President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

I just found this podcast to see what they were saying. I didn't listen to much of it (I can't, working and need to be listening to other things), but the little I heard from the guys he was interviewing had it right. I just wish the host would give up on acting like "we" just need to design (what he really doesn't understand) better. It's the attempts to design the market that created the distortions everyone is complaing about in the first place.

I have posted about what the guy at the begninning of the podcast was saying a number of times on here. ... as it was unfloding. Here was one from 2022.

People like the host of that podcast look at "data" (that really isn't reliable) to try to explain what they see (or in the case of a lot of people, what they want to see), when the very obvious cause is what the Fed has already done (done without understanding what potential consequences might be later), which explains what we are experiencing in the present.

FWIW, nothing necessarily means a "crash." But underlying what they are talking in that podcast about is debt that was mispriced (artificially low) to the tune of an unquantifiable tens of trillions of dollars. For people with a 30-year fixed rate mortgage at 3 percent, they will never have to refinance. They are just locked in their homes for eternity. ... unless our monetary overlords can price fix the debt markets back down to zero interest rates (the fantasy everyone still clings to), which doesn't seem possible anymore given the economic mess / inflation we are finally dealing with. Although, who knows how much bigger they can dig a ditch and what schemes they can come up with to do it?

But there is a portion of the rental housing market (single family homes, mulifamily homes and apartment buildings) that mirrors the commercial real estate market, where yield-starved investors were bidding up prices and financing what they were doing at much shorter duration. That debt is going to need to be refinanced in the next few years, and that has the potential to spur a crash if a higher interest rate environment is in place. This is why the Fed is so eager to start cutting rates again, even though "inflation" by their own measures is still hot.

We can't afford anything except severely mispriced debt with the mess we have created. Already the interest on our Federal budget has jumped to more than a trillion dollars a year ($140 billion last month). The fantasy everyone is still fighting for requires us to price fix rates so they are artificially low for eternity. ... which creates the distortions that hurts people with the consequences of it (and causes the economic populism and anger we are now experiencing politically).