Quote:
Originally Posted by Rain Man
I'm optimistic. The market went down when interest rates went up, so it seems logical that the opposite should happen next year. And we've essentially been at a 0 percent return on average for the past couple of years, so at some point it'll go positive.
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I think there is still a fair amount of risk in the market. I've seen some rather troubling statistics on consumer debt, especially in the lower income individuals in the country that is pretty horrifying. Maybe it's nothing, maybe it's something that can cascade. I'm not educated enough to know.
I think there are major structural issues in real estate. I know there has been a lot of real estate bought on leverage, REITs, commercial, side hustles pushed by YouTube Finance bros, etc, and the numbers just don't work at 9% interest. Anywhere. Maybe it's no more than normal, maybe it's a swath of commercial real estate that is vastly under capitalized.
The other thing that is worrisome, and will remain for awhile is that I'm concerned that our society isn't good for high interest mortgages. Mortgages rates haven't been in the same universe as this since 9/11. That means there is 20 years of rates half this. I think I read it was 1995 since rates were this high. That means that nobody under 50 has ever even had the opportunity to be in the housing market in this kind of environment. And the world was far different then than now. That is a major structural change that was quite abrupt and we may not have seen all the repercussions yet.
The other thing that could make this thing get real ugly real fast is if the labor market softens. Every talking head couldn't help but crow about how the labor market was strong and there couldn't be a recession with a strong labor market. I think we've seen in Silicon Valley it doesn't take a load of layoffs to soften a labor market. That thing falls out of bed, even a little bit, I think it could have tremendous cascading results.
Obviously I hope none of that comes to pass, but those are the risks I see.