<story><title>The Shock of Sweden&apos;s Housing Market Is Hitting the Country&apos;s Currency</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-14/sweden-s-housing-shock-hits-krona-leaving-riksbank-few-choices</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>opportune</author><text>I think a strong housing market may be the result of lack of productive capital, but I think it has more to do with supply and demand. Most average people pay for a house using a mortgage payment, so when buying a house, they&amp;#x27;ll be looking for a house that has an affordable mortgage payment.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s say Joe wants to spend &amp;#x2F; can afford a $1000&amp;#x2F;month mortgage payment. If interest rates are 5% and the maximum mortgage period is 30 years, Joe can afford to buy a house worth $190,000. However, if interest rates go down to 2% and Joe can now take a 40 year mortgage, Joe can now buy a house worth about $330,000. Great for Joe! The only problem is that housing supply is relatively inelastic, so the supply of housing didn&amp;#x27;t magically increase overnight. When Joe buys a house, he&amp;#x27;s essentially bidding against a bunch of other people for that house. If those other people&amp;#x27;s mortgage payments were affected the same way, then the actual effect is that what was once a house worth $190,000 is now worth $330,000.&lt;p&gt;This sounds like a problem out of an Econ 101 exercise. Either politicians are stupid, or more likely, they know that &amp;quot;homeowner policy&amp;quot; like this can make them and their other rich buddies even richer.</text></item><item><author>maxxxxx</author><text>Totally agree. It seems one of the factors that helped the US until the 90s was that housing was affordable so people could move around easily. A &amp;quot;strong&amp;quot; housing market seems to indicate that there are no productive places for investing and no wage growth so people need to gamble on houses to rise instead.</text></item><item><author>opportune</author><text>When will we learn that a &amp;quot;strong&amp;quot; housing market is not necessarily a good thing? High housing prices are great for those who already owned houses but terrible for everyone else (e.g. the entire generations born after prices became inflated). Not to mention people are greedy and will over leverage themselves when interest rates are good. No country should let the &amp;quot;landed gentry&amp;quot; hold them hostage over interest rates or tax policy so that their assets - many of which they do not even actually own - can appreciate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>littlestymaar</author><text>&amp;gt; Either politicians are stupid, or more likely, they know that &amp;quot;homeowner policy&amp;quot; like this can make them and their other rich buddies even richer.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not a malice vs idiocy situation, actually there is a third explaination : economy needs a growing money supply to work properly (and the money creation need to compensate the economic growth AND the reduction of money velocity[1]). But since the late seventies, money creation is only possible through the banking system via credit. That&amp;#x27;s why central banks reduces interest rates to stimulate economy, because you need to create money to enable economic growth. To get out of the rising housing prices trap, we need another money creation mechanism, but many people are affraid of the old ones (state-controlled monetary creation) and a lot of people (bankers, homeowners) have a lot to lose if we changed the system.&lt;p&gt;[1]: this is the failure of the monetarist view from the seventies, which predicted a constant money velocity, in fact we&amp;#x27;ve had a declining one for the last four decades.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Shock of Sweden&apos;s Housing Market Is Hitting the Country&apos;s Currency</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-14/sweden-s-housing-shock-hits-krona-leaving-riksbank-few-choices</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>opportune</author><text>I think a strong housing market may be the result of lack of productive capital, but I think it has more to do with supply and demand. Most average people pay for a house using a mortgage payment, so when buying a house, they&amp;#x27;ll be looking for a house that has an affordable mortgage payment.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s say Joe wants to spend &amp;#x2F; can afford a $1000&amp;#x2F;month mortgage payment. If interest rates are 5% and the maximum mortgage period is 30 years, Joe can afford to buy a house worth $190,000. However, if interest rates go down to 2% and Joe can now take a 40 year mortgage, Joe can now buy a house worth about $330,000. Great for Joe! The only problem is that housing supply is relatively inelastic, so the supply of housing didn&amp;#x27;t magically increase overnight. When Joe buys a house, he&amp;#x27;s essentially bidding against a bunch of other people for that house. If those other people&amp;#x27;s mortgage payments were affected the same way, then the actual effect is that what was once a house worth $190,000 is now worth $330,000.&lt;p&gt;This sounds like a problem out of an Econ 101 exercise. Either politicians are stupid, or more likely, they know that &amp;quot;homeowner policy&amp;quot; like this can make them and their other rich buddies even richer.</text></item><item><author>maxxxxx</author><text>Totally agree. It seems one of the factors that helped the US until the 90s was that housing was affordable so people could move around easily. A &amp;quot;strong&amp;quot; housing market seems to indicate that there are no productive places for investing and no wage growth so people need to gamble on houses to rise instead.</text></item><item><author>opportune</author><text>When will we learn that a &amp;quot;strong&amp;quot; housing market is not necessarily a good thing? High housing prices are great for those who already owned houses but terrible for everyone else (e.g. the entire generations born after prices became inflated). Not to mention people are greedy and will over leverage themselves when interest rates are good. No country should let the &amp;quot;landed gentry&amp;quot; hold them hostage over interest rates or tax policy so that their assets - many of which they do not even actually own - can appreciate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Gustomaximus</author><text>Homes are important to people and they tend to buy as good as they can afford. When employment is stable and interest rates are low people will spend more because they can and feel safe doing so.&lt;p&gt;Early movers purchase a higher grade of home than they could have previously. Eventually this shifts the market as a whole as income distribution remains stable. Then people buy the same house they would have previously at a higher price. Now nothing has changed and people are more in debt as the cycle returns to normal, if it ever does.&lt;p&gt;Plus the whole investor (foreign and domestic) vs owner occupier discussions we are seeing plenty of...</text></comment>