this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
162 points (97.6% liked)
traingang
22706 readers
9 users here now
Post as many train pictures as possible.
All about urbanism and transportation, including freight transportation.
Home of train gang
:arm-L::train-shining::arm-R:
Talk about supply chain issues here!
List of cool books and videos about urbanism, transit, and other cool things
Titles must be informative. Please do not title your post "lmao" or use the tired "_____ challenge" format.
Archive links for reactionary sites, including the BBC.
LANDLORDS COWER IN FEAR OF MAOTRAIN
"that train pic is too powerful lmao" - u/Cadende
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The house market is the only one that prices are tried to keep artificially hi and everyone is ok with it.
And it's pretty stupid, they're going to sell the house and live where? In the bank with all that money? The houses are going to be expensive for them too!
If a person borrows $100k and buys a $100k house, they will have zero equity. If house prices double, they have an asset worth $200k, a loan of $100k, leaving them $100k in equity. This approach to finance is so common in the US that a 7% dip in housing prices is seem as apocalyptic. You will have people walking away from mortgages, foreclosures, a contraction in the money supply since people will not be able to borrow as much against their assets, and banks will fail from the depreciating homes on their balance sheets and/or aggregate demand will fall. And people who are doing well and very well are mostly just people that were allowed to borrow a lot of money at favorable interest rates.
Remember the joke about how the person who voted for the leopards eating people’s faces party was shocked when the leopards at THEIR face?
If there’s one thing boomers are good at, it’s pushing their luck. They go in with the assumption that THEIR property value will rise and not anyone else’s. Lo and behold everyone’s housing values are high so they probably would be no better off if property values stayed low in terms of net profit.
Since the western "middle class" do not own as much capital as the upper class and have to make most of their living off their labor, they don't have as clear a path to retirement. Owning a property that appreciates in value is instilled in them as the path to financial freedom.
I think it has to do with the fact that no alternatives are ever presented (pensions are attacked and defunded, social security defunded etc.) so they can't even comprehend a world where you don't have to accumulate as much as possible before you hit retirement age.