Growth in the number of owner occupied housing units seemed to slow in 2019, but the pandemic crisis has boosted it by 6 million!

 

An astonishing increase.

Green New Deal in the hands of Democrats is a dagger aimed at the heart of the middle class

 Joel Kotkin here in The New York Post:

If these Democrats win both houses of Congress as well as the White House, things could get far worse for the already beleaguered middle class, which has been rocked by the pandemic, with an estimated 100,000 small firms going out of business. Particularly hard-hit by the recent urban unrest are inner city and minority businesses. ...

If the Democrats win on Election Day, the future for the middle class could be bleak. As a lifelong Democrat, this is not easy to write, but most of the party’s initiatives — such as the Green New Deal — are directly harmful to those in the middle and working classes, who’d be forced to face increased housing and energy prices and fewer upwardly mobile jobs in industries like manufacturing.

Stock market performance under Trump has been good in comparison with his predecessors, but best ever remains Eisenhower by far, followed by Truman

The post-war boom was almost inevitable and had little to do with the individual man and his policies. The income tax code's punitive elements at the time drove money into domestic investment, which received favorable tax treatment.

For America to be great like that again we must punish foreign investment and reward domestic. That's what creates jobs for Americans and expands markets for housing, autos and everything else here at home, with the result that companies make money and stocks do well.

But everyone in both parties, it seems, still want everything for themselves, investing abroad where labor is cheaper and regulation lax.

The only person in politics even remotely open to reversing the status quo remains Trump.

Real Clear Politics has moved Minnesota into "toss-up" status because of Trafalgar Group poll

The poll has Biden beating Trump by only five points in liberal Minnesota.

"A five-mile stretch of Minneapolis sustain[ing] extraordinary damage" recently, per the New York Times, probably had something to do with it.

LOL, this didn't age well

$30 million affordable housing project torched in George Floyd riots in MN

'[T]he old polarizing politics is a spent force. The image of the "angry black man" still purveyed by sensationalists such as Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza is anachronistic today, when blacks and even Muslims, the most conspicuous of "outsider" groups, profess optimism about America and their place in it'.

-- Sam Tanenhaus, The New Republic, 10 Feb 2013

Has anyone on the right discussed how Trump and his Fed chair are destroying free market capitalism?

Of course not. When the right does it, it's OK, see. When the left does it, it's socialism or some damn thing. These suck ups say nothing except, "China, baaaaaaaad! America, goooooooood!"

The Fed is now buying EVERYTHING in sight in order to backstop EVERYONE. Today we learned it would buy in the municipal bond market, the commercial mortgage backed securities market, the might as well be junk bond market, and CLOs. That's not free market capitalism.

The Fed balance sheet is already past $6 trillion this week. Remember when it wasn't even a trillion back in 2007? Of course you don't. Remember when Bernanke promised to "normalize" it when the last crisis was over? Of course you don't. Guess who is promising the same thing again? Same Fed chair, different name. Jerry Powell. 

Fed Is Seizing Control of the Entire U.S. Bond Market

It's bad enough the Fed has been long buying agency mortgage backed securities and Treasury securities.

Eventually it will buy stocks, too, now that it is buying anything and everything in the bond markets.

This is all bullshit. If you believe in capitalism, then you believe in bankruptcy. Nobody believes in that anymore, least of all Donald Trump. Otherwise he'd do something about it.

So America declares itself officially dead today, as it literally dies from a virus it willingly invited in.

How fitting. 

Liberalism's mental disorder gets its death wish.

The real reason Trump & Co. didn't want you to panic

To avoid the Federal Reserve Bank having to intervene to rescue the economy, that's why. But, too late.

The Fed dropped its benchmark interest rate to 0% this afternoon and will restart QE with $700 billion in Treasury and mortgage security purchases. It knows tomorrow is going to be rough.

The reason isn't to boost the stock market, though there is no doubt they hope that would be a happy by-product of their action.

Because economic activity has dived with all the cancellation going on in order to stop the virus from spreading, there is extreme pressure on overnight funding markets which businesses use to fund their operations. Their income has tanked but they still have bills to pay. Borrowing in the funding markets is critical for the survival of far too many companies. The addition of so many more entities having to go to the funding markets than is usual, and in larger quantity, under these new and dire circumstances means money markets will not have enough liquidity to meet these new demands. So, the Fed will step in to keep things well lubricated.

That's it.

This could have been avoided if Trump had simply shutdown the country on Feb 1 like Xi Jinping shutdown Hubei on Jan 23. China is over the hump on the epidemic there because it acted early to contain the infection. We are just getting started, and unfortunately we are looking more like Italy than South Korea. The virus was still capable of being isolated here on Feb 1. Since then it has spread everywhere because we foolishly permitted travelers to come and go, creating hot zones everywhere. Now it's payback time.

This is going to be really ugly unless Trump acts immediately to do what Fauci wants, which is a 14-day shutdown. People need to shelter in place for a few weeks.

You won't care about an economy in flames if you can't breathe because a killer pneumonia has you gasping for breath.

Homeownership growth under Trump is slowing as of the end of 2019

Fake jobs boom: After 8 slow years of full time jobs recovery we're STILL not back to where Reagan got us in 4 years

Full time jobs are the sine qua non for family formation, births, homeownership, car sales, durable goods orders, retail, tax revenue and good schools.

You wanna know why all that sucks? Joe Biden's THREE LETTER WORD, J.O.B.S., right here:

Housing update: Case Shiller National Home Price Index hit 212 in October 2019, 51% above 140

The Case Shiller National Home Price Index hit 212 in October 2019, 51% above 140. The full data at the new iteration of the index since February 2018 is behind a registration wall. 

The 140 level was the level around which the index tracked for most of the post-war until the year 2000, in a range between 120 and 160.

Since then it's been as high as 235 in 2005 and 2006 during the housing bubble, and as low as 151 in February 2012 after the bubble sort-of popped. A real correction might have taken prices to 120 or even below.

Clearly the index never returned to the post-war experience, which was mostly slightly below 140. Keeping housing prices high became a Federal Reserve objective and bragging point after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, achieved by manipulating interest rates lower.

The median sales price of an existing home in the US is currently $271,300 through November 2019, a price which is traditionally considered affordable to any individual making $104,346 per year and up. [The proprietary data has been removed from FRED and currently starts only from April 2024. Use MSPUS instead].

Seeing that's just 8.5% of individual wage earners in 2018, the median sales price of an existing home is currently UNAFFORDABLE to 91.5% of wage earners.

Most people have to put together two incomes to afford such a house. But in a country where the median wage is south of $33,000 per year in 2018, two incomes only gets you to $66,000, which affordably buys you a house worth about $171,600 or so, $100,000 less than the current median sales price.

In my immediate vicinity, there's exactly two such single family homes on the market right now which are affordable to a couple making $66,000. Everything else costs much, much more.

This is a picture of declining equal opportunity.

LOL: Richard Spencer imagines 6-9% of US population is effectively alt-right, a vanguard just waiting for support from many multiples of that

Time for a Lenin haircut.

Meanwhile minimum 10% of US population directly allied with already socialist military, then add Pentagon's industrial complex and finally 79.5 million owner-occupied housing units, all just waiting for The Right Man to come along and end it all.