Post 349: Mortgage Burdened Youth and the Illusion of Prosperity

• The price of weight-loss drugs is plummeting.
• Used luxury watches are a multibillion dollar business.
  • And so are fakes.
• TV watching via streaming has taken over.
  • And YouTube leads the way.
• The percentage of American homeowners with a mortgage has been declining.
  • But is due to a generational divide with the next generation’s monumental mortgage debt funding the retirement of mortgage-free Boomers.
• Audiobooks are becoming increasingly popular.
• A look at housing supply and how the US, Canada, the UK and Australia rank far below Italy and France.
  • Cue housing affordability crisis.
• In Financial Ructions
  • U.S. corporate bankruptcies are the highest in 15 years.
    • Higher interest rates are slowly squeezing the economy.
  • The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in the U.S. has been above 6% for three years.
    • And the spread vs. the 10-Year Treasury yield jumped higher the last few years.
      • That’s what happens when the Fed stops buying trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities.
• We start a new book review: Depression, War and Cold War by Robert Higgs.
  • We see that no, the U.S. economy did not thrive during World War II
  • And how it was the threat to property rights and the resulting plummeting of private investment that prolonged the Great Depression.
    • It was only once the war ended and the government drastically cut spending that the economy took off.