The Federal Moratorium on evictions is ending at the end of the month. Like last month, it could always be extended again.
It will be extended until the most opportune moment to do the most damage to the economy. Why? Vandals are in charge in D.C.
This was always a misguided program but was an integral part of destroying the relationship between lender and lendee, renter and landlord. The government comes in all humanitarian-like to suspend payments on FHA-backed mortgages, which are all of them post-Lehman Bros., after locking people in their homes for a year while blocking access to therapeutics which would have mitigated the worst of COVID-19’s effects on the society.
We know this now. Vaccination is patriotic. Stay home on the dole wearing a mask during sex for the greater good. If not, you’re a COVIDiot.
But, let’s leave all that aside for a minute. People have been terrorized and many of them are still not thinking straight, regardless of why and how they were driven to that state.
Moreover, I’ll stay away (for once) about any conspiracy surrounding this issue. Because the argument actually works better if we don’t go there. Let’s assume the intentions of people we know to be liars had the best of intentions and run the scenario in housing out.
So, while interrupting the normal ebb and flow of capital because of extreme circumstances may have felt like the right thing to do, the consequences of that policy are wholly predictable given the deplorable state of our politics. Again, even without any personal accusations of malice by individuals in decision-making positions, we still arrive at the outcome we have today.
Everyone on both sides of the residential debt divide is staring at a step-function reset of their cash flow when the eviction moratorium ends and that step-function will be a doozy, down.
Then when you think through what it is that Davos is trying to do with the Great Reset, which they have stated forthrightly, it is very clear why this moratorium has been extended until this summer, far beyond when it should have been.
And it has nothing to do with trying to keep Joe Biden’s poll numbers from collapsing by buying the votes of renters.
It has a lot to do with forcing both landlords and debtors into bankruptcy simultaneously, and do so when the bulk of the next round of government spending can be doled out to those closest to the Washington laundromat.
Martin Armstrong is right to bring up this issue but I don’t believe he’s thought through the full effect of the policy:
Those in power are just incompetent of ever managing the economy. Once they stuck their foot in the door, if they take it out and there is a wave of foreclosures, they will be to blame. So what do they do then? Put the foot back in the door and suspend all mortgages because they have an election in 2022?
Assuming incompetence over malice isn’t a bad rule of thumb when it comes to certain things. But in the case of a bunch of dirty European commie oligarchs trying to take over the world, bankrupting the middle class is their raison d’etre.
The play here is simple, convince everyone to stay put and look like the hero to the little guy by suspending mortgage payments for more than a year. This helps get Biden inaugurated president. Then keep the bogeyman of variants of COVID going well past any reasonable person’s patience until the economy has endured maximal pain, bankrupting hundreds of thousands of landlords and assisting the cocking up of the labor market subsidizing sloth through extending unemployment benefits and stimulus checks.
Why do you think they are rolling out your Child Tax Credit as a monthly support payment? Magnanimity?
Once you can’t hold back the “stay in your homes until XXX” narrative anymore you lift the moratorium. Since a lot of small businesses are gone most of the jobs available are McJobs. Even with a labor shortage forcing entry level wages higher that isn’t enough to cover the mortgage payment of a 3/2 in the ‘burbs.
To give you an idea of how bad it is local restaurants are closed on both Sundays and Mondays here in my neck of the woods because they explicitly can’t get anyone to come to work. McDonald’s are begging people for cashier’s jobs at $12/hour. In Florida. Right-to-work. $12 to jockey a register. Madness.
There is little to no incentive to go back to work for even $12/hour when the government will pay you more than 2/3rds of that to stay at home. If it’s bad in Florida where unemployment benefits are less than enough to starve on, you can imagine what it looks like in more enlightened states like New York.
Now all those people have more than a year of back payments to make, which they can’t. The landlords need the money now to keep from being foreclosed on by the bank. And guess who gets to swoop in and buy up all those single-family homes and apartment buildings with newly-minted USG ‘infrastructure’ spending money?
You guessed it…. Blackrock. That story made it out into the world in April with a piece by the War Street Journal.
If you think we’ve seen the peak of Blackrock’s takeover of the economy, just wait until people have to pay their mortgages again.
You really will own nothing and like it or else. But wait, there’s more.
Blackrock will buy those houses at pennies on the dollar. They will wipe out hundreds of billions in mortgage debt but, more importantly, they will force a massive reassessment of housing prices across the country. And, as Dexter K. White pointed out on the latest episode of my podcast, Blackrock et.al. don’t even have to buy indiscriminately to have maximal effect.
They’ll just buy up the properties in red and purple districts to flip the electoral map. Under Obama it was called zip code targeting. And it’ll be accelerating once the eviction moratorium ends sometime soon.
Who do you think they’ll move in there? Well, go ask the people in places like Minneapolis.
Even worse, because the story got too much traction by late June none other than The Atlantic was running an apologia to tell us we’re crazy to think there’s anything weird going on here. The Atlantic. The only publication more Davos than it is The Economist.
But, after debunking the idea that Blackrock becoming the country’s biggest slum lord as ludicrous, the writer Derek Thompson, tells us what the real agenda is:
How can we encourage Americans to support more housing construction near where they live? Maybe the answer is … more single-family rentals. As the Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen points out, homeowners tend to look down on nearby construction, because more ample housing could drive down the cost of their property. But renters might celebrate nearby construction for the same general principle: Ample housing might hold down their rent.
In the arithmetic of online outrage—where big banks are evil, and landlords suck—nothing is more villainous than a big-bank landlord. But the larger villain in America’s housing crunch isn’t the faceless Wall Street Goliath overseeing your apartment building or house; it’s the forces stopping any new apartment buildings or houses from existing in the first place: your neighbors, local laws, and local governments. If we can’t see the culprit of America’s housing crisis, that’s because we’re eager to look everywhere except in the mirror.
Right Derek. More rentals. Why don’t you just polish Herr Schwab’s knob on Tik-Tok while you’re at it.
Here in North Florida, after twenty years of forcing density restrictions on agricultural zoned land development to “preserve green spaces” Alachua County is now trying to get rid of single-use zoning so they can build the equivalent of Section 8 trailer parks in those same low-density zones. So, first they destroy your ability to develop the land for your benefit then they want to use Federal money to bring in refugees and “Dreamers” and create rural slums.
Because The Walking Dead is their model of the future.
And what will that do to the price of your home? You who worked through COVID, who did things right, who paid their mortgage? Oh right, you’ll now be upside down on that place you just bought in Florida or Tennessee to get away from the lunatics in California and New York.
Hamster meet wheel.
This is why you get out of debt in the face of a crisis. Don’t always assume they want endless inflation. Deflation of specific assets is always how they consolidate power. First they’ll make you feel rich through the boom and then they’ll take it away with an inexplicable policy error from the Fed (sound familiar?) and there’s trillions in zero-cost money to help get out from underneath all that stress.
All you have to do is embrace extreme minimalism.
There is no recovery story now. There is only liquidation of the middle class and the destruction of even the veneer of civility granted by the suburbs.
Last week’s jobs report may have kernels of truth in it which point to things improving, but it won’t matter, not with oil prices headed to $90 a barrel or higher. The next phase of the destruction of the middle class in the U.S. is well underway. All those new cars we bought with our stimmy checks? We won’t be able to afford those either. But, hey, there’s a silver lining. Your per child tax credit will come to you as a monthly handout to help you walk to your McJob to make ends meet thanks to a benevolent government who just broke your legs.
Join my Patreon if you finally get what’s going on.
Incredibly powerful commentary.that gives me nightmares. I’m forwarding thisto my list of friends,associates and enemies as I think the later do not deserve this fate.
So up until recently Goldman-Sachs was the rivaled baddy of the world, and probably still are. Blackrock was brought in by Trump, two years ago. Who are they, what are their operating orders and how are they connect to the banks/Fed, whose the controlling entity ? Trying to get a working knowledge of how they interact and act for the government.
Try Phillips “Giants, The Global Power Elite”…less a read than a compilation of entities and relationships.
Strategy from 1970’s smart guy Doug Casey: Pay off your house, or owe nearly 100 percent. Do Not Own/Owe Half of your house.
A little silver and gold will pay 5 years taxes, so you stay, or squat until it is convenient to move with saved payments (letters/notices/Creditwreckage…bah). Leave when armed Deputies come, and no earlier. You may “earn” the right to stay by staying, along with more desperate neighbors. Back payments might be due, but your pm.s are up 80% a year in real terms. Organize!
Blackrock goes back much further than Trump.
A tad more investigating is in order.
It’s Black Stone, that bought properties for pennies on the dollar after the 2008 housing bust, and will do so again here, not Black Rock
Both will do it. Blackrock is already doing it. Blackstone will belly up to the trough as well.
I wonder why the federal government wouldn’t just make the landlords whole? Of course giving Blackrock and others the free money to buy up all things housing and then change the zoning to allow them to put multiple people in previously single family homes would work well too.
Just a shout out to all you government lovers out there.
THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR GOOD WORK!
Bless your heart, Tom. May I call you that?
Great article, again. However, Alachua county ain’t Nawth Florida. (Not that this takes away from your articles main point).
Look at a satellite photo of Florida at night. See the bright lights of Gainesville, Jacksonville and Tallahassee? See that big splotch of black in the middle? That’s North Florida! There’s ten acres on a river up here that you should offer a kings ransom for.
They never use it. By the way, the area is keeping well drillers, building inspectors etc busy as all get out. Times a’ wastin.
Drop me a line and come visit. Goats are welcome.
Greg, I already live in that dark section of N Florida. I don’t live in Gainesville. Fuck those commies.
Back on May 29 you said
“Bottom line, for now global oil prices have likely peaked no matter what drivel comes out of John Kerry’s mouth”.
What has made you change your mind on oil?
Ta Mick
What to do…?
If you live in a blue city in a red state. Your nice, suburban house has a mortgage. Sounds like its time to get out of Dodge and pay cash for a smaller place in a rural red area….
That’s not a bad plan. Buy what you can afford, or keep the Loan-to-value ratio below 30%
Tom, if the Davos crowd are as smart and diabolical as you suggest, they would have thought about who will do the actual work in their post-reality utopia.
Obviously they are not going to work. That’s not how dictators roll. Also, they don’t know how even if for some reason they wanted to start. The Davos dummies don’t know how to cook their own meals, never mind how to clean the carborator on the lawn mower or clear the garbage disposal. They have servants doing all this now.
The welfare crowd can’t even keep their own rooms clean. They use their welfare check to visit Popeyes or KFC or McD’s. They call the super to fix all the stuff that is constantly breaking in their appartment because… they don’t know how to take care of stuff never mind how to fix it.
So in this post-reality utopia, the guy that knows how to fix things becomes king. Davos needs the fix-it guy a lot more than the fix-it guy needs them. The guy who knows how to farm decides if society eats; if Davos punishes the farmer, the welfare crowd doesn’t eat and they rebel.
The Davos crowd are evil, but they aren’t stupid. Dictators know they need a middle class / working class. The ones that don’t know that don’t survive their own revolution.
Tom,
Who fixes broken lawn mowers to maintain the Davos estates in this post-reality world? Who fixes all the stuff in the UBI recepients appartments?
The Davos crowd doesn’t do work. That’s not how dictators roll, and they don’t know how to fix things as it is. They have servants to do this now. What happens when the servants are gone and they have to rely on UBI welfare rats to fix their estate?
The UBI welfare rates can’t take care of their own stuff. They call the building superintendent constantly to fix things, because they don’t even take care of stuff never mind make repairs.
In this post-reality world you describe, the guy who knows how to fix stuff becomes king. Davos can’t afford to kill fix-it man; Davos needs fix-it more than fix-it needs Davos, and fix-it man knows it.
Dictators that survive their own revolution make friends with the fix-it guys. The ones that don’t, they don’t last past the revolution phase.
Herr Schwab is a university academic who just raises tuition and expects someone else to fix it for him. But the other Davos folks have learned to exploit the world off campus — and they need the middle class to do work for them.
No enough time for all the pieces to fall into place. 70% of US GDP is consumer spending. My guess is that banks will foreclose but do so on a systematic timeline employing big institutional buyers (mostly foreign). This tactic will prevent a total collapse of the dollar. With nearly 30trillion in debt, Joey B can not fumble.
I’ve thought for years that these fine folks have been working on ways to send us back to the days of feudalism and we will all be their serfs.
Larry Fink is WEF and CFR, previous underlings are bidenistas now, watching the store, while he has international ambitions. How to stop the Davosians? Grabbing tangible assets with FauxGeld is spreading from the elite to the bourgeois, who dimly sense a trap in suddenly free stuff they always had to work for before. Many people under them have long been accustomed to enjoying the product of other’s industry, and they vote too, for as long as that’s necessary and no longer. So Schwab creates a larger dependent underemployed population in subsistence housing that they don’t own. If you didn’t work for it and own the value in it, why take care of it? Just because Europe is riddled with moral weaklings doesn’t mean that everywhere else is. Not every eviction goes smoothly, even for single cases involving egregious breach of contract. Imagine a backlog of hundreds and resulting arbitrary streamlining in court. Local law agencies are refusing to enforce selected state or federal laws based on local evaluation of their suitability for locals. Every sheriff knows that there’s citizens doors that he or she really doesn’t want to walk up to unless they just have to. This is going a far piece beyond states rights. Eviction orders will be selectively enforced at best, and many smaller real estate investors will sell out or walk away, set up like pigeons by the government and it’s controllers. Resolution Trust Corporation 2.0?
When people lose their investment in society and the status quo, only force will control them. Trapped Europeans are kind of screwed. It’s different here. Vaccine-crats going door to door jab-monitoring in St. Germaine-en-Laye or Wolfratshausen aren’t gonna take a bullet. If this plan of bidens is enacted, many nosy US government employees aren’t going home. So the native independence of the average US citizen is in Davos’ way, predicated on ownership of houses and guns and one’s self for medical care choices. First count the antivaxxers and gun owners, then return with needles and handcuffs. Financial manipulation screws you out of your house/savings. Glad to have no debt whatsoever and a cheap rental cottage (family owned) some 350 steps from the Gulf of Mexico, single and childless.
But it would have been so much better to come of age under an honest government with it’s citizens best interests at heart, trusting your society enough to marry and have children without screwing up their future like the political jerks are now. I feel like this country had it right sixty years ago, but greed and inattentiveness killed it. I was lucky enough to grow up in Bavaria, Holland, France, and Switzerland, but the US was always special. Was. You can’t even talk to people face to face safely anymore.
Economic growth is required in order to shrink debts through inflation.
Economic growth requires surplus energy. That is a undeniable fact.
“China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam are planning to build more than 600 coal plants” – france24.com
It is energy that is becoming harder to source. You think like an economist Tom. Trying to preserve your imaginary wealth through cryptos and whatever when, our real wealth; vast resources, clean water, abundant oceans and our forests have all been stolen and our productive farmlands poisoned to death.
Is this what you are trying to preserve.
Look at the physics. Our economy is a heat engine. Early economists tried to map this engine using the laws of thermodynamics and they did not work out so, they disregarded the pollution and called such things “externalities” while at the same time, ignoring the fact that resources are finite or limited. “If mankind ever needs more copper, we will find a way to make more copper”. Ha!
While you and others continue to ignore root causes, you will be writing the same old same old until everything stops. The Davos crowd knows what is coming and this how they are preparing for it.
If you want to do some real good then, get real.
An excellent presentation as a primer for you from 1995.
Dr Albert Bartlett (RIP): Arithmetic, Population and Energy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_VpyoAXpA8
Cheers.
H.
Nonsense.
I like Tom’s no-nonsense reply.
That picture of a new single family house in america is called a “caravan” in the UK.
Spoken like an economist.
We shall see. Currencies are a proxy for energy and if you look around your room and ‘think’ about it, you will see the embodied energy in everything you have.
Energy Tom. That’s what it’s all about. How much can you do without? Sooner rather than later, physical reality is going to impose limitations on every thing that you do and no amount of currency creation, crypto or otherwise can stop it.
Dr Bartlett is a well respected physicist from the University of Colorado. Look him up. I will bet that you did not even bother with the introduction.
I expect that you will continue to write your usual how not to save our world while it continues to disintegrate around us and not address fundamentals. I mean, why should you be any different to all the other eggspurts out there basically saying the same things and getting them just as wrong.
I will continue to read your articles. You are a good writer and some of them are good. Please brush up on your physics and arithmetic which, I am sure will improve your understanding and product.
Avagoodwun.
H.
I would caution you to not assuming anything about me and what I know.
I would tell you to brush up on your physics seeing as I am one (25 years as a chemist). Don’t ever walk into a conversation assuming you know more than the person you are talking to.
I read your comment as a chemist and a physicist (high energy laser spectroscopy in college, electroless deposition research and metallurgy background as a researcher) and called it ‘nonsense’ from a place of sincere knowledge.
In short, FUCK YOU YOU ARROGANT PRICK.
“Energy Tom. That’s what it’s all about. How much can you do without? Sooner rather than later, physical reality is going to impose limitations on every thing that you do and no amount of currency creation, crypto or otherwise can stop it.”
The US can get way more crowded and get much more like Africa or India before your scenario even remotely manifests or becomes even the tiniest bit concerning to the average Branch Covidian out there.
Your theory seems to me that “we will run out of energy and die because too many digits on bank hard drives somewhere (a.k.a. dollars)” and you call crypto crazy?
They once modeled the economy using fluids. It seemed to work. But it’s all more complex now of course and fake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC
“The MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer) also known as the Phillips Hydraulic Computer and the Financephalograph, was created in 1949 by the New Zealand economist Bill Phillips (William Phillips) to model the national economic processes of the United Kingdom, while Phillips was a student at the London School of Economics (LSE). The MONIAC was an analogue computer which used fluidic logic to model the workings of an economy. The MONIAC name may have been suggested by an association of money and ENIAC, an early electronic digital computer.”
“MONIAC had been designed to be used as a teaching aid but was discovered also to be an effective economic simulator.”
So what is your area of expertise?
Whether we talk about “doctor” Bernanke, “doctor” Yellen, “doctor” Fauci, or whomever this “doc Bartlett” is… we are talking about a bunch of Peter Pans. We are talking about people who never left campus, didn’t want to grow up, can’t hack it in the real world. And so they resort to academic credential-ism as a substitute for meritocracy.
For those who actually managed to grow up and leave campus, one’s academic credentials are close to irrelevant. If you have a doctorate, it means we expect you to have more skills and more productivity… if you don’t have the skills and productivity, your piece of paper from University of Who-gives-a-sh!t is worthless.
Its amazing how many recent comments on various blogs (not just this one) have someone quoting an “expert” doctor dumb-dumb, tenured peter pan at the University of I-don’t-wanna-grow-up. Are we really supposed to be impressed by someone who couldn’t hack it in the real world?
If you can make it off campus, you know there is a huge difference between what works in theory, in a controlled laboratory setting, and what works in the real world under (ahem) not always ideal conditions.
Real world actors have to deal with budgets. Raising prices / taxes / tuition by double digits every year would cause every single customer to shop elsewhere. Academia does not deal with reality, and neither do government bureaucrats.
Any single parent trying to raise kids on fixed wages knows 1000x more about economics than Bernanke and Yellen and Powell combined. Throw in Greenspan too. The single parent knows more. Period. Amen. Its not even close.
Dr Mom knows more about medicine than Fauci the Liar. Locking people indoors, away from sunlight, is no way to kill a virus. How many people would have trusted Fauci if he had admitted upfront that he funded the gain of function research in the first place — against the orders of the Obama administration.
Academia has its place — on campus. But Peter Pans are not equipped for the real world. That applies to all the so-called “experts” that are being paraded on TV lately.
Those who know don’t go on TV, and those who go on TV don’t know.
Not spoken like a chemist. As someone has studied science and obviously can do math, it amazes me that you continue ignore physical realities. What’s the matter with you?
You are much like Ugo Bardi, also a chemist who, unlike you and I give you credit for not so, so far, is one of many who has banned me for saying these things. Your last statement is typical of the responses that I have received for a couple of decades now and tells me something about you.
BTW. My credentials are in the realm of computer science and systems engineering so, I also am no dummy. Let us both see what the future holds then one can criticize the other.
My argument is, our situation will continue to deteriorate, as it has done for several decades now, for reasons that I have specified and until it starts to improve, unlikely in my opinion, you really have no argument. If they start to improve then, you can call me all the names you want.
Cheers.
H.
Dood. I just find you tiresome. I’m not debating you on these things. And have written plenty on the physical state of the world and how all this interconnects
But I disagree with the basic premise of the argument that currency and energy are related. Seriously, matter abd energy are conserved.
Our system is not degrading because things are finite. It has everything to do with organizational systems. It’s not matter based. So fuck you. What’s wring with you?
Tom, this guy linked to a youtube video…
youtube, in their infiinite arrogance, would not allow the guy who won a nobel prize for inventing mRNA to comment about mRNA use. Think about the level of stupid and arrogance that runs youtube.
youtube wouldn’t allow world class virologists to talk about covid unless they towed the party line. A censorship committee made up of San Fransisco wack jobs, majoring in social justice not medicine, will not tolerate licensed medical practitioners asking questions.
Why would anyone link to propoganda? Youtube is for entertainment, and only entertainment. It is not a credible source for anything factual
Okay. I don’t wanna argue either. I’ll just say that I disagree with you. Currencies are a proxy for energy, our systems are degrading due resource depletion and I know a lot about organizational systems and leave it at that.
BTW: That video that I posted earlier is really good and if you haven’t seen it, I recommend it to all. In my opinion, it should be required viewing for all politicians and journalists. Please humor me and check out the first 10 minutes at least. Then dismiss it if you wish. With your background, it will be easy to digest.
Catchya next time.
Cheers.
H.
So adding zeroes to banknotes like in Zimbabwe is like building nuclear power stations? That’s what I’m reading here. Maybe something is wrong with your presentation…