Via Priceonomics.com,
A widely unpopular practice (and illegal in most states), price gouging is when sellers take advantage of a disaster situation to excessively raise prices on essential goods like food, fuel, and shelter. Concern across communities about this problem is especially heightened after the past several months of storms, forest fires, and other disasters.
"The time to buy is when after there's blood water in the streets."
It’s been nearly a month since Hurricane Harvey, a storm that some expect to rank among the costliest natural disasters in US history, and still tens of thousands of Texans remain marooned in temporary housing, unable to return to their flood-damaged homes, while thousands more are struggling to secure hotel rooms and other types of temporary housing, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Even as the damage from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma is still being tallied, a preliminary assessment released last week by Black Knight Financial Services estimated that as many as 300,000 borrowers in the vicinity of Houston could become delinquent on their loans and 160,000 could become seriously delinquent, or more than 90 days past due.
Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
A number of people have argued over the past few days that Hurricane Harvey will NOT boost the US housing market. As if any such argument would or should be required. Hurricane Irma will not provide any such boost either. News about the ‘resurrection’ of New Orleans post-Katrina has pretty much dried up, but we know scores of people there never returned, in most cases because they couldn’t afford to.