Just under a year ago, US home prices finally surpassed their prior all time highs, one decade after the 2006 bubble...
... and haven't looked back since. Which, all else equal, would be great news for America, where the bulk of middle-class wealth is not in the stock market contrary to conventional wisdom, but in its biggest, and most illiquid asset-cum-investment: one's home.
America's obsession with the ever-growing McMansion, combined with a perpetual lack of funding for said McMansion, has resulted a unique phenomenon which Trulia has dubbed "The Incredible Shrinking Yard." Analyzing public records to compare residential lot sizes to home footprints, Trulia says that homes built over the past two years occupy a staggering 25% of the land on which they sit, compared to roughly half that amount in 1975.
Here are some of Trulia's key findings:
In recent times, we have covered a grade-rigging scandal in Baltimore, Maryland that is worth paying attention to. Baltimore City Schools could be on the verge of gaining national attention, as the prime example of America’s broken education system.
There were plenty of bad actors that contributed to the housing crisis in 2009...the banks that underwrote mortgages for people that they knew couldn't afford the home they were buying and then turned around and sold those loans to unsuspecting insurance companies via RMBS structures...the high school janitor making $50,000 a year who suddenly figured he could afford a $750,000 home...the 22-year-old Las Vegas stripper who took out millions in mortgages so she could make "easy money" flipping homes...there was plenty of blame to go around.
President Donald Trump is a showman whose love for spectacle has transformed even mundane personnel decisions into elaborate pageants - as the New York Times pointed out last night.
And of all the turmoil in the administration's process of hiring, and firing, employees, nothing has quite underscored this fact more clearly than Trump's quest to select Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen's successor before he term ends in February.