{"id":12706,"date":"2015-09-28T06:06:22","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T11:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12706"},"modified":"2015-09-28T06:06:22","modified_gmt":"2015-09-28T11:06:22","slug":"the-echo-bubble-in-housing-is-about-to-pop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12706","title":{"rendered":"The Echo Bubble in Housing Is About to Pop"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oftwominds.com\/blogsept15\/echo-bubble9-15.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Echo Bubble in Housing Is About to Pop\u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n<p><i>And here&#8217;s the knife in the heart of the Echo Housing bubble: declining household income.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><b>The Federal Reserve-induced Echo Housing Bubble is finally starting to roll over, and the bubble&#8217;s pop won&#8217;t be pretty.<\/b>\u00a0Why is the bubble finally popping now?<\/p>\n<p><b>All the factors that inflated the Echo Housing bubble are running dry.<\/b>\u00a0These include:<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; unprecedented low mortgage rates<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; FHA mortgage approvals for anyone who fogs a mirror<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; frantic cash buying by Chinese millionaires desperate to get their money out of China<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; the Federal Reserve buying up trillions of dollars in mortgages<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; lemming-like buying of housing for rentals by everyone from Mom and Pop to huge hedge funds.<\/p>\n<p><b>The well&#8217;s gone dry, folks.<\/b>\u00a0There isn&#8217;t going to be another push higher or a third housing bubble after this one pops.<\/p>\n<p><b>Let&#8217;s start with the basics: demographic demand for housing and the price of housing.<\/b>\u00a0There are plenty of young people who&#8217;d like to buy a house and start a family (a.k.a.\u00a0<i>new household formation<\/i>), but few have the job or income to buy a house at today&#8217;s nosebleed level&#8211;a level just slightly less insane than the prices at the top of Bubble #1.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.oftwominds.com\/photos2015\/home-prices9-15a.png\" alt=\"\" align=\"center\" border=\"0\" \/><br \/>\n<i>Charts courtesy of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/mdbriefing.com\/\" target=\"resource\">Market Daily Briefing<\/a><\/i>)<\/p>\n<p><b>It&#8217;s considered bad form to describe today&#8217;s prices as insane.<\/b>\u00a0It tends to hurt the feelings of everyone who&#8217;s counting on the Echo Bubble to 1) make them even richer or 2) bail them out of the hole they fell into after Housing Bubble #1 popped.<\/p>\n<p><b>Exhibit B is the insanely low mortgage rate, which has finally reversed course and is notching higher after 30 years of going lower.<\/b>\u00a0Why are today&#8217;s rates insane?\u00a0<b>Risk.<\/b>\u00a0Mortgages are intrinsically risky. People who are terrific credit risks lose their jobs, experience horrendous medical crises, get divorced, etc., and the net result is a default that is unexpected.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Echo Bubble in Housing Is About to Pop\u00a0 And here&#8217;s the knife in the heart of the Echo Housing bubble: declining household income. The Federal Reserve-induced Echo Housing Bubble is finally starting to roll over, and the bubble&#8217;s pop won&#8217;t be pretty.\u00a0Why is the bubble finally popping now? All the factors that inflated the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[127,130,303,305,3708,406,1154,2339,1389,4924,661,662],"class_list":["post-12706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-china","tag-fed","tag-federal-reserve","tag-household-income","tag-housing-bubble","tag-interest-rate-policy","tag-mortgages","tag-nirp","tag-oftwominds","tag-qe","tag-quantitative-easing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12706"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12707,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12706\/revisions\/12707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}