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What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

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Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#181

Post by kshacker »

nemo44x wrote: post #172
Bellend wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe we are in a time where everyone is milking the 90s-20s real estate bubble and no one wants to be first to fold. Internationally, not just on a per country basis. As soon as say, French real estate collapses (or UK or USA or Germany etc), the whole rotten castle of cards will fold as well. If it doesn't you can enjoy the expensive property, but you won't be eating farmed foods, won't be in a clean environmen…

Why would it collapse? There’s insatiable demand for extreme limited property. Interest rate hikes may lower the price of property but the interest will rise proportionately. Do people really think at sone point no one will want premium property and I’ll finally get it cheap? Of course that will never happen.

You can twist the supply demand imbalance only so much. Go farther than required for longer than required, and some cracks will eventually show up. Like they did for Silicon Valley bank.

So it is hard to say when those cracks appear since the global market is quite a big market and can sustain imbalances for a long time, but then the bigger the bubble the bigger the crash.

Foreigner limits, tax on no. Residents, start of uncontrolled construction - these are only some ways I can think it may break and my ideas are based only on reading the internet, you never know what dynamics come and break the housing. Or they break the world or its money supply.

Not trying to fear monger just saying the dance will end.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#182

Post by im3w1l »

tptacek wrote: post #132
im3w1l wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite simple. There are multiple conspiracies and they ally with each other but those bonds are fluid and shifting. To give two examples relating to China and India here was a thread very recently that mentioned how the Mexican cartels are making inroads in the US, succesfully corrupting some police union and that cartel was also in cahoots with the chinese as thats where they were sourcing their fentanyl from.…

Sounds pretty simple. Every abusive group in the world is coordinating with every other group.

I didn't word that very well, I meant that they sometimes ally, and sometimes oppose each other and often they are neutral.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#183

Post by listenallyall »

tptacek wrote: post #85
varispeed wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a convention, in the ComicCon sense This is a common way people use to rationalise it. But how do you think decisions are made when there is group of people where each one has a part to play to execute a policy? The word you are looking for is a meeting. People meet, discuss, share concerns and agree plan. At this level, this is not something you can do over a Zoom call as you don't know who may be in the room…

One way you can tell it's a conspiracy theory is that people talk about the WEF, which has no power other than arranging the name tags on the lunch tables at the gatherings, rather than the actual policy makers making decisions. Try a thought experiment: contravene the will of the World Economic Forum. What happens next? You don't get to go next year? Statistically, that means your company performance will significan…

> no power other than arranging the name tags on the lunch tables

The WEF itself would starkly disagree.

For more than 50 years, the Forum has engaged global Partners to drive significant impact – creating historic initiatives, industry breakthroughs, economic solutions and tens of thousands of projects and collaborations – improving the state of the world

That's a lot more than arranging name tags.

https://www.weforum.org/impact

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#184

Post by Aeolun »

nivenkos wrote: post #7

The main problem is the terrible rent control system - with a lucky few getting rent-controlled first-hand contracts, and everyone else facing a cut-throat almost completely unregulated market of sub-letting. Rent control never works.

The Netherlands has a variation of this for newly built properties. The prices for new properties are controlled, but the prices for second hand properties are not. If you win the lottery, you get to buy a newly built house for like €250k, which will them immediately jump in price to €450k, because that’s the price you can now sell it for.

It’s completely bonkers…

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#185

Post by owyn »

throwawaybbq1 wrote: post #130
throwawaybbq1 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an immigrant and got really burned during the Harper admin (Kenny's handling of immigration destroyed my life). That basically meant my options are Liberal or NDP. NDP policies seem to think if I make more than 200K, I am a rich fat cat (ignore that I have a freakin PhD at the cost of a delay in buying a house - effectively making me far poorer in wealth terms than someone with a mediocre undergrad who bought a p…

I only see one solution to right the wrongs of the past (with respect to the housing bubble). Tax wealth annually. Tax home sales the way the US does it. As a society, we need to acknowledge how zero interest rates were directly responsible for the housing bubble. The people that caused that should be shamed publicly.

Interest rates and tax policy have massive impacts on behavior and the overall economy. It's kind of nuts that we do live in a system where these rules change all the time based on the whims of a bunch of politicians, half of whom are apparently members of an apocalyptic death cult. Or in this case, kinda racist?

"The bridge from Rinkeby makes it easier for criminals to recruit your children into crime," the party told local voters during last year’s campaign.

Speaking of taxing home sales, before 1997 any profit was considered capital gains. After the "taxpayer relief act" in 1997, the first $250k was exempted ($500k if married). So that was like a big flag saying "go forth and make money flipping houses". Side effect in our timeline is the creation of infinite home flipper content for YouTube. Similar signals with zero interest rates. "Buy a house now, no matter what it costs, for tomorrow it will cost more. Oh, maybe buy some guns too while you're at it, the end times are near".

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#187

Post by Aeolun »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #140
watrami wrote: post #103

It seems like it's the same story everywhere I look. Housing is the main driver of inequality and there is little change happening. We have the same problem here in Germany. I am currently living in Munich to finish my CS Master's at TUM and build a startup, and it is absolutely impossible to find anything remotely affordable. I am supported by two startup scholarships and make enough to get by, but no landlord even…

Your GF gets rejected on a financial basis while making 75k euros? How expensive are the places she's trying to rent? > We are already looking to move to other places and created a university-wide google sheet where we compare different countries and cities around the world for those kinds of categories It seems like if you want to live anywhere that's desirable you have to pay an arm and a leg for rent, no matter wh…

Tokyo is pretty affordable. Certainly enough to have a whole range of options for €75000.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#188

Post by friend_and_foe »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #120
gruez wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure, I live in a rent controller apartment and it certainly is great for the many people in my apartment who work in the city but could never pay the rents. That's kind of like saying "What's so bad about zoning restrictions? I own a house and it's not affecting me at all!". Of course it's great for you and other people who have a rent controlled unit. The OP explicitly acknowledges this. The issue is for…

If there were no rent control, all the units would go to the wealthy and everyone else would be driven out of the city.

Why is that? You've got to ask yourself this question, why would this happen? Because if you don't address the cause, you've got a "law of conservation of problems" and you just shift your problems from one place to another. Rent control doesn't solve problems, it moves problems to another part of the system, in this case, a housing system.

So what is the core problem? The core problem is that there aren't enough dwellings in the city for everybody that needs to be there. If there were they wouldn't be so expensive. So figure out what you need to do to build more dwellings.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#189

Post by [deleted] »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #120
gruez wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure, I live in a rent controller apartment and it certainly is great for the many people in my apartment who work in the city but could never pay the rents. That's kind of like saying "What's so bad about zoning restrictions? I own a house and it's not affecting me at all!". Of course it's great for you and other people who have a rent controlled unit. The OP explicitly acknowledges this. The issue is for…

If there were no rent control, all the units would go to the wealthy and everyone else would be driven out of the city.

[deleted]

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#190

Post by dogcomplex »

whitemary wrote: post #160
voisin wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Housing is the main driver of inequality Low interest rates and endless money is the main driver of inequality. Housing was just one manifestation of the root cause.

Capital accumulation and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall are the objective fundamental causes of inequality in every capitalist society, which is why every capitalist society depends on a plethora of ostensible efforts to counter these fundamental characteristics of capitalism. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to...

If the tendency of the rate of profit to fall was the underlying problem, basic needs and housing would be dirt cheap. That's not a problem - it's a good thing for consumers (and therefore the lower classes). It's the plethora of efforts to counter this which capitalists employ (mainly monopolization) to inflate prices anyway despite underlying increased efficiency (and less labor) that's the problem. The main problem though is that labor is perpetually kept desperate enough to accept bargains which favor investors, and consumers have no other means of gaining capital, even as they get automated out of the job market.

It's a fundamentally unfair system which inevitably maximizes inequality. It's untenable without a government-enforced wealth-redistributing tax to offset that.

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