Because the last time it was done, it was not forbidden, because good jobs cluster in only a few regions now, and because of vast influxes of foreign money, we have charts like this:
So, almost a 100 percent increase in five and a half years. (People living in Vancouver wish housing prices had only risen this much.)
Meanwhile, the Fed is muttering to itself about how there is almost no inflation, because they don’t measure housing price increases as inflation and consider the most important inflation that which does not include energy and food.
In other words, if the price of having a home, staying warm or cool in your home, driving your car, or feeding yourself is going up, well, that’s just not very important.
A lot of people got very rich in real estate speculation, mortgages, and downstream securities last time, and the vast majority of the rich ones got to keep the money they made. Even those who lost it, were mostly made whole by government. (Ordinary home owners were, uhhh, not made whole.)
Given it worked last time, and given that there was no real penalty for doing it, and that the Fed and other central banks proved they were willing to bail out the rich to the tune of trillions of dollars, why not run the play again? The profits are privatized; the losses at the end will be socialized. Heck, with a bit of luck the Fed will print money pre-emptively to make sure that there is never a crisis for rich people ever again, just ever-increasing asset prices.
(This applies to the stock market as well.)
There is, mind you, a real economy buried under all the money being funneled to rich people somewhere, and at some point that economy may just collapse. After all, all the people who own these fancy condos and houses expect a servant class to take care of them.
But perhaps that labor can all be turned over to robots, as Silicon Valley wants, and the poor can just be expelled from places like SoCal, DC, New York, Vancouver, and Toronto entirely, to slowly drug themselves to death, or perhaps just starve, in the vast interior wastelands of the continent where “real” people don’t want to live.
This is, fairly explicitly, what Silicon Valley techbros want; they want to eliminate the need for surplus people.
I wonder, though, how many of them will find that they too, are surplus, when AI becomes able to code and write ads.
It will, at least, be amusing.
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