Хорошо сформулировано, ИМХО.
IMO it's the bubble being re-inflated by cheap interest rates/easy money policy. If interest rates are now 33% cheaper than they were before, the payments on a similarly price house might be 20% to 30% cheaper depending on the length of the mortgage.
I'm taking numbers out of thin air (+/-) because I want to voice the idea without spending time researching exact interest rate comparisons, etc. etc.
So the result is that folks renewing mortgages now pay a lot less, folks buying houses now pay a lot less, and the upper price limit of what people could afford to pay for a house has increases substantially because the payments are cheaper.
It looks like the housing boom is in the early stages of being re-ignited with interest rates that are low enough to counter a bit of a damper created by rising unemployment.
We all know how the last easy money/cheap interest rates boom ended.
The last boom only ended because governments started to try to increase interest rates to more reasonable levels in order to stave off future inflation.
Taking into consideration that they know what that did, and how it would be even more devastating this time around, there will be enormous political pressure to keep interest rates low, so interest rates will stay low for quite some time and the threat of future inflation will be ignored.
Once inflation starts to ramp up, political pressure will very slowly start to build to address it. It will require a significant amount of pressure in order for action to be taken, since the number of people owing massive amounts of debt will be even greater than before. And these people vote.
So with that thought in mind, only when inflation is running rampant like wildfire, and doing excruciatingly painful harm to the population at large, will the pressure be significant enough that it will be politically feasible to raise interest rates to very high levels in order to address inflation.
И дальше - пост того же автора, еще интереснее:
Originally, I always thought that when inflation pops up, interest rates on homes, etc. will rise as well.
Now I am starting to ponder the possibility/probability that governments might increase and maintain the decoupling of interest rates on homes vs interest rates on other debt. Perhaps by buying ever increasing quantities of mortgages in a system that gradually moves to relegating banks to the role of acting purely as mortgage flippers.
The end result in that scenario would seem to be that homes that were once owned by people, financed by the populations savings and investments stored in banks and invested in mortgages, would then be owned by the government, financed by their printing press. Then I guess interest rates can be kept lower, since there's so much more money available in circulation. One of many effects of this is that people that would originally invest in savings accounts in banks that would invest in part in mortgages can no longer get good interest rates on their money.
I can't see it being a popular political decision to raise interest rates on housing and see a large majority of the population lose their homes. On the flip side, I CAN see it being a popular political decision for politicians to "heroically" help homeowners by keeping interest rates low on homes, no matter the cost, even if they have to print some money on their printing presses to do it. So I'm starting to think low interest rates on homes will be here for a long time. Further, if this trend goes in that direction, and there is decoupling, I could see politicians continually lowering the interest rates (on homes/voters only) in order to grow their political popularity.
The end result, IMO is market distortion that causes bubbles and problems elsewhere, like the mention above of people desperate to find places to invest their money (***).
I guess in that scenario, in an abstract way, the government takes money away from the population at large through its regular taxes, or through inflation, and redistributes that wealth to the category of people that own homes through subsidized interest rates.
So because tax payers at large pay for this , in some way or another, and the beneficiaries are the homeowners, presumably the non homeowners are paying for it in part as well.
So this latest wealth redistribution takes money away from people that don't own homes (who are poor, for the most part), and gives it to the ones that do own homes.
Then we get to look at some nifty statistics down the road, showing the growing gap between the rich and the poor, and listen to some politician tell us how unfair that is.
*** On people desperate to find places to invest their money.
I think we see this already. Low interest rates caused by government intervention make people desperate for yield, and force unsophisticated people to take risks they might not otherwise take (or have to take). An interesting article I read the day before yesterday was written by an analyst who couldn't fathom why high yielding junk bonds were selling for prices that were ridiculously high when taking into consideration their anticipated default rate.
What I read into this is people desperate for yield, grasping out desperately for hope in a dismal situation of no hope for building their savings or investments.
"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help"
Got tired of saying that one. Been spending more time on stocks analysis and picking instead of pondering the various ways of looking at things governments do and their cause/effect.
Some libertarian politician said this one, which I parallels my thoughts a lot when musing various government things:
The government is great at breaking your leg, giving you a cane, and then saying; "see, without me you couldn't walk"
