Shrink the State. End the Fed. Balance the budget. Make a profit. Leave an inheritance.
Gary North
Posted on January 27, 2015
By Mark Hanson This “housing recovery” has not been about demand, rather house-price super-inflation, which is suspect as price is a “lagging” indicator to demand. Existing Home demand has been extremely weak since mid-2013, when rates popped and the unorthodox demand began to dry up. “End-user” Existing home demand has been weak since 2007. Builder […]
Continue reading →Posted on January 26, 2015
Uncle Sam wants to make it more affordable for Americans to buy their first home. The recent policy changes affect government-backed home loans and could make it less costly for first-time buyers to come up with a down payment or to afford private mortgage insurance. The changes center on the Federal Housing Administration and mortgage […]
Continue reading →Posted on January 20, 2015
On March 29, 2014, ten 3D printed houses, each measuring 200 square meters, appeared in Shanghai, China. The buildings were created entirely out of concrete using a gigantic 3D printer, and each costs only 30,000 RMB ($4,800). Today, just ten months after the initial project, the company behind these 3D printed buildings, Shanghai WinSun Decoration […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on December 19, 2014
The rate of price inflation (median CPI) was up a tiny 0.1% last month. The CPI was down by -0.3%. The 30-year mortgage rate is at 3.8% There is no “inflation premium” in the mortgage rate today. This sends a signal: “Don’t worry about price inflation. Lend!” This will prove to be a misleading signal […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on August 27, 2014
Those trusting souls who arrived late to the biggest housing bubble in history have lost a lot of money. They are going to lose a lot more. It’s here at last. Pop. Writes MarketWatch: In one case, scores of property owners surrounded a Shanghai sales office of Greentown China Holdings Ltd. 3900, +8.58% GTWCF, -33.19% […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on August 7, 2014
We are told that there is a fundamental change taking place in the United States with regard to home ownership. This is nonsense, and the sooner you figure this out, the better. We are told that home ownership in the United States peaked in 2004 at 69%, and is now down to 65%. This represents […]
Continue reading →Posted on May 20, 2014
Builders ramped up construction in April, but they were mostly building multifamily apartment buildings. A monthly report from the U.S. Census Bureau showed total housing starts up 13 percent month to month, but that was driven by a 43 percent monthly jump in buildings with five or more units. Single-family housing starts rose just under […]
Continue reading →Written by Gary North on May 13, 2014
A Chinese firm can build ten houses a day for under $5,000 each. The construction is based on cement and used materials. You can see them here. This is a revolution. Give this another decade — maybe less. This will hit the construction industry like a ton of 3D-made bricks. Want a weekend getaway home […]
Continue reading →Posted on April 29, 2014
So you want to get into the real estate investment game without having to pick up a plunger to unstop a toilet when your tenant calls in the middle of the night. Your best bet might be a real estate investment trust, or REIT. Like bonds, the key to REITs is the non-correlation of the […]
Continue reading →Posted on April 26, 2014
The housing sector may or may not get better after a slow start to 2014. But regardless, it certainly won’t save the broader economy — at least not according to two professors who run a popular economics blog. On House of Debt, Princeton’s Atif Mian and University of Chicago Booth School of Business’s Amir Sufi […]
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