Love the A.Smith quotes. I hate how misrepresented he has been in modern monetarianist and neoliberal arguments. Although maybe his better work was always the Theory of Moral Sentiments. I don't know though, i never read it.
AusFinance
You'd have to fix this really slowly tho right? Like however many decades it took for housing to inflate to this point, you'd basically have to spend that long deflating it?
Probably that two to three decade time period, but actually deflating is risky.
I like Alan Kohler's idea that you'd spend the time equalising housing as an asset in the market. So slowly backing off the incentives on housing as an investment in the market, while increasing supply, and using the normal run of inflation in the economy to let other activities in the economy catch up in price.
Yeah, cool. I'll look into Kohlers idea further. Seems sensible and acheivable?* (*except for the fact it's probably a political mine field and voters aren't great at evaluating long term plans).
This is probably his most focused work on Australian housing. I think it was turned into a book as well.
Alan Kohler, The Great Divide Australia's Housing Mess and How to Fix It - Quarterly Essay
His podcast is good as well, he and Stephen Mayne tend to have some interesting conversations. Thompson, the other host is a great case study in everything wrong with commercial media journalists.
Neat! Thank you
When a long term trend of house price deflation occurs investors will flee the market, resulting in a massive crash.
It is basically unavoidable. So the number must go up.
This is only a problem for those who own numerous investment properties. Those people will survive. It could be bad for anyone struggling to pay a mortgage, because they no longer have the option to sell. We'll need policy to protect those people, 0 interest maybe. Also sucks for anyone planning to sell and retire on the cash. Everyone else wins big time.
Yeah, I did think about that... Does seem inevitable. I'll keep pondering haha 😆
I've always thought that the older generation should be able to sell their house and transfer the profits across to super without tax penalty (or maybe the standard 15%) . There's so many investors because there used to be a big push before super to grow your "nest egg", so understandably that generation should be supported to transition the plan.