Why the Housing Affordability Crisis Could Last Another Decade

Posted on August 7, 2026 by MN Gordon

“I don’t want to survive. I want to live. And I want to buy a house.” – Wall-E

Locked Out

The U.S. housing market is currently stuck in a morass of rising mortgage rates, low sales, increasing inventory, and stubbornly elevated prices. If you’re a middle-class earner trying to buy your first home right now, a quick entry into a monthly payment calculator will deliver a heavy dose of disappointment.

What’s going on? Shouldn’t house prices be declining in response to rising inventory? Isn’t that how supply and demand are supposed to work?

Moreover, it’s not just 7 percent 30-year fixed rate mortgages that prospective house buyers must contend with. There’s rising property taxes and soaring insurance that are also contributing to housing being completely unaffordable.

To understand why the housing market is sick, you must look back to the days of the faux pandemic. If you recall, after massive intervention by the Federal Reserve, mortgage rates hit historic lows below 3 percent.

Millions of buyers and millions of existing homeowners who refinanced locked in those remarkable rates. Borrowing costs were nearly free. And the ultra-cheap credit drove house prices to record highs. Continue reading →

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Why Sam Altman’s Wild Claims Are Empty Hype

Posted on July 31, 2026 by MN Gordon

Did you hear what Sam Altman – the ChatGPT geek – recently said?

It sounded like something out of a science fiction movie. And it signals the AI hype machine has officially hit maximum velocity.

Last week, on the Relentless podcast, Altman remarked, “We are now, like, in the singularity.”

He didn’t say we’re approaching it. He didn’t say it’s coming by 2030. He said we are in it right now.

He pointed to a recent incident where an autonomous AI agent powered by OpenAI’s latest models broke out of its sandbox and hacked into datasets at Hugging Face to score higher on a cybersecurity benchmark. When prompted to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths to test cyber capabilities, the AI agent targeted Hugging Face to obtain the information needed to carry out the task.

To Altman, that’s not a dangerous security flaw. It’s the start of a brave new world.

“I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,” said Altman, predicting an “awesome” future where AI handles 30 to 40 percent of all human work tasks. Continue reading →

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Misogynist Monsoons

Posted on July 27, 2026 by MN Gordon

The days are long and hot in the northern hemisphere in these dog days of summer. Yet they’re extraordinarily pleasant thanks to the ingenuity of central air conditioning. We run the A/C in our home unconditionally. It’s one of the many fruits of abundance we enjoy.

Electricity powers our climate-controlled home, it refrigerates our food, and it powers the pumps that circulate and filter the water in our backyard swimming pool. Daily dips this time of year are essential, agreeable, and extraordinarily enjoyable.

We count our blessings to live in a day and age where regular working stiffs can experience these remarkable creature comforts. We suffer no guilt from it. Nor do we endeavor to restrict others from these same enjoyments. We encourage all people to use modern technology to make their lives better.

But somehow our existence has put us in the crosshairs of those who hate civilized society. The way we live, for reasons unclear, is allegedly contributing to something called global climate change.

Thus, according to government financed media outlets, we’re at fault for every scourge to the planet. Poverty, hunger, inequality, natural disasters, and everything in between.

It doesn’t matter that these blights have existed forever – certainly before the invention of A/C and long before we ever adjusted a thermostat – it’s our fault. Continue reading →

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Adapting to Higher Yields

Posted on July 24, 2026 by MN Gordon

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, recently said he wouldn’t buy long-term U.S. Treasuries. His rationale is simple, he “doesn’t understand the upside.”

Here at the Economic Prism, we don’t understand the upside either. But, unlike Dimon, we’re not running the largest primary dealer of U.S. Treasuries on Earth.

Primary dealers, remember, are the elite financial institutions obligated to participate in U.S. Treasury auctions. Their purpose is to help grease the wheels of Uncle Sam’s multi-trillion-dollar borrowing machine. Yet Dimon, the chief architect of that machine’s biggest partner, just publicly bashed the product.

So, what does Dimon actually mean? Why would the ultimate financial insider pass on what has long been purported to be the world’s safest asset?

To understand why Dimon “doesn’t see the upside,” we need to start with the single most fundamental rule of fixed income. When yields go up, bond prices go down.

Imagine you buy a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond today with a face value of $1,000 paying a fixed 4.5 percent annual interest rate. You’re locked into receiving $45 a year for the next decade. Continue reading →

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