Alles wat Jan bezighoudt, interesseert en irriteert... en ook een beetje onzin...

zaterdag, oktober 22, 2022

A global house-price slump is coming? (economist.com)










It's sickening that this [slump in housing prices] is always marketed as bad news, even though we've been in a bubble for the past 20 years. The bad news is that we decided that owning a house is a retirement plan instead of giving people proper retirement plans. Somehow every non-homeowner has to be a policy slave to the passive income of some wealthy person. And we defend it by claiming that old people who are worth enough money not to work are not wealthy, as if we care about old people. We only care about old people as model "savers" who can be used to morally justify policies that directly and overwhelmingly benefit the very wealthy to the obscenely wealthy.

And also, there's a problem with revolving credit (i.e. a 2-year mortgage), such as Australia or Britain, or anything that is floating along with some interest rate. But these are a) intentional problems that the people making the loans hope will make them rich, and b) problems with pricing, because people are expected to take decades longer to pay off a house than it would take for them to build it alone with their own hands in their spare time.