Juggling Dynamite

All this house could be yours for $1.39 million in Greater Vancouver.  Even at the lowest mortgage rates in 90 years, residents are finding housing unaffordable. It’s not the interest payments that are the problem, it’s the principle sums that are impossible.

See Something is grotesquely wrong with Vancouver’s housing market, and the time for denialism is over:

Fuelled by the special sauce of Chinese wealth – and good old Fear of Missing Out – prices have decoupled from the local economy, with an average detached price of about C$1.4 million (HK$8.9 million). So far, so normal for Vancouver…

It is important to understand that the Chinese money that flooded into Vancouver since 2005 came via the recycling of the credit bubble through the world.  As western households gorged on credit they were also able to gorge on Chinese goods which sent US dollars to China who then lent them back to America by buying US treasuries.  This went on for years until the US housing bubble burst in 2006 and the credit derivatives market imploded western banks.

Then in 2008 China ramped up stimulus spending to try and jump-start the world economy back to insatiable demand.  This was unsuccessful but it did manage to inflate the largest credit bubble in human history in China.  As the government kept pumping credit, Chinese total debt surged and capital looking for places to park flooded into other foreign asset markets.  The dramatic effects of this in places like Vancouver are obvious:

From 2005-2012, about 45,000 millionaire migrants arrived in Vancouver under just two wealth-determined schemes, the now-defunct Immigrant Investor Programme and the still-running Quebec Immigrant Investor Programme. Let’s put that in perspective. The entire United States only accepted 9,450 wealth migration applications in the same period under its famous EB-5 scheme, likely representing fewer than 30,000 individuals.

So, Vancouver has recently received more wealth-determined migration than any other city in the world, by a long stretch. This, in a city with some of the lowest incomes in Canada.

The trouble is prices have become so impossible that new buyers are not able to step on to the property ladder. This is a problem for those hoping to cash out and step off…

Trillions in central bank-driven leverage into financial markets has driven up asset values to unsustainable levels which are totally unsupported by wage growth and savings while undermining productivity in the real economy. This has facilitated criminal extraction of capital by a few while leaving IOU’s in the drawer for everyone else. Pensions are hollowed, key public investments and infrastructure are unfunded. 32 US states today have growing budget gaps, forcing spending cuts in critical service areas along with the closures of parks, recreation and cultural centers.

The truth is that the bankers have led the free world into bankruptcy. And so far, they are still pulling the levers and calling the shots.  Many good points in this interview.

Former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman and FBN’s Neil Cavuto on the factors leading to the widening wealth gap. Here is a direct video link.

This is absolutely outrageous. What kind of democracy and due process is this?

Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke on the Senate floor on May 21, 2015 about the bill she introduced with Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) that would require the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal to be made public before Congress votes on Fast Track authority.  Here is a direct video link.