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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

No.

Inflation is great for mortgage holders.

If ~40% of inflation is rent, it's hard for inflation to be 100% (for example) and rent inflation be 0%. It's possible, but very unlikely.

If you bought an $8M house in Tahoe you can't afford, it would be outstanding if inflation went up to 80 billion percent, because then you'd basically get the house for free (as every dollar last year would be worth $800M this year, buying your house for the equivalent of a penny in this inflated currency).

The only thing bad for mortgage holders is home price deflation - which usually doesn't happen when there is high inflation for the above stated reason.

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Inflation measures consumer prices, not the prices of assets like housing

The response to inflation is interest rate rises, which increases the monthly mortgage repayments and total future outlay of mortgage buyers who dont have long term fixed rates (as of course do other rises in costs of living). And of course, this ultimately has a negative impact on the value of the house (although generally quite a modest one, especially somewhere like the UK with a shortage of homes)

No.

~35% of the inflation basket in the US is owner's equivalent rent - which is an indirect way of measuring rent: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...

In Canada it's ~41%.

If you read your own link, it explains that the entire point of estimating owner' equivalent rent is to avoid counting capital appreciation of housing in the CPI, because house prices are not consumption (and also because actual expenditure on mortgages would be particularly unhelpful to include in an inflation index because it's directly correlated with the policy variable central banks use to reduce inflation)

In the UK, the subject of the OP, measured inflation is around 8% and house prices (which rose consistently above inflation for the last couple of decades) are falling.

Falling house prices are not good for homeowners.

Which will go down along with the prices of those homes.

Hm I’m not sure you’re factoring variable rate mortgages, which most people in the U.K. have. As interest rates rise so do mortgage payments (usually with a 1-2 year delay).

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