[Peace-discuss] Michael Hudson excerpt

[ewj]

ah the compulsion to buy a place to live. the lie of the joy of home ownership. On 2018-06-04 01:16 , David Green via Peace-discuss Wrote: I don’t think people realize the radical damage that Obama did to the economy by bailing out the banks and not rolling back the terms of bank credit to keep housing affordable. Obama basically said, “Make housing unaffordable. Make as many junk loans as you want. Don’t worry, because I’ll stand between you and the mob with the pitchforks.” He didn’t jail any bankers. He didn’t regulate them. He created the situation that Trump inherited. Trump has just pushed it to a further degree, with full Democratic support. The Democratic donor class loves Trump. They want him to be reelected because he’s cutting their taxes, he’s deregulating their banks, and he’s essentially deregulated fraud! This leaves the millennials with a problem. How can they cope with a situation where they don’t have anyone representing their interests either in Congress where it’s really the same party now, or with an opportunity to earn enough to get a home mortgage? It’s very hard  to earn the money that you need to buy a house anymore. There has to be a god in a machine – Deus Ex Machina – meaning rich parents or a rich uncle. Paul Sliker: So maybe a better investment for millennials would be to organize outside the banks. Michael Hudson: Well, here’s the other problem: Congress last week deregulated community banks. I’ve worked as a consultant for community banks in Chicago. Their strategy is to make more reckless loans than the commercial banks. So deregulating them enables them to lend at even higher debt to equity ratios. They can set lower down payments, and help bid up the price of real estate even more. So the congressional rewriting of bank regulations last week makes it much harder for millennials to get an apartment, because it will inflate the price of housing with yet more bank credit. https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/01/us-vs-china-housing-and-those-millennials/print/
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