Comment on This Plastic Mr. Fantastic
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I do wonder, maybe there is similar scheme when it comes to housing affordability. There is too much of a coincidence that much of the Western countries are having the same housing crisis. Most ordinary Westerners are perplexed to find out other countries also have the same issue, or are surprised they can’t find a place to live when they move abroad. There is a deliberate manipulation of the housing market and misinformation. Here in Ireland, after all, foreign vulture funds outbid locals and then either rent or sell properties at extortionate price. And yet, the wrong kind of foreigners are getting blamed.
BanMe@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s because we allow property and the homes that sit on it to be a speculative market. We encourage it. The only way for property values to be high, well, it’s a supply and demand thing. If you glut the market with anything, you drive prices down. And people whose entire retirement is built on that won’t be having it, let alone the conglomerate owners…
China is trying to steer into the opposite with laws against it. Not sure how well that’s working, but they can acknowledge the issue at least.
ray@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
In the US the whole idea of owning a house as your “nest egg” that keeps growing forever in a way that you can retire with is so toxic. And then there’s also the retirement funds demanding huge returns on real estate.
prototact@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Yeah exactly, housing is used as a value storage for large players when they need to use a generic asset in between investments. It’s relatively safe but its value is passive, it is driven by the rest of the market. Plus it’s great for money laundering and bribing politicians or officials. So all this manipulation raises the prices for everyone, and most people don’t benefit from it. It’s just so greedy and abusive.
dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Furthermore, we then tie it all into the stock market and link our future pensions to that. So we can never really change the system otherwise everything will collapse.
It’s like a house of cards.