WHAT are the most dysfunctional parts of the global financial system? China’s banking industry, you might say, with its great wall of bad debts and state-sponsored cronyism. Or the euro zone’s taped-together single currency, which stretches across 19 different countries, each with its own debts and frail financial firms. Both are worrying. But if sheer size is your yardstick, nothing beats America’s housing market. — the Economist
It is the world’s largest asset class, worth $26 trillion, more than America’s stockmarket. The slab of mortgage debt lurking beneath it is the planet’s biggest concentration of financial risk.
For more on the state of the US housing market, check out these links:
6 Comments
It's unfortunate that housing has been turned from a right (of sorts) into a commodity. As long as it's seen as something to be traded and profited upon, housing bubbles and the like will continue to plague us. The only folks who really lose are those that can least afford it, those that can buy up the defaulted properties do so with gusto and restart the cycle.
When has housing ever been a right? How could housing possibly NOT be a commodity?
SF with Lennar is attempting 25% BMR w/o subsidy
http://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Development-with-25-percent-affordable-housing-9157776.php
seriously jla? adequate shelter is a pretty basic human need
there's actually a wikipedia page on it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_housing
why assume everything is a commodity? certainly you and your labor are commodities to be traded unscrupulously by the lowest bidder, but at least your home should be able to stand outside that fray.
curtkram, who would you have enforce the right to housing? And how is anything that's on the market, not in part a commodity?
Curt, it wasn't a statement, it was a question. If you look at the framework required to de-commodify housing you will realize that it's implications are far more disastrous. Home ownership is for most people the only ownership power they have...and what atrocious laws could possibly limit that without completely destroying the framework of Liberty? The same framework that renders Europes anti-burka laws unconstitutional in the US. Property rights are a basic tenet of a free society. We cannot possibly strip that away and maintain our level of personal liberties. Your not looking at the broader legal and political implications of what you are suggesting. As for housing being a basic human right, I agree to an extent. We should all have the right to shelter, but 5000 ft2 houses are a commodity just like 100k dollar cars. that said, like the established minimum wage, what is actually "the minimum shelter" that fulfills that right to housing? Is is culturally determined? Is it an established spatial requirement per person? we should build more socialized housing for the poor without destroying the liberties and longstanding traditions attached to homeownership. So yes, I agree that basic housing is a right, but not all housing should stand outside of that fray of commodities...
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