Peter Thiel is so mistaken about homeownership in his interview with John Gray

 Peter Thiel says "To unshackle ourselves economically, one should start by attacking the extraordinarily distorted real estate market", but never once mentions how the prime culprits of the distortion were and are all Federal.

These were the commoditization of housing by the so-called Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 under Clinton and Gingrich, followed by Federal Reserve interest rate suppression under Obama after the collapse of the ensuing housing bubble it caused, re-inflating that bubble.

To Thiel "interest rates went steadily down", as if by the influence of some mysterious force. What could it be? He is not i n t e r e s t e d.

Nor does he mention a third Federal culprit, how the demand side for housing was and is distorted by 15% of the population swelling with foreign born in the UK and the US as a direct result of legally admitting millions of immigrants since 1990 in the US and since 1994 in the UK.

These are the legacies of the Bushes, Bill Clinton, John Major, and Tony Blair, now augmented by deliberate non-enforcement of the border in America by the likes of Obama and Biden, turbo-charging the demand side for housing, and prices with it, by flooding the country with illegal aliens.

Thiel observes that culturally "We became too risk-averse, too bureaucratic, too reliant on peer review in the sciences" somehow, but doesn't connect this to the aging demographics, even though he is aware of it. Not re-inflating the prices of homes of Baby Boomers would have been political suicide. He fancies this is now "over", but misses that the heirs of all this property are voters too.

This is not over.

Thiel is essentially a radical, as was Ronald Reagan and also Margaret Thatcher. He completely misses how the libertarian impulse to deregulate under Reagan and Thatcher led in a straight line to the housing catastrophe we all live with these many years later. His libertarianism is myopic.

John Gray: "The difference is that this Truss wing of the Conservative Party wants to go back to Thatcher because they see that as a radical moment and they want to repeat the radical moments. But radical moments are very hard to keep repeating."

Peter Thiel: "They’re hard to repeat by doing the same thing. It was a one-time move to deregulate and lower taxes and then it’s not clear that doing it the second time does much good. ... The Reagan and Thatcher administrations ... allowed more companies to be acquired, more M&A activity to happen. It was a somewhat brutal but very powerful reorganization of society that was possible and in fact the right thing to do in the 1980s."

Incessant headlines about deep American discontent tell us we don't particularly like this now reorganized society. The new world order means your kid is saddled with horrible college debt, can't find a decent job, has to live at home with you, can't buy a house, can't get married, can't have children. 

But Thiel is still dreaming the pipe dream of "exponential growth" to solve these problems. He hopes technology will come to the rescue in the form of remote work:

"Is there some way to reopen a frontier in real estate? The possibility where I think the jury is very out, though it doesn’t look that promising in 2023, would be remote work. Could the internet be a way that people are not stuck in these cities? And that would reset all these real estate values tremendously because even in a rather densely populated country like England, there is plenty of space if you’re not forced to be within the green belt of London itself. And in the United States even more so."

The interview is here.  

John Gray: The possibility that millions value some things more than economic gain is not considered by the British political classes

Sounds oddly familiar.

Brexit has left the British political class trapped by its own history:

Persistently denying respect to Leave voters in this way can only bring to Britain the dangerous populism that is steadily marching across the European continent.

Alexis Tsipras sought out the help of Yanis Varoufakis starting in 2010, but never fully agreed with him

Varoufakis' plan, as outlined here in an interview in The New Statesman, was never embraced by Syriza as it needed to be to have even a chance of succeeding:

[Yanis Varoufakis] said he spent the past month warning the Greek cabinet that the ECB would close Greece’s banks to force a deal. When they did, he was prepared to do three things: issue euro-denominated IOUs; apply a “haircut” to the bonds Gree[ce] issued to the ECB in 2012, reducing Greece’s debt; and seize control of the Bank of Greece from the ECB. ... As the crowds were celebrating on Sunday night in Syntagma Square, Syriza’s six-strong inner cabinet held a critical vote. By four votes to two, Varoufakis failed to win support for his plan, and couldn’t convince Tsipras. He had wanted to enact his “triptych” of measures earlier in the week, when the ECB first forced Greek banks to shut. Sunday night was his final attempt. When he lost his departure was inevitable.

Hitch: A Stalinist to the End . . .

. . . at least in the mind of George Eaton, in the New Statesman:

In his boisterous advocacy of the [Iraq] war there was more than a hint of the Marxist belief in the necessity of violence in order for history to progress. As Stalin once grimly phrased it, "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs."

A shoddy little slam on a dead follower of Trotsky who can no longer defend himself if you ask me.