A conversation on Twitter this week resurfaced a Wall Street Journal report from April about big investors getting into real estate, overbidding normal people to do so. “If You Sell a House These Days, the Buyer Might Be a Pension Fund,” the title says. “Yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family homes, competing with ordinary Americans and driving up prices.”

The resulting social media traffic made the article No. 1 on the WSJ website on June 10.

“You now have permanent capital competing with a young couple trying to buy a house,” real estate consultant John Burns told the Wall Street Journal. “That’s going to make U.S. housing permanently more expensive.” His firm estimates “that in many of the nation’s top markets, roughly one in every five houses sold is bought by someone who never moves in.”

This is a direct consequence of the Fed printing so much money and long encouraging debt by keeping interest rates so low for so long that investors are looking for better assets. Our government has long privileged debt over savings in large part because that makes it easier for the government to deficit spend, making debt less costly to Congress. So normal people essentially get punished for saving because Congress won’t stop spending.

Since the government quietly taxes away your savings through inflation, people and institutions who want to put money away for future use, or just grow their assets, are forced into riskier and more distortive behavior. Thus mega-dollar money asset managers and private equity firms are snapping up millions of homes at inflated prices because government profligacy has made it harder for them to secure a yield. //

CulturalHusbandry
@APhilosophae

Jun 8, 2021
Replying to @APhilosophae
So where does this position the average American in 30 years when its a given that every new neighborhood is to be bought up whole so they can be utilized as SFR's? It positions them as peasants. Being poor can be temporary condition bettered by upward mobility.

CulturalHusbandry
@APhilosophae
In the US and other nations home ownership is often the 1st and most vital step. This can provide for generational wealth and success. But as permanent, guaranteed renters youre pissing away a lifetime of equity and the chance for mobility. You just become a peasant. //

Blackrock is well known for its use of its massive financial power to elevate leftist social causes, including, as the tweeter noted, the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” strategy. WEF also predicted in an infamous 2016 video, based on “input” from their Davos crowd, that by 2030 “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”

But when people “own nothing,” they are not happy. Refusing to take ownership is a refusal to take responsibility. In the beginning, that may seem carefree and glamorous, but in the long run, a refusal to take responsibility — whether that be refusing to commit to marriage, children, faith, a community, or to all of the above — actually makes people deeply unhappy.

In responsibility is where people find happiness. Our government should stop making financial decisions that steal from all of us the ability to take responsibility for our own families, homes, and happiness. And, regardless of what our corrupt and feckless governments do, each of us must continue to pursue ownership of our own lives through every avenue possible.