“Isn’t home ownership a crucial cog to any healthy economy? Well, as Germany shows—and Gershwin wrote—it ain’t necessarily so.”
– Most Germans don’t buy their homes, they rent. Here’s why.
On the NASDAQ, the peak of the real estate bubble in late 2007 was about $2,800. When the bubble popped, the index lost 50% of it’s value.
At the current rate of market rise, we are on track to double the total value of the pre-bubble peak market midway into the next year, exceeding $5,000 on the index.
The only time the index, in the entirety of history, broke $5,000 was the late 90s/early 00s tech bubble, after which the index lost 80% of its value.
What’s the difference between the tech bubble then and the bubble now? The tech crash hurt a narrow piece of the market, its effect was proportionate on the industry causing it (visible in the DJ Industrial Index). The same was not true of the real estate crash which, because it was caused by heavy leverage in the banking systems, caused crunch across the board.
The DJI lost a little more than one quarter of its value in the dot-com crash. In the real-estate crisis it lost about half. It too has more than doubled since the late 00s.
Now imagine the bubble we are in now, the largest rise since 2000, having the same crash, but one in which not just the bad actors see their stock drop 80%, but the entire market.
Why think about this now? When I was born in 1987 the NASDAQ Composite was at ~$455. As of this month, it’s broken $4,555. A 1000% rise.
More data on student debt and home ownership:
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, tireless chroniclers of the growth and impact of student debt, released new data this week showing that 30-year-olds with student debt are still less likely to have mortgage debt than 30-year-olds without.
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