> ...as a country real estate provides a huge amount of our economic backbone.
I could do without the economy depending on real estate being a good investment.
I could do without the economy depending on real estate being a good investment.
When the government is primarily working on the numbers (real estate values, tax revenues from real estate) there's a perverse incentive to maximize the numbers rather than serving the needs of the entire population. SF is a great example of this--the real estate market is a disaster for the middle class, but it's fantastic for the landowners and the city. Indeed, it's in the interests of both of those aforementioned parties to drive out the middle class from the region and replace them with more wealthy buyers. The whole system depends on this happening or it risks collapse.
Money is created via bank loans. The largest bucket of loans in the US is mortgage debt -- and it's worth trillions more than any other type.
Should this source of newly minted dollars dry up, the US could very quickly fall into a liquidity crisis.
So, yeah, it's easy to shake our fists at high housing costs -- but what most people don't realize is that almost every dollar you've ever touched or earned was born in some other person's mortgage.
Non-debt based monetary systems (gold, bitcoin, etc) will result in slower growth, since developers and governments will need to wait until they can attract enough saved capital to start their projects. This is why people turn up their noses at these systems. But is slower growth really such a bad thing?
Yes and no. But it doesn't matter, since countries are competing with each other. If one decides to forgo growth, it'll lose politically and economically against those who didn't.
They're trapped, as you say, by each other. None can get off the ride before the others do. They will all need to fail together in a worldwide economic collapse, or agree unilaterally on some sort of global debt reset.
But that's not how grownups should run a planet, and it will doubtless lead to a lot of human death. It's already lead to uncontrolled growth that has damaged ecologies, fisheries, and aquifers for thousands of years to come.