A year ago, middle-class Americans were charging around like so many drunken, delirious Spaniards running with the bulls at Pamplona, buying up grossly overvalued homes at two or three times their real value in what was predicted to be an "endless bull housing market." Well, the problem with running with the bulls is that sometimes you get gored. According to increasingly worried media reports, home sales and values are dropping like a rock. Biggest drop in forty years, they say. Too bad for those of you yuppie folk who bought a house for $500,000 and it's only worth $250,000 at best now--but you're still stuck paying off a half-mil mortgage.
One article I found states that "Housing, which had set sales records for both new and existing homes for five consecutive years, has been rapidly loosing altitude this year, as consumers were battered by rising mortgage rates, soaring energy prices and a slowing economy. " Well, yeah, but there's a little bit more to it than that.
The big "housing boom" was a phenomenon pretty much restricted to America's rapidly shrinking class of yuppies, people with good jobs and (to ordinary working people) astronomically high salaries, mostly for dress-for-success jobs which don't actually do anything or produce anything except to re-cycle existing wealth, such as marketing etc.
This feverish buying spree began about five years ago among these mostly white people, the last of the American middle class which is being systematically destroyed by the Jews and neocons and illegal immigration. They finally realized just how vulnerable they were, and they started hunting desperately for some way to acquire hard assets that wouldn't be washed away when the deluge finally comes, as all thinking Americans pretty much know in the back of their minds it will come.
Why, exactly, they picked real estate in the form of large and garish suburban homes and lots defies rational analysis--I mean, I could see buying a farm or ranch or woodland, something you can survive on when the world goes Mad Max all around us, but a split-level two-story Colonial in a suburb within loping distance of a ghetto or a barrio, that costs as much to heat in the winter as a working man makes in a year?
This was their inflation hedge and rainy day nest egg? When the yuppies lose their jobs and they are forced to compete with the Mexicans and blacks for jobs flipping burgers and stacking shelves at Wal-Mart, how do they expect to make four-figure mortgage payments every month?
Of course, the super-rich real estate promoters and speculators who have made a killing off this madness are doing their best to explain it all away, according to Breitbart: "'The worst is behind us as far as a market correction. This is likely the trough for sales,' said David Lereah, the Realtors' chief economist. 'When consumers recognize that home sales are stabilizing, we'll see the buyers who've been on the sidelines get back into the market.'"
Not if they don't have any money because they've lost their $100,000 per year jobs in the corner office and they've had to go to work stacking pallets in a warehouse or data-entering for temp agencies they won't, Dave.
Congratulations, yuppies! You've been well on your way to achieving downward mobility for many years, and now you're ready for the next step--getting your asses booted out of those $500,000 suburban mansions and down here into two-bedroom renter houses, cheap apartments, and house trailers like the rest of us. Welcome home, brothers and sisters.
