The Upshots of the New Housing Bubble Fiasco

“The free market for all intents and purposes is dead in America.” – Senator Jim Bunning, September 19, 2008

House Prices Go Vertical

The epic housing bubble and bust in the mid-to-late-2000s was dreadfully disruptive for many Americans.  Some never recovered.  Now the central planners have done it again…

On Tuesday, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) released its U.S. House Price Index (HPI) for September.  According to the FHFA HPI, U.S. house prices rose 18.5 percent from the third quarter of 2020 to the third quarter of 2021.

By comparison, consumer prices have increased 6.2 from a year ago.  That’s running hot!  But 6.2 percent consumer price inflation is nothing.  House prices have inflated nearly 3 times as much over this same period.

Here in the Los Angeles Basin, for example, things are so out of whack you have to be rich to afford a 1,200 square foot fixer upper in a modest area.  Yet the clever fellows in Washington have just the solution. Continue reading

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Hey, St. Louis Fed!… Go Tofurkey Yourself!

The maniacs at the Federal Reserve are working overtime to wreck your Thanksgiving feast.  What gives?

Raging price inflation – the worst since the 1970s – is a direct result of the Fed’s program of mass dollar debasement.  Specifically, the Fed has expanded its balance sheet by $5 trillion since September 2019.

This $5 trillion, remember, was created out of thin air.  No soil was overturned.  No widget was fabricated.  No technology was discovered.  The Fed made a ledger notation and the money magically appeared.

Yet all this printing press money from the Fed has a serious defect; there’s no production behind it.  And if you follow the money you find that much of the $5 trillion was loaned to the Treasury.  From there, this fake money was spent into the economy like real money…where it chases the price of goods and services higher.

The fake money cycles through the economy as if it were the real thing.  Grocers accept it.  Dog walkers too.  But the fake money represents no increase in actual wealth.  It merely pushes prices higher.  Unrestrained Fed money printing also sparked an epic supply chain crisis and rife shortages of consumer goods…and further price inflation. Continue reading

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Boondoggle Democracy for the Elites

President Joe Biden puffed out his chest.  He grinned from ear to ear.  He’d finally accomplished something as President.  The passing of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure boondoggle.

Upon signing the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act on the White House lawn this week Biden declared:

“That’s how our system works.  That’s American democracy.  And I am signing a law that is truly consequential, because we made our democracy deliver for the people.”

No doubt, American democracy is a giant scam.  It has been for a long time.  In fact, democratic mob rule supplanted the limited government of a republic with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913.  This amendment established direct election of Senators by popular vote.

In short, the Seventeenth Amendment allows the Senate to buy votes from their constituents in exchange for delivering federal money back to their districts.  This ensures the government acts to meet the collective demand for private prosperity through public spending.  It also rewards political corruption and public graft. Continue reading

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Pre-2020 Prices are Gone Forever

Price inflation is completely out of hand.  You know this.  Your dog knows it too.

Still, President Joe Biden wants you to believe he’s got it all under control.  Last month, for example, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki insisted inflation is decreasing.  What a crock!

That was about the time White House chief of staff Ron Klain – an absolute goober – endorsed Jason Furman’s claim that America’s inflation and supply chain problems only affect a small part of the U.S. population.  Furman, a former Obama administration economist and economics professor at Harvard University, also tweeted that “most of the economic problems we’re facing … are high class problems.”

Ivory tower thinking like this has turned Washington into a land of idiots.  The elites are completely detached from reality.  And their policies are wreaking havoc on working class and middle class Americans.  We can’t change this.  But we can revel in what it represents… Continue reading

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