Nothing should be done to support high housing prices

I felt the need to sit down and scribble this out, early this Friday evening, before going to see Watchmen, because there is a gigantic fundamental error circulating in the think-tanks in Washington D.C. Many authorities within the Obama Cabinet are openly declaring that everything that can be done to stabilize housing prices must be done. The free-fall in the value of housing must stop. The reason why the average home owner should buy into the mortgage rescue plan is that it will prevent foreclosures from lowering the value of your home.

Hehehehe...

Well, this would all be very nice political bullshit if it were a mere excuse for rolling out some aid to stricken families. Unfortunately, of late, I have gotten the impression that Obama's boys and girls are serious about this notion. I think the really want to stop the free fall in the price of housing.

Let me make this absolutely and completely clear so that nobody can misunderstand what I am saying: Nothing should be done to stabilize house prices. Nothing could be more dastardly, more terrible or fundamentally wrong for the American people than stabilizing housing prices at current levels and attempting to get them to rise again.

In all this goddamn hoopla about banking collapse, you are forgetting the absolute fundamental reason for this crisis. Hot leverage dollars bid up the prices of real estate to insane levels. We have reached the point where just about every common house is totally unaffordable to every common American worker. Because housing prices are unaffordable, we are seeing a massive amount of defaults on mortgages. It is not just happening because speculators are abandoning ship. It is not just happening because of predatory loans. It is happening because Joe the plumber can't afford his $550,000USD 1,200 SQFT townhome in Receda California. Any loan of this amount to Joe seems both predatory and foolhardy.

Call me foolish. Call me irresponsible. Call me a dreamer. However, I believe that when every common ordinary home is unaffordable to every common ordinary worker, you have a very serious structural flaw in your economy and society. People can't buy houses when they need shelter. They can't sell when they need to move. They can't build when more housing is needed, because there is no hope of finding buyers.

When wage growth is 0.0% after inflation, year after year, housing cannot continue to appreciate at 7.7% year after year. There are no new dollars in the American wallet to cover this massive increase in cost. Banks like Bear Sterns and Lehman might favor the system of life-long debt peonage, but we common citizens do not. Most of us refused to sign off on this system, and that was when the housing market bubble burst.

To get out of this crisis, the price housing must correct. The market is self correcting right now. Housing values are dropping. This is good. It must continue for some time. Townhouses in L.A. need to go down to the $200k range, not the $500K range. Even at this price they are onerous cost items indeed.

If the Obama administration is serious about stabilizing prices they will

1. At best, waste trillions of dollars and barely retard the correction process.
2. At worst, waste trillions of dollars and fuck the very same little people they claim to represent.