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Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

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Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#101
post #58
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who has all this money to spend? everywhere everything is so expensive. i make a ton, and this doesn't add up. nothing about home prices seems to add up.

I think for a lot of (white collar) people, the last year and a half of covid has been the most lucrative time of their entire lives. Crazy returns across all asset classes.

my measly half million dollar worth of stocks "only" grew 30%. There's a significant amount of people do that much better than i did? what am i missing?

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#102
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mortgage borrowing costs are at historic lows.

its still expensive to borrow $700,000, on top of your current expenses. that's an extra payment of $3300, whos got that laying around to wait for a house to be built

A down payment is required if not paying cash, usually 10-20%. You’re financing the rest at 2-3% for 30 years, or borrowing against your public securities at ~1% and a reasonable amount of leverage (~%30) dictated by your brokerage.

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#103
post #35

Multi-year chart of lumber prices puts some of these "skyrocketing" and "cratering" headlines in perspective: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lumber

I like the chart, but it's exactly what the article indicated, no? Article indicated It went up to 3 times the price and is now down to pre rocket prices. Charts seem to agree?

I wouldn't define "returning to historic norms" as "cratering". Would you define a plane landing smoothly on a runway, even after a steep dive, as "cratering" the runway?

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#105
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mortgage borrowing costs are at historic lows.

its still expensive to borrow $700,000, on top of your current expenses. that's an extra payment of $3300, whos got that laying around to wait for a house to be built

If the Fed is committed to propping up equity markets which they asserted in no uncertain terms when markets died in the beginnings of the realization that COVID was going to be much more substantive than SARS or H1N1, it was clear that equity markets would take the "good news" of lockdowns + continued lower interest rates as signs that equity markets were going to continue to rally.

I mean basically where is there yield? Crypto + NFTs (yuck to the latter), real estate and equities. Even just running correlation analysis on these various assets over the last 20 years showed that crypto was super underpriced (despite only 12/13 year track record) while real estate is tremendously overvalued and equities were the only thing to react in a reasonable way to both (1) the initial realization covid was serious and (2) the Fed stepping in with 2 novel revolvers for SMB and for corporate credit. Treasury even threw in a bit into the bowl and performed stimulus. The last 1.5 years likely minted more "wealth" than in the previous 100 years combined (hand waving a bit) - a framework was laid to make much more money than what you put in provided you were looking at what was to come based on what was spoken.

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#106
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that you can't just cut down a tree and make lumber out of it. You have to dry it out first, which, afaik can take a long time. I don't know about the other stuff though.

Most construction lumber is kiln dried in less than five weeks.

There isn't that much excess kilns to dry lumber. They have to be of a certain standard -- especially if they are graded.

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#107
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they were just quotation marks rather than scare quotes and they genuinely wanted to show how wild the price fluctuations have been. Cynicism abounds on the internet, but people are still sometimes genuine.

Thanks. I'm legitimately quoting, but also prefer use of more specific terms like "tripled" or "fives times more expensive" etc. than common dramatic headlines words like "crushed", "slammed", "blasted", "surged".

Except sports headlines. I like them in sports headlines.

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#108
post #72

If the price keeps dropping at this rate lumber will be free by December! /s Seriously, this is a welcome correction, and another sign that runaway inflation fears were based on hyperbole.

Maybe prices will go negative like oil!

We will have to pay the trees to stop growing!

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#109
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, people were saying/thought that this was runaway inflation and not a result of supply chain issues because of COVID and tons of people suddenly having to spend way more time in their house because of COVID? Maybe I'm ignorant of the inflation argument more than anything else but it doesn't even pass the sniff test in my opinion.

There seems to be a group of people who predict hyperinflation at the drop of a hat. I’m not sure if it’s paranoia or motivated reasoning though. Maybe a mix of both?

It may have started as one or the other, but at this point they've been predicting hyperinflation for so long that they now have motivated reason to be "right, just called it too soon"

Re: Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater

#110

If the price keeps dropping at this rate lumber will be free by December! /s Seriously, this is a welcome correction, and another sign that runaway inflation fears were based on hyperbole.

Wait, people were saying/thought that this was runaway inflation and not a result of supply chain issues because of COVID and tons of people suddenly having to spend way more time in their house because of COVID? Maybe I'm ignorant of the inflation argument more than anything else but it doesn't even pass the sniff test in my opinion.

Printing tons of money and handing it out to people who will spend it immediately tends to at least put pressure on prices.
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