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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   24941 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Core inflation, a better measurement of long-term inflation that excludes volatile commodities like gas prices, is even lower at around 2.5%, essentially hitting the Fed’s 2% target.

This is the perfect example of why many people just flatly disbelieve the economists in favor of their lying eyes. For most Americans, housing is a huge percentage of their outlays. In the time from February 2020 to now, the increase in housing prices coupled with the increase in interest rates has approximately doubled the monthly outlay to finance the same houses. People see this, they feel trapped and frustrated by it, and no amount of telling them that if they just ignore the cost of food and energy, inflation is actually low will convince them that their actual cost of living isn't an enormous issue.

If a typical American believes their eyes over the economists and focuses on housing, they will view inflation as being close to zero.

Typical situation: not moving this year.

If you aren't moving, rent increases for lease renewals are generally much smaller than rent increases for new tenants. (See Zillow Rent index = asking rent for stuff on the market, vs CPI Rent which is what people who take a survey actually pay.) If you are a homeowner and have a mortgage the only thing that is going up is either home insurance or property tax (which often gets rolled in, i.e. my mortgage bill is actually principal + interest + escrow to cover property tax/home insurance), which is at most 1/3 of the total.

People see this, they feel trapped and frustrated by it

The illiquidity of the market is unfortunate. People made an interest rate bet and won a lot of money. Consider a mortgage with 25 years of $2000/month payments (principal+interest) - this was worth $446k to the bank at a 2.5% discount rate (i.e. 0% interest + 2.5% to cover default probability) but if the bank sold it today they'll get $284k (assuming 4.5% interest + 2.5% to cover default = 7%). The homeowner is richer by $162k in NPV!

But it is unfortunate that this $162k comes with a lot of hassle - namely they can only realize it slowly over time by holding onto a specific piece of real estate. A regulatory fix I'd propose: if a mortgage holder sells the loan the debtor gets a 30 day call option at the sale price + $1k.

If you aren't moving, rent increases for lease renewals are generally much smaller than rent increases for new tenants. (See Zillow Rent index = asking rent for stuff on the market, vs CPI Rent which is what people who take a survey actually pay.)

CPI Rent looks pretty high. The Zillow Rent index is actually lower at 3.2% YoY.

If a typical American believes their eyes over the economists and focuses on housing, they will view inflation as being close to zero.

Nope.

Pretty much any measure of inflation is coming down at the moment, and is approaching normal levels. And most importantly, wages are rising even faster.

Cole_Phelps_Doubt.png

This is a weird thing to say because most people already own houses and they're financed through long-term fixed rate mortgages so when house prices go up they're happy and when interest rates increase it doesn't affect them. There is the so called mortgage lock-in effect but this is quantitatively small when compared to the former things (most people don't move that much anyway).

Anyway people who think house prices are too high should be complaining about local zoning laws that restrict supply, not Joe Biden.

One of the real problems with the US' inflation calculation is the largest factor is housing costs and the main input on them is a survey of homeowners asked to estimate what their home would cost if rented. As you may imagine homeowners are generally very poorly informed about the pricing of rentals because they are very far removed from the market.

The last time I rented was was more than a decade ago, and I rented a small apartment, I have no idea what it would cost to rent my home.

If you asked me that, I'd look for comps. As it happens, I looked up rental houses in my town recently. There are two for rent, and neither is similar to mine. So yeah, how the heck should I know?

How much of the market is first-time homebuyers? I figured demand might be up given

  1. the last couple years being (perceived as) a bad time to buy
  2. Cost of living pushing people to downsize
  3. COVID factors like remote work pushing people to move

But when I check total sales it looks like we’re at 2010 lows, so maybe you’re onto something.

It certainly doesn’t feel like a tight market here in Texas. My coworkers are reporting chaos, a dozen offers on the first day, racing to outbid each other with starting offers. It sounds like hell.

The housing market is currently irrational with median home prices outpacing median income for the first time since, well, ever. Certain markets are more insane than others. The median home price in Idaho is now $469,000 while median income in a dual-income family is just under $70,000 before taxes. Assuming a 20% down-payment of ~$100,000, the monthly mortgage payment would be $3,538, roughly 60% of the take-home for the median household. Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado are all fairly similar in terms of median home price outstripping the ability of the locals to purchase. Meanwhile, the southeastern US is pretty stable with low prices and reasonable overturn in inventory.

Texas is somewhere in the middle from what I've seen. Houston and DFW area both have lower home prices compared to some of the really inflated markets in the west, but not as low as the rest of the southeast. It wouldn't surprise me to know that many of the Cali/NE corridor transplants are currently driving up the market in Texas like they did in the mountain west during COVID.

Thing is even if you're locked in on your mortgage, if the cost of repairs and maintenance, insurance, utilities, and possibly taxes get bumped up you're still on the hook.

So yes, happy you can keep paying a relatively low payment on an asset that appreciates, but keeping that asset in good repair is still becoming more burdensome.

Yes, I understand that the claim is that the cost of financing a house doubling actually doesn't matter much. My claim is that people actually do notice such things and it causes them to downgrade their opinion of the state of the economy, even if the experts tell them otherwise.

Though real, it's hard to credit this effect for the entire partisan gap. 95% of Republicans aren't young urbanites being drained by high rental costs.

I see. I 100% agree with you then. This is a good example where experts are right and there's a big disconnect for people. Interesting why it breaks down so strongly on partisan lines though.

To be clear, we do not agree on the object level, we only agree that the experts think one thing and the consensus is the other. I think the experts are lying through their teeth and it's very obvious, but I acknowledge that I understand what they're saying.

Well, experts think people’s situations are good, the consensus people have is that their own situation is good, and there’s a partisan split on whether they think others’ situations are good. There’s a little logic 101 game we can play here in identifying who is wrong about what.

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