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.
Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,
President Trump is expected to nominate the next Federal Reserve chair within a matter of days.
As I’ve explained before, Donald Trump has the opportunity to appoint a higher percentage of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve system at one time than any president since Woodrow Wilson.
Last December we joked that the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund had responded to sinking returns and withdrawals required to fund budget deficits by allocating another $130 billion in assets to what appeared to be an already massively overpriced equity bubble in return for an extra 40bps of "expected average annual real returns" (see: Norway Buying $130 Billion In Global Equities As Sovereign Wealth Fund Continues To Bleed Cash). The extra equity purchases pushed the fund's total equity allocation to a staggering 70% of their $860 billion in assets under management.
What would you guess? Five…twenty five…fifty?
James Stafford, editor of Oilprice.com not only does the math, but explains the energy-driven geographic arbitrage currently driving bitcoin mining.
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.