Why Housing Will Crash Again - But For Different Reasons Than Last Time

Institutionalizing the speculative excesses that inflated the previous housing bubble has fed magical thinking and fostered illusions of phantom wealth and security.

The global housing market has been dominated by magical thinking for the past 15 years. The magical thinking can be boiled down to this:

A person who buys a house for $50,000 will be able to sell the same house for $150,000 a few years later without adding any real-world value. The buyer will be able to sell the house for $300,000 a few years later without adding any real-world value. The buyer will be able to sell the house for $600,000 a few years later without adding any real-world value.

And so on, decade after decade and generation after generation: a house should magically accumulate enormous capital (home equity) without the owner having to do anything but pay the mortgage for a few years.

The capital isn't created by magic, of course: it's created by a greater fool paying a fortune for the house on the speculative confidence that an even greater fool will magically appear to pay an even greater fortune for the same house a few years hence.

This is the result of housing transmogrifying from shelter purchased to slowly build equity over a lifetime of labor into a speculative bet that credit bubbles will never pop. This transmogrification is the final stage of the larger dynamic of financialization, which turns every asset into a speculative commodity that can leveraged via debt and derivatives and sold into global markets.

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