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Epic Economist, 9/9/23
"Remember 2008? Another Terrifying
Housing Crash Is Now In Progress"
"Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and that seems to be the case with the U.S. housing market. The Federal Reserve created an even larger housing bubble than 2008, and economists and financial experts have been relentlessly warning that it will inevitably burst. Higher interest rates are absolutely strangling the real estate industry right now, and there is no relief in sight.
The distortions we are witnessing in the housing market this year haven’t happened in more than a decade. For instance, the latest numbers show that year-over-year sales of existing homes have fallen to a level that we’ve not seen in 13 years. Adding to the bleak outlook, investor purchases sunk by 45% over the past twelve months, data from real estate brokerage Redfin reveals
Economists at Fannie Mae are warning that this may be the beginning of a prolonged freeze. The experts projected in a revised forecast that stagnation in the housing market could last into 2024, whether economic conditions improve or worsen. “Regardless of whether a soft landing is achieved over the coming year, we expect existing home sales to stay subdued and within a tight range,” they wrote.
Moreover, when home sales crash, everybody who works in the real estate industry suffers. The situation is also getting dire on the commercial real estate side. he Wall Street Journal recently published an article entitled “Real-Estate Doom Loop Threatens America’s Banks”, and that headline is actually not an exaggeration of the current state of affairs. Commercial real estate prices are plunging all over the nation, and major U.S. banks have trillions of dollars of exposure.
This shows that many of our financial institutions are at serious risk of experiencing widespread losses. If the Federal Reserve were to stop raising rates immediately, that would help. But officials continue to insist that rates are going to go even higher, and that is going to escalate this crisis into a full-blown real estate apocalypse. Instead of realizing the damage that has been done and starting to fix the problem, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned on Friday that additional rate increases might be required to put inflation on a convincing path to the central bank’s two percent target.
We have got a major crisis on our hands, and it is not going to go away any time soon. The administration told us over and over again that “Bidenomics” was working, but that’s not what we’re seeing on real terms. If this feels familiar, it’s because it is. And we know how ugly things have gotten the last time around. The housing bubble burst has already begun, and a historic crash in property values is coming next. We have now entered the very early chapters of a full-blown economic nightmare.
Conditions are going to get a whole lot worse for the real estate industry. And things are going to get a whole lot worse for the economy as a whole. So we truly hope that you have been getting prepared for what is ahead because most Americans are going to get completely blind-sided by the disaster we’re about to face."
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