Those expecting a new housing collapse have been looking in the wrong places. The collapse has already occurred right beneath our noses. If anyone believes we aren't in the midst of a housing collapse worse than 2008, let me ask you this. How affordable was a house post 2008 collapse? How many people can afford a house now? How many houses were available in 2008? How many houses now? Instead of price collapse and correction like in 2008 though, this crisis has come in the form of a far more insidious silent seizure and redistribution of real estate from the people to the elites. The consequences are only beginning to be realized but will profoundly change the landscape of America. As a result, the ownership of private property, which is the bedrock of financial security in our society, has been shattered. Once, Americans could dream of building their lives and families around a home, but today, that dream has been crushed by artificially created unaffordability and shortages. Further, the crisis is even more acute for the younger generations, which face a nearly insurmountable challenge of affording a home as a new first-time buyer. For these post Millennials, most are destined to be rent serfs all their lives. These conditions break the linkage between the population and their nation. Without a stake in society within which they live, there is no ownership and no incentive for the stewardship of the necessary cornerstones of our nation. Without ownership, the disease of indifference metastasizes into hopelessness. Left destitute, homeless or dependent, and without dignity or the ability to establish and build any personal wealth, the people of the United States will become detached and ungovernable. Whether or not we remain blind to what is transpiring right in front of us today will be fundamental in determining whether America can return to prosperity or if it becomes another impoverished socialist cesspool of desperate people living at the mercy of the scraps tossed to them by their elites.
This was no accident. Remember the classic Klaus Schwab comment about you’ll own nothing and be happy? Well, he was serious at least about the you owning nothing part. In fact, this may have been the biggest seizure of private property and redistribution in modern history. So, how did this happen? Like most things, at first it happened slowly and without any notice. After the 2008 collapse, Americans were presented the greatest opportunity to acquire real estate in a generation. Those that had lived within their means suddenly had cash on hand and a bargain market flooded with homes. In fact, there were so many, a new buyer could easily find and buy foreclosures online directly from the banks. However, sometime around 2012, this all changed. Suddenly, a market flush with cheap and abundant properties evaporated seemingly overnight. The online sales disappeared, the foreclosures disappeared, and the prices started to rise. What you weren’t told is that the banks and their government puppets conspired and struck a new deal. The deal required banks to scrub their foreclosure sales from the market and instead of selling them to the public, sell them in bulk to big corporate buyers often using government funded loans to “bailout” the banks. This racket certainly must rank at the top of a long list of cases where banks used their influence to rob the populations blind while being provided cover by the government. The banks got the property off their books and were paid for it, select companies were able to buy vast amounts of real estate using your money and then price fix the markets, and you got the bill. Is this starting to make sense?
Seeing the opportunity to not just control the housing market, but to increase profits, the banks continued to work with corporations like BlackRock to eliminate any remaining inventory in the housing market, which drove up their housing portfolio value still on their books. The real estate companies didn’t care though because they were spending other people’s money acquiring them in bulk. Soon, the housing inventory was completely dried up and prices began to rapidly appreciate. The banks were once again in control. By driving up prices they could secure longer and more lucrative loan terms while also ensuring people, now spread thinner by costs, would have to take on larger amounts of debt mainly in the form of credit cards. This too provided additional profit for the banks. Even better, inflation was beginning to creep into the market due to the massive program of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve, which drove down interest rates, but the sheer volume of debt being issued gave banks massive liquidity for mergers and acquisitions. This trend continued throughout the first half of the Trump Administration. However, the worst was still to come.
I remember when the first reports of a new novel coronavirus began circulating in the press. We can debate this later, but from where I stand, COVID-19 was an engineered take down from start to finish. It was simply too perfect in that it realized nearly every dream and machination of the Left. Not only did enable a soft coup and removal of then President Donald Trump, but it collapsed the US economy, gave nearly unchecked powers to petty tyrants, and enabled a massive theft and redistribution of private property. The last point is what I want to focus on. With unconstitutional unilateral powers, a small, unelected body called the Centers for Disease Control began issuing deliberately destructive edicts to the economy and housing market. The hallmark of these edicts was the “rent moratorium.” This was packaged just as you’d expect a communist policy to be sold. We were told it was to “help” the poor and struggling people unable to pay their bills and out of work. Of course, the same people that now said you didn’t have to pay rent were the same people that said you couldn’t work and closed our economy creating massive job losses. However, like all communist policies to “help,” there was a poison pill imbedded in this “altruistic” act. Those that happened to actually be property owners were probably the first to realize that the “rent” moratorium only applied to people paying rent to private owners and rental companies, but it did not apply to homeowners paying a mortgage to the banks. Now common sense would have dictated that if this was truly about helping people overcome a temporary economic shutdown, then mortgage payments should have been suspended as well, but they weren’t. This is your tip off to their true agenda. You see, with the economy shut down and millions out of work, the banks fast tracked the foreclosure and seizure of as much private property as possible. They knew that millions of Americans relied on rent to cover their mortgage payments and by simply using their lobbyists to buy off the Trump Administration, they could use regulations and rules issued by the government during the crisis to bankrupt those property owners. This my friends is true communist redistribution. Many falsely believe that this is done through a gun to the face, but in reality, it is almost always done through the bureaucracy under the color of law and only backed by the threat of violence.
To add insult to injury, not only did the banks seize massive amounts of prime residential and commercial real estate, but they then received “bailout” money courtesy of the taxpaying citizens they just robbed of their homes. Further, additional funds were essentially given by the government to a few hand-picked real estate investment firms to, “help the poor banks” with all of this real estate debt on their books. With billions, arguably trillions of dollars, these firms then when about consolidating the proceeds of the largest real estate heist in history. Seriously, how hard do you think they were laughing when they got away with this scam? I want to remind you all again that his was done under Trump’s watch and with his blessing. Not only was Trump pushing poison vaccines and letting cities burn hoping for a bump from the chaos in his polling, but he also allowed millions to have their entire life savings held in real estate bankrupted. It didn’t end there though. Many of those people relied on that rental income to pay their bills and feed their families. These people were completely wiped out by Trump’s communist redistribution scheme. If you love Trump, that’s fine, but the man is responsible for this. As a real estate billionaire, he cannot feign ignorance. Trump understood better than 99% of Americans exactly what these policies entailed and did it anyhow. If he didn’t, he would be a complete moron. You have to pick one. I remember telling my friends in the real estate market when the rent moratorium went into effect that they had no idea how badly Trump just wrecked the housing market. I told them this would have long term disastrous effects, which the masses are just now beginning to fully realize.
So, what happened after they seized the real estate? Glad you asked. With an unprecedented amount of real estate now in the possession of a very few entities, corporations like BlackRock set about price fixing the rental market. Empowered by additional investor funds, BlackRock continued to monopolize any markets they didn’t have a controlling share in. They did this by buying up every last piece of real estate even at a premium. This had multiple detrimental impacts on the private home buyer. The most obvious was it bid up prices beyond the reach of most buyers. This was only possible by the massive equity behind companies like BlackRock. In addition, it nearly eliminated any remaining inventory in the housing market, further driving up prices. The scale of this has been so big that it’s created its own market gravity. Despite economic conditions that long ago should have caused a large drop of prices and correction in the housing market, the continued ability to remove any excess liquidity in the market has artificially maintained home prices at eye watering levels. In short, this has so distorted the market that normal price action is no longer a factor. BlackRock, in collusion with the government and the banks now effectively centrally control the housing market and pricing and they have every intention of continuing to inflate the prices.
This is only going to get worse. The higher BlackRock can drive up the prices, the more it profits. First of all, it inflates the value of its portfolio to its stockholders. Second, it forces people that would normally be home buyers to become home renters. Since BlackRock maintains a monopoly on the rental inventory, it produces even more revenue via these rentals. In addition, they have benefited from rising interest rates. This has led to much higher rates for mortgages on already astronomically overpriced homes. The combination makes it next to impossible for a first-time home buyer to break into the market, but it makes it very easy for a giant investment firm that can pay up front with cash to snatch up those additional homes that make it to the market and would otherwise sit at those prices. It’s also important to note BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, with over $10 TRILLION in assets under management, has had a disproportionate influence in pushing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs as well as other core subversive and destructive policies of the Left. These policies have only destroyed the nation faster, forcing countless millions more into poverty. This in turn creates more people dependent on Larry’s rental monopoly for housing. Oh, and for any of you out there thinking that it just sets BlackRock up for a big collapse if values drop or properties get trashed, think again. He has so much lobbying power and influence, he is guaranteed to get federal “bailout” funds to subsidize his now quasi-nationalized housing industry should any disruption occur.
Hopefully, at this point, you see how this all begins to tie together. On this point, I’ll bring you back to, “you will own nothing.” Communists have always hated and targeted private land ownership. To them, it is an intolerable condition that creates classes. The caveat of course is that though the people must be forbidden from owning private property, it is perfectly fine for the ruling class to not just own it all, but control it all. To accomplish this, redistribution, by force if necessary, must occur. Now that a controlling majority of the private real estate has been redistributed and consolidated by the elites, short of a revolution, there is very little hope of prying it back out of their ownership in the foreseeable future. This means a return to perpetual serfdom and the end of the American dream if it is allowed to go unnoticed. The best you can hope for is to be “assigned” housing by the government and live where it tells you just like the old Soviet Union. So far, your ruling elites have done a masterful job of suppressing this information and have prevented most from waking up to the fact the walls have been closing in for over a decade. If there is a peaceful solution to this, it is through heavy counter lobbying to highlight this issue and educate the masses to the underlying causes. This, like most complex subjects is difficult to convey to normies with limited attention spans and without the danger of them falling victim to the counter punch. Should they become angry and understand the extent to which they have been dispossessed of a future, they are very vulnerable to being duped into demanding the “government” subsidize their housing. If they fall for that socialist trap of enslavement, not only will they be paying even more for less, but they’ll never ever realize the dream of private ownership.
Folks, I’ve turned back to domestic issues for a bit because if we lose our home base, there is no point in worrying about anything overseas. We are in very dangerous times and unfortunately, despite the rhetoric, we don’t have any good leaders. Our options for president, even if a president could turn this around (and a single man cannot), frankly are horrible. Again, Trump created this so, to think he’ll fix it is denial. Then there is Biden and his regime that have only taken what Trump started and demonstrated how much worse it can be. Where I come from this isn’t a good choice and I’d say we are going to have to fight this one alone. So, here is what you need to do. The first thing is you must divest from BlackRock and insist everyone else does too. You can’t hold their funds in your investment portfolio, retirement accounts, pension fund, etc. We must totally divest. This, if done broadly, has the potential to create a negative feedback loop and force them to start liquidating assets if we can frighten Congress enough to not give them a bailout. This will free up inventory and reduce prices. With reduced prices their stock will drop, and they’ll have less revenue. In addition, if you are selling your home, only sell to a known buyer. Don’t sell to cut outs or investors. Sell to moms and dads with real families, real names, that really will live in the neighborhood. I know it is tempting to go with the highest bidder, but if that bidder is a BlackRock front company you are not just screwing yourself, but all of us. Remember, collectively, the effect is driving up the costs for all of us while removing options. If you are a contractor or rental management company, refuse to do business with BlackRock owned rental portfolios. If they can’t find qualified maintenance and repair companies to service their properties, or they have to pay an exorbitant rate for service, it also erodes their profitability and more investors will start to pull their money. Again, the key is to make it both unprofitable and unpopular to do business with BlackRock. These relatively simple things, if broadly undertaken, will disrupt and potentially reverse what more appropriately should be called the home ownership crisis. Outside of that, hang on to the land you can find because they aren’t making more and what’s left is being gobbled up. As a parting note, I have included the US House Price to Income Comparison chart. As you can see, COVID collapsed prices, enabled the steal, and then they shot back to record highs in relation to wages. This was engineered and no accident.
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Till next time.
D.t.Y.