Money Talks: Why house prices are so stubbornly high
Money Talks from The Economist
The Economist
4.4 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2023
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Housing in America has never been this unaffordable. The pandemic set off skyrocketing prices; then the Fed began to rapidly increase interest rates, pushing up borrowing costs. Many predicted this might result in a crash. But after dropping 10% from all-time highs, home prices in America are picking up again. What is going on?
On this week’s podcast, hosts Alice Fulwood, Tom Lee-Devlin and Mike Bird ask if anything can take the heat out of the American housing market. Skylar Olsen, chief economist at property app Zillow, tells them that interest rate rises have added $800 a month to the typical American household’s mortgage bill. And Domonic Purviance from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta explains how central bankers are thinking about the impact on the affordability of those loans.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Finance doesn't need to be disrupted. |
| 0:03.0 | It means people who see the potential for progress, |
| 0:06.0 | like faster payments, more transparency, and new ways to meet compliance, |
| 0:11.0 | so that finance can move at the speed of business. |
| 0:15.0 | This is what our blockchain solutions deliver for financial institutions, |
| 0:19.0 | enterprises and central banks around the world. |
| 0:22.0 | Progress is a choice, and it's one you can make right now. |
| 0:26.0 | Ripple, crypto means business. |
| 0:32.0 | The American housing market has long been volatile. |
| 0:36.0 | But when the pandemic hit, it went mad. |
| 0:39.0 | So March is where things started to go ahead and get pretty insane. |
| 0:44.0 | Nicole Nickel is a Florida Realtor based in Orlando. |
| 0:47.0 | She saw demand for houses go through the roof. |
| 0:50.0 | People purchase homes without even seeing them in person. |
| 0:55.0 | Doing the entire transaction online, I had never seen that before. |
| 0:59.0 | And you were having 40 offers at one time less than 24 hours. |
| 1:04.0 | Lockdowns and new home working patterns were leading Americans |
| 1:08.0 | to reassess how and where they lived. |
| 1:11.0 | There was a rush to upsticks and move. |
| 1:14.0 | Competition for housing in Florida was so fierce that people were buying any property |
| 1:17.0 | they could get their hands on. |
| 1:19.0 | They didn't care. |
... |
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