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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

#151
post #142
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.

A monthly payment on a mortgage of $1mm is ~$4k. That’s the same cost to rent a 2-3br in the 1k-1.4k square foot range in much of San Francisco. Napkin math suggests that it’s a reasonable payment for those >=$170k annual income, which is very common in software in the USA.

there's also insurance, pmi if you didn't do the down payment, hoa seems common, taxes. Thats all more then 50% of my take home. (Im not including my rsu, im hesitant to budget off that theyre so variable) And a million dollar home is cheap at the moment. Looks like the median in sf if 1.5million.

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to pay attention to the verbs chosen to describe things done or said by politicians

Yep. One of the ways reporters mislead people while remaining factually correct. Then they blame factually incorrect news as destroying society while they're just doing the same thing more tactfully.

"factually incorrect news" is not the same thing as "fake news". Fake news is like a fake Rollex. The correctness of the time on the dial isn't the thing that makes it fake. Fake news is fraud without the monetary connotation.

If I went and lifted the NYT CSS files and registered some intentionally misleading domain / company name like "Times of New York", I could go around saying whatever I want and a good number of people would believe it. Fake news is worse than wrong, its divorced from reality. There never was a journalist trying to get it right to begin with. Fake news is a click farm in Macedonia, not a news outlet that made a mistake.

See also: "deep state" (which has now been bastardized to mean "shadow government").

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

#153

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.

I don't know anything about lumber market and it's transitory conditions and fluctuations (other than a last week news where I live, northern Spain, that said that woods price are at all time high supposedly because demand is also at records high, from international markets including japan) so it may very well be a transitory price fluctuation because WFH or whatever.

That being said, taking out the "runaway" adjective, inflation should be expected as a logical consequence of the monetary policy at least in US and Europe, and as a matter of fact, consumer price index are already up all across the board and both Fed and ECB had already adjusted their inflation target up. This should surprise no one, you just cannot increase the monetary mass by trillions in the year where the global economy shutted down due a global pandemic and not expect an inflationary spike. The global public debt won't be "paid" without an increase on inflation.

And this is not a criticism on the political behind this. The decision was made to ease the economic impact of the pandemic both in the general public and the private sector and in most cases this was achieved, but that doesn't mean the impact does not exist, is just that is being spread out in 20 years, and part of that would be on inflation.

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

#155
post #101
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you're anything like me you probably managed to save a whole heap of money as well - less eating out, no commuting costs etc. etc.

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

#156
post #143
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The chart you linked was way more dramatic than I imagined when I read "skyrocketing" and "cratering".

Well, the y axis is not anchored to zero.

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low interest rates, QE, stimulus, and rocketing stock prices facilitated the hot real estate market as much as proximate covid policies. You are correct to guess there is a substantial discussion that you're ignorant of.

Low interest rates don't increase inflation do they? And rocketing stock prices are definitely not a part of inflation. QE and stimulus can certainly contribute , but "as much" is a pretty big overstatement. If anyone thinks inflation was a notable fraction of the price quadrupling, they're being ridiculous. Even a huge amount of inflation would only be 2-4% of the lumber price increase.

Yeah I'm not seeing how 4x in price is "due to inflation" it might "contribute" or something but I find it hard to believe.

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

#158

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.

I don't know anything about lumber market and it's transitory conditions and fluctuations (other than a last week news where I live, northern Spain, that said that woods price are at all time high supposedly because demand is also at records high, from international markets including japan) so it may very well be a transitory price fluctuation because WFH or whatever. That being said, taking out the "runaway" adjecti…

I'm more than onboard with the idea that recent monetary policies have put pressure on prices, I just don't see how anyone can sanely say that a 4x price increase is (was) "caused by inflation". Of course implying that all or the vast majority of the increase is directly attributable to inflation, adding "runaway" back into the discussion.

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would wait. I'm an licensed inactive General Contractor. If 14 months ago, they were building them for $450,000, I'd wait. I'd shop around for another contractor too. A young guy starting out, might save you a lot. (There's no way to verify he knows what he's doing though.) If you are some what handy, it's not that difficult to owner build your own house. That is if you get the blueprints past the town's council. G…

I'm picturing a web developer in 2023 wondering why everything is slightly tilted in his DIY house even though he used the poured slab as reference

Well, u can always transform: rotate(X°) in the end ;-)
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