Bubble, Bubble; Toil and Trouble- Making House Payments
http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/16/real...ard/index.html
39 million households are paying more for housing than they can afford
Quote:
Nearly 39 million households can't afford their housing, according to the annual State of the Nation's Housing Report from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. One-third of households in 2015 were "cost burdened," meaning they spend 30% or more of their incomes to cover housing costs. Of that group, nearly 19 million are paying more than 50% of their income to cover their housing needs.
This is the kind of crap that gives me the willies. We have a major financial ebola attack about once a decade. 1987 S&L , 1997 LTC, 2007GFC, 2017.......
When people start not to be able to afford their houses, that is a sign of a bubble. Who can buy the houses? That is pretty much the definition of a bubble. When you look at interest rates increasing and the fact that people are overburdened with the payments now- as rates go higher, we could see a major drop in housing values and another loan-liquidity problem. And the real issue is that we haven't reloaded, or hit our monetary refractory interval- i.e. we shot our wad for the GFC and all the viagra (low interest rates) haven't gotten us to the point where we could go another round if something like a GFC hit.