I will explain why we are not just heading for possibly the biggest housing crash in history but maybe the biggest economic crash most of us will ever experience.
Please excuse the long post.
This bubble that has been created in the last 2 years has been from Pent-up demand, low-interest rates, government support for the housing market, a dangerous and misleading rationale that property is a hedge against inflation, and a long and seemingly unending bull market, have made property seem like a sure bet.
This inflation monster is here to stay and won't be going away anytime soon.. The CPi is supposed to be 9% and I think most of us know it is at least 2 times higher. The BOE is now admitting it is not transitory and is playing catchup, I can tell you now interest rates will go through the roof so ignore what you read in the mainstream media. Also, you have to take into account all of the supply chain problems which are not going to be resolved anytime soon. This is why we have to start looking at the bigger picture and the wider economy. With rampant inflation, I really don’t see any way out of this one as we can’t just flick a switch and turn inflation off. There is a bad choice and a worse choice. The bad choice is to fight inflation and let interest rates go up so everything will collapse. The worse choice is to continue to create inflation to avoid that and postpone to consequences of hyperinflation. It looks like we are already heading towards stagflation, high inflation, high unemployment and a deep recession. Governments worldwide have been printing all this money and telling people to stay at home so we weren’t producing any goods or being productive. We have been dealing with much higher than expected inflation numbers long before Putin invaded Ukraine and inflation isn’t transitory running record budget deficits. Countries were flooded with money which people have been spending. All of these sanctions are also pushing inflation much higher.
In this year alone we will see many firms making cuts to jobs and we already see this happening due to consumers cutting back on spending. Businesses are now suffering and they are now seeing their turnovers drop drastically. The stock market is having its worse start a year since 1939. We are seeing so much volatility.
House prices have now hit their peak as for April growth was 0.3% which is a big drop if you compare to previous months of this year. Expect house prices to decline, although this will vary depending on where you live. Within the next 2 years we will see a housing crash like nothing before. All of this pent up demand we have seen during the pandemic will evaporate. You can forget the supply and demand argument because the economy is going to take a real significant downturn.
Unfortunately, all of this money that was printed during the pandemic which has created these artificial markets will be coming back to bite us all really hard. We are just at the beginning of a very long bumpy road.