?
Does his analysis make any sense?
a) "the Fed yanked rates to near-zero to bribe voters into lockdowns" which drove home prices sky-high
b) The delta between the current artificial rate, and the prior artificial rate has consequences
c) Therefore we should lower rates, because, you know, its not the right time to pay the piper.
The issue is why are we stealing money from future generations, so we can live better? Am I the only one who thinks it amoral and disgusting?
No, you are not the only one!!! And you are 100% right we are being gaslit!
We are lucky that the new Fed chair know this too.
"This surge in inflation has destroyed the poor and middle class, and has taken a divided country and made it more divided". - Kevin Warsh
TDS? Remember, this Iran War is totally Unconstitutional and what instituted by Trump at the instigation of Israel.. Not that it bothers anyone in the GOP. It is always Party over Country. How exactly has Trump made America Great Again? What do we make other than exporting wars and printing money? The views above are fact. If you want to run around and make Islam your bogeyman, feel free. Trump ADMITTED to ARMING Iranians to start an insurgency. So this KILLING THEIR OWN PEOPLE came from the USA. That's right, those weapons were planted by us so we could COMPLAIN about Iran killing Iranians. Yet, we bomb a girls' school and don't even have the human decency to apologize. Which country acts like the barbarians?