Fast money chasing hard assets financed at ultra low interest rates.
Some day the markets are gonna puke up Ben & Janet’s Bucks.
Two years ago in a ritzy area north of Houston people were trying to sell $250,000 homes and couldn’t find buyers. Now they’re getting $300,000. It’s nuts!
you read about some people resenting the busloads of tech workers (living in San Francisco, working in Palo Alto) and complaining that they drove up housing prices. Well, they had an impact to be sure. But,
according to the leading real estate broker, some 3/4 of local sales are to buyers from Communist China (and many of them making all-cash purchases).
This is confirmed, with varying figures, by several of the other leading realty offices in that area.
So, if only 8 or 10 percent of USA house sales are to foreigners, it DOES vary by community, location.
(Incidentally, the average used tract house in Palo Alto is now at $2.3 million dineros.)
We’ve inflated our money supply and sent a good deal of it overseas.
Jefferson’s quote about fiat money fits here.
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
It’s literally happening right in front of us.
A real estate firm here in the Tampa Bay area has agents speaking 20 different languages, including Italian, Polish, Albanian, Greek and Finnish.
And we wonder why home prices are so high.