“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small parcel of land.” - Abraham Lincoln

Land Banking: This is how it works
Apartment developer billionaire Harry Triguboff, Australia's 2nd wealthiest man, as of 2011, was surprisingly candid at a lunch held by the American Chamber of Commerce in Oct 2011.

Triguboff told the audience he was able to pay “very little tax”...
“I keep a lot of my properties.
And if you keep them and there’s capital gain it’s beautiful,” he said. “You don’t pay tax. I don’t lease them so I don’t pay tax on the rent, but I get depreciation.” He paid tax on apartment sales but that’s where the land banking came in: “You have to buy lots of empty land,” he said. “You keep the land and it brings you no income, so you claim it against your tax.”
Source: Financial Review, 07 July, 2012.
(That article disappeared from the Financial Review as of mid-2016, but Leith van Onselen, at Macrobusiness, has shared a review here.)

Banks tranfer title deed:
Banks claim it isn’t their fault that they lost their 'business income' - their monthly mortgage payments - due to foreclosure.
"They go through the legal process of getting the borrower off the title to the property and putting themselves on the title deed as the owner of the property" – Domnique Grubisa, Sept. 2020

In the lead-up to the 2007/8 GFC, in the US, Investment Bankers created a national crisis by gambling and loosing depositors savings due to the Stock Market Crash of August 2007. Consequently, US Treasury Secretary, 2006-2009, Henry "Hank" Paulson, (former Goldman Sachs CEO/Chairman), and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernake held secret meetings with Government regulators to negotiate federal intervention - to be “bailed out" by taxpayers.

Closing line from the 2015 movie, The Big Short,
referring to 2008/9 US government bank bailout:
"Paulson and Bernanke just left the Whitehouse.
There's going to be a bail-out. They knew.
They knew the taxpayers would bail them out.
They weren't being stupid. They just didn't care."

When it comes to 'following' Real Estate and Banking "Boom-Bust" Cycles, Australian economist Philip J. Anderson, author of the "The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking" (2009), is a key expert on 'investment portfolios' and their history.

“Real estate is sold as a much safer investment than the constantly fluctuating stock market. Share price volatility is compared unfavourably with the steadier and impressive gains made from real estate which is, we are told, 'as safe as houses'. As millions of Americans – and countless others in the Western world - have recently found to their cost, house prices can also suddenly and dramatically drop. Yet no other text on real estate, either current or from the past, mentions this fact, reinforcing the perception that real estate is an almost risk-free investment.” – Phillip J. Anderson, (2009) "The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking"

See Phil Anderson's 2020 commentary:
"Your Citizen’s Dividend: No Taxes, No Government and No Paid Politicians"
(Free eBook - pdf)
"You’ve probably been taught that nations cannot function without government.
It’s OK. We were all taught that. But it’s a lie. In fact, eliminating the need for governments, all taxes and our paid politicians, is really simple to do."

"Housing is a cost of living to wage earners. All outgoings associated with housing, including land taxes, are an attack on their cost of living."
- Raymond Makewell, The Science of Economics, 2012
"...governments use the tax system to milk the poor. Why do they do it? To enrich people who own land." – Fred Harrison, Ricardo's Law, 2006

It would be easy to end 'investment' in real estate via taxation policy:
"Buying a house should be as easy as waking up in the morning and making a cup of tea." - John Tippett, A Philosophers Take on Economics, 2013

Investment strategist:
Preparing for The Next "Great Recession" - in Australia
"Covid-19 will have an unpredicted impact!"
On 18 March 2021, we heard from Roger Montgomery, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Montgomery Investment Management, Australia:
"Why I Think House Prices Will Keep Going UP"
This is what he said, in full-followed by selected readers comments:

“Australia is in the grip of its biggest property price boom in more than a decade. The boom is motivated in no small part by a fear of missing out. But there are also other important factors at play, leading me to believe that this trend could continue for some time.
Last year I outlined my bullish thesis for Australian property: cheap rates, a lack of stock and COVID losing its grip on the economy. But these all pale into insignificance compared to the impact of the easing of credit by banks if the government’s legislation relaxing responsible lending rules goes through.”

Three Comments on Roger Montgomery post:
1.
These trillions of fiscal dollars are quite different to the FED QE that only increased bank reserves. This is real money from nothing pumped into the community. The bond traders are onto it. I would not be so sanguine about interest rates.
2.
I think the last point on post covid migration will see this boom continue for many years to come…….50 year loans are just around the corner, that in my opinion, is one of the only ways (unfortunately) that our kids and grandkids will be able to afford to pay a mortgage into the future……
the bust, which will come eventually will be horrific!!!!
3.
A little off topic but recently my neighbours property sold by auction. As per normal operating procedure, the agent’s estimated guide wasn’t in the same solar system as the eventual sale price. Anyway, surely someone is working on disrupting this industry. How can they charge close to $70,000 to unlock a door 4 times? The wage increase of the beloved real estate agent must be 20% per year. I look forward to the day that the cost of selling a house isn’t so prohibitive.
To which, Roger Montgomery replied: "if the strong real estate prices persist there will be another agent ‘oversupply’ and most will be competing again for business."

The 2007/8 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), stock market crash, should come as no surprise to history buffs. Philip J. Anderson shares an illuminating analysis of real estate bubbles through U.S. history.

"A study of US history reveals a very clear (average) eighteen-year cycle in US real estate prices, measured from trough to trough or peak to peak." – Phillip J. Anderson, The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking, 2009.

"The world’s worst downturns are always preceded by land speculation (the chasing of the economic rent) fuelled by misguided credit creation courtesy of the banks." – Phillip J. Anderson, 2012

The U.S. federal government began selling off land in the year 1800.
"Since the 1800s, there have been peaks and valleys of land sales and speculation roughly every 18 years.
" - The Complete History Of US Real Estate Bubbles Since 1800. - Eric Goldschein, Buisness Insider, January 2012

“For the first 144 years of real estate enclosure in the U.S., land sales and/or real estate construction peaked almost consistently, every 18 years,” Anderson writes. “The world’s worst downturns are always preceded by land speculation (the chasing of the economic rent) fuelled by misguided credit creation courtesy of the banks.”
... "Rewind to the first major boom-and-bust, in 1837. The stock market peaked just prior to the bust, a trend we recognize in our own era. >>>more

"The financial sector has succeeded in depicting itself as part of the productive economy, yet for centuries banking was recognized as being parasitic. The essence of parasitism is not only to drain the host’s nourishment, but also to dull the host’s brain so that it does not recognize that the parasite is there. This is the illusion that much of Europe and the United States suffer under today. The aim of this book is to pierce this illusion and replace junk economics with economics based on reality. In Killing the Host, Michael Hudson argues that financial crises will continue unless we radically transform our economic and political structures, and reclaim the best ideas of classical economics."

KILLING THE HOST exposes how finance, insurance, and real estate (the FIRE sector) have gained control of the global economy at the expense of industrial capitalism and governments.

The FIRE sector is responsible for today’s economic polarization (the 1% vs. the 99%) via favored tax status that inflates real estate prices while deflating the “real” economy of labor and production.

The Great 2008 Bailout saved the banks but not the economy, and plunged the U.S., Irish, Latvian and Greek economies into debt deflation and austerity.

This book describes how the phenomenon of debt deflation imposes austerity on the U.S. and European economies, siphoning wealth and income upward to the financial sector while impoverishing the middle class.

Interview:
How Finance Behaves like a Parasite Toward the Economy
In his June 2015 report, Professor Michael Hudson explained financial parasitism.
Excerpt:

Michael Hudson: Economists for the last 50 years have used the term “host economy” for a country that lets in foreign investment. This term appears in most mainstream textbooks. A host implies a parasite. The term parasitism has been applied to finance by Martin Luther and others, but usually in the sense that you just talked about: simply taking something from the host.

But that’s not how biological parasites work in nature. Biological parasitism is more complex, and precisely for that reason it’s a better and more sophisticated metaphor for economics. The key is how a parasite takes over a host. It has enzymes that numb the host’s nervous system and brain. So if it stings or gets its claws into it, there’s a soporific anesthetic to block the host from realizing that it’s being taken over. Then the parasite sends enzymes into the brain. A parasite cannot take anything from the host unless it takes over the brain.

The brain in modern economies is the government, the educational system, and the way that governments and societies make their economic policy models of how to behave. In nature, the parasite makes the host think that the free rider, the parasite, is its baby, part of its body, to convince the host actually to protect the parasite over itself.

That’s how the financial sector has taken over the economy. ... >>>more

20 Dec. 2020
The Law of Rent - Classical Political Economic solutions
What is Rent Seeking? A Hard Look at Rent and Rent Seeking
with Professor Michael Hudson and International journalist Pepe Escobar
An interactive discussion on wealth inequality and the “Great Game” on the control of natural resources. In this webinar, Michael Hudson and Pepe Escobar unpack one of the most destructive features of our economic system and the many different ways it drives wealth inequality.
They also focus on China – US relations and their understanding of the “Great Game” regarding control of the world’s resources.

Overview:
Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States...
Doors Wide Open
Corruption and Real Estate in Four Key Markets
Author: Maíra Martini
Project coordinator: Maggie Murphy
January 2017
Transparency.org

The Problem:
How the Corrupt Purchase Luxury Real Estate in Key Markets
Problem 1. Inadequate coverage of anti-money laundering provisions
Problem 2. Identification of the beneficial owner of legal entities, trusts and
other legal arrangements is still not the norm
Problem 3. Foreign companies have access to the real estate market
with few requirements or checks
Problem 4. Over-reliance on due diligence checks by financial institutions
leads to cash transactions going unnoticed
Problem 5. Insufficient rules on suspicious transaction reports and weak
implementation
Problem 6. Weak or no checks on politically exposed persons and their associates
Problem 7. Limited control over professionals who can engage in real
estate transactions: no “fit and proper” test
Problem 8. Limited understanding of and action on money
laundering risks in the sector
Problem 9. Inconsistent supervision
Problem 10. Lack of sanctions

Executive Summary
The real estate market has long provided a way for individuals to secretly launder or invest stolen money and other illicitly gained funds. Not only do expensive apartments in New York, London or Paris raise the social status of their owners and enhance their luxurious lifestyles, but they are also an easy and convenient place to hide hundreds of millions of dollars from criminal investigators, tax authorities or others tracking criminal behaviour and the proceeds of crime. According to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), real estate accounted for up to 30 per cent of criminal assets confiscated worldwide between 2011 a nd 2013.1

Several cases that have come to light in the past year, including the trial of Teodoro Obiang, son of the president of Equatorial Guinea;2 Malaysia’s 1MDB scandal;3 the Brazilian Car Wash Operation;4 and the Panama Papers’ revelations,5 offer examples of how high-end property in key markets may have been used to launder money. In many such cases, property is purchased through anonymous shell companies or trusts without undergoing proper due diligence by the professionals involved in the deal.

The ease with which such anonymous companies or trusts can acquire property and launder money is directly related to the insufficient rules and enforcement practices in attractive markets. The countries analysed in this study – Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States – have committed in different forums, such as through the FATF and the Group of 20 (G20), to do more to prevent and curb money laundering and terrorist-financing, including by regulating gatekeepers, such as real estate agents, lawyers and accountants, who may act as facilitators in transactions that can enable money laundering.

This report identifies the main problems related to real estate and money laundering in these four countries and finds that, despite international commitments, current rules and practices are inadequate to mitigate the risks and detect money laundering in the real estate sector. >>> more

Century of research on property cycles: a literature review
Arvydas Jadevicius, Brian Sloan and Andrew Brown, School of Engineering and the Built Environment, Edinburgh Napier University
International Journal of Strategic Property Management, 2017, Vol21/2
- Taylor and Francis
- Academia.edu pdf

"Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time" - Coehlo (1999, p.164)

INTRODUCTION
The literature concerning business fluctuations reveals that there is a disagreement between classical and modern business cycle researchers on how regular business cycles are. According to Reiter and Woitek (1999), classical economists such as Moore (1914) and Kitchin (1923) saw business fluctuations as genuine cycles, i.e. recurrent phenomenon with typical characteristics. Conversely, modern macroeconomists including Zarnowitz (1992), Solomou (1998) and Dudukovic (2007) identify business cycles as a sequence of irregular fluctuations with no cyclical pattern. Dudukovic (2007) argues the term “cycle” is rather misleading, whereas business fluctuations do not tend to repeat at the regular time periods.As her evidences suggest, the length of business cycles, measured either from peak to peak, or trough to trough, vary substantially, implying that cycles are not mechanical in their regularity. Maddison (1991) and Solomou (1998) expressed similar views by stating that the average duration and other defining features of the business cycles have apparently changed over time. In the UK, these features changed notably after the 1970s, compared with the “golden age” between the 1950s and 1960s. Consequently, this variance of views and facts led macroeconomists, including Solomou (1998) and de Groot (2006), to hypothesise that over the years various types of cycles have been developed.The aim of this review is to explore the mechanics and rationale behind these cycles and thus argue the importance of the subject. The paper assesses what research methods, data and data analysis techniques were employed by researchers, and what were outcomes of these studies.

It is considered that a greater awareness of the various types of cycles discussed herein could be useful for both the private and public sector in assessing various economic issues. . . >>>more

Part 2
Learning from history: The Kondratieff Wave explained
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1. KONDRATIEFF WAVES: Dimensions and Prospects at the Dawn of the 21st Century (2012) pdf Editors: Leonid Grinin (Russia), Tessaleno Devezas (Portugal), Andrey Korotayev (Russia) Excerpt “there is a category of scientists that leave after them a mystery that many others try to solve for many years, decades, or even centuries afterwards. For two thousand years mathematicians tried to prove the Fifth Postulate of Euclid. For three hundred years they were haunted by Fermat's Last Theorem. There are a number of such examples. And the persistence demonstrated by scientists is not coincidental, for the discovery of the mysteries of harmony, be in nature or in the social life is the main goal of science. The Russian economist Nikolay Dmitrievich Kondratieff left after him a mystery that has been haunting economists and social scientists for almost a hundred years. Joseph Schumpeter named this mystery ‘Kondratieff Cycles’. Why do we observe such regularity in long-term fluctuations of economic and non-economic indicators?” >>> more 2. Mager, N.H. (1987). The Kondratiev Waves, New York: Greenwood Press. Excerpt: p. 27 Russian agricultural economist Nikolai Dimitrijevic Kondratieff (1892-1938) observed large-scale wave-like perturbations, lasting about half a century, across global socioeconomics. Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) gave the Kondratieff Wave its name, the ‘K-Wave’. In Kondratiev’s Paper on the Notion of Economic Statics, Dynamics and Fluctuations, published in 1924, Kondratiev’s conclusions were as follows. 1. Prosperity years were most common in the capitalist economies during upswing periods. 2. Agriculture suffered more and long depressions than did industry during price downswings 3. Major technological innovations were conceived in downswing periods but were developed in upswing periods 4. Gold supply increased, and new markets were opened at the beginning of an upswing 5. The most extensive and devastating wars occurred during periods of an upswing. – 3. In 2001, Australian Taxation Office (ATO) Land Valuer Bryan Kavanagh made the case that short term interest rate cuts feed directly into higher and higher land prices and ever-escalating mortgages. Follow his BLOG. The Coming Kondratieff Crash Rent-seeking, income distribution & the business cycle by Bryan Kavanagh Geophilos, Autumn 2001, No. 01(2), pages 84-93 (pdf) Excerpt: NIKOLAI KONDRATIEFF (1892-1938?) was a senior economist in the Agricultural Academy and Business Research Institute under the regime of Joseph Stalin. His empirical analyses suggested that economic depressions occurred at relatively regular intervals. He considered 36 price, value and quantity series, including wholesale prices, interest rates, wages, foreign trade, industrial productivity and commodity prices since 1789 for the US, UK, France and Germany. Smoothing deviations from the trend in these data, he concluded thateconomies displayed long-wave cycles of between 54 and 60 years in duration. Tragically, Kondratieff’s study apparently fell short of Stalin’s expectations. He was convicted of being a member of a secret peasants’ society and exiled in 1930 to imprisonment in Siberia, where he is said to have died. Kondratieff did not attempt to give an explanation of the causality of the depressions determining the period of the longwave. He had shown only the approximate periodicity of the long-wave. Bryan Kavanagh argues that Henry George provided an explanation for economic depressions before Kondratieff demonstrated their approximate timing, and he explains why Australia, which is rich in the relevant real estate data, may be taken as a proxy for other industrialised nations when testing the current long-wave cycle. >>>more

Part 3
Australia
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Since 2016, Australian banks have been offering low-interest on 2 or 3-year fixed interest mortgages. As of 2021, banks are offering 1.75% on 3 year fixed rates.

EG, bank small print: After your Fixed Rate period ends, the applicable interest rate will be the variable Principal & Interest rate we offer on similar facilities at the time. Currently this is 2.34% p.a. for Owner Occupier loans and 2.74% p.a. for Investor loans. Rates, repayments and interest charges are indicative only and subject to change.

That's the big trap - proof that the NEXT "18.6-year Real Estate and Banking Boom-Bust Cycle" is still 'turning'. Historical formula suggests, with variations, an approximate "14 years to the top and 6 years to the crash"
14 years since 2007/8 = 2021/3 - the 'Turning'.
We're on the way to the next crash, predicted for 2026/7.
There's uncertainty regarding the impacts of the Covid-19 'catastrophe'
- unlike the consequences of the 9/11 'catastrophe'.

- What Is the Federal Funds Rate?
- Historical mortgage rates: 1971 to 2020
- A Crash Course in Pre-foreclosure Sale and Short Sales, 2020

The Global Financial Collapse (GFC) 2007-2008
January 2008: Australia's newly elected Labor Party Treasurer Wayne Swan revealed, on page 2 of his autobiography (2014), that US Treasurer Paulson telephoned him during the week he took office, in January 2008, to recommend he keep the real estate market 'UP'. Swan went on to launch the 'open door' policy for wealthy property investors; The Minerals Council of AU 'protected' the mining industry boom, while 'offshore' tax evasion continued.

Meanwhile, PM Kevin Rudd, a Mandarin speaker, encouraged trade with China:
PM Rudd's 2008 directive to Treasury Director Ken Henry led to "Australia's Future Tax System" 2010, aka "The Henry Review" and the Reserve Bank of Australia continues to protect "Depositors in authorised deposit-taking institutions (ADIs). See also Dr. Steven Kennedy: Australia's response to the global financial crisis, 2009.

Unlocking the Riches of Oz
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Before the 2008 GFC, several warnings were issued by Australian Taxation Office (ATO) (Ret) Land Valuer and author Unlocking the Riches of Oz (2007), Bryan Kavanagh - is still 'following the cycles': Follow his BLOG.


"Although the facts are quite clear, economists sidestep this analysis, claiming that real estate bubbles are a factor of the under supply of land. Inadequate suitably zoned land explains these bubbles, they say, but they have no explanation for what caused land price bubbles before town planning and zoning came into existence, not all that long ago." - Bryan Kavanagh

YouTube:
(with Subtitles)
2005 Forecast of Global Financial Collapse
ATO Land Valuer Bryan Kavanagh, introduced by the Hon. Brian Howe AO, at Melbourne University, 2 August 2005, demonstrating why the world was about to experience financial collapse.

In May of 2007, Bryan Kavanagh published the results of his study on the long-term effects of property bubbles: Unlocking the Riches of Oz: A Case Study of the Social and Economic Costs of Australian Real Estate Bubbles, 1972-2006 (2007).  Download the report here (pdf). Synopsis: This report collates Australia’s real estate sales since 1972 to create ‘The Barometer of the Economy’. As the barometer demonstrates a delayed inverse relationship between property bubbles and the economy, we investigate the extent of Australia’s publicly-generated natural resource rent in order to assess the scope for ‘Unlocking the Riches of Oz ’ currently suppressed by the deadweight costs of taxation. Re-calculating GDP on the assumption of the notional public capture of one half of Australia’s resource rent since 1972, we show the benefits that would flow to all Australians, the environment, housing affordability and industrial relations by reducing taxes in favour of greater reliance on resource rents to be substantial. Mr Kavanagh's findings According to Mr Kavanagh's study, collection of Resource Rent, aka Economic Rent, would allow Australia to remove all taxes on productivity, i.e. income, sales, pay roll tax – all business taxes. Mr. Kavanagh's research revealed, in May 2007, that if the government collected half of Australia's 'Resource Rent' there would be, 1. Sufficient funding for all public services and public infrastructure, including free education and health care. 2. At 2007 value, an annual tax-free surplus-based 'Citizen Dividend' aka a 'Universal Basic Income' of between AUD$34,000. and AUD$49,000 would replace welfare, social security, and unemployment payments. Commentaries by Bryan Kavanagh 1. Could it be that economists are ignorant of the Theory of Real Estate Valuation? Bryan Kavanagh, 2012 i.e. that the phenomenon of land price is simply the capitalisation of its net annual rent? And, therefore, greater public capture of land rent via municipal rates and state land tax would keep the lid on recurrent land price bubbles? [...] The utter economic stupidity, hidden not only by neo-classical economists but also by the crass diversions in Australian political life, could of course be rectified by putting into place the recommendations of Ken Henry’s inquiry into the Australian tax system. See full report, including illlustrative graphs HERE. 2. Property Bubble Leads to Crash Landing by Bryan Kavanagh Featured in Business Age and The Sydney Morning Herald Friday, March 28th, 2008  Excerpt: Here is an unyielding truth. A country cannot go into recession unless there has been a real estate bubble. US land economist Homer Hoyt documented the fact back at the beginning of the 19th century. The Land Values Research Group recently defined and studied the effects of property bubbles in Unlocking the Riches of Oz: A Case Study of the Social and Economic Costs of Real Estate Bubbles, 1972 to 2006, which is freely available at www.lvrg.org.au. It concludes that the current residential bubble has hyper-inflated since 1999 and is about to burst, despite sophisticated financial derivatives, hedge funds, collateralised debt obligations, credit default swaps, all brought into existence to “insure” that it not burst. The failure of derivatives will compound the upcoming financial threat. >>>more

Land Value Research Group
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Bryan Kavanagh contributed key research
under the auspice of the Land Value Research Group
Founded in 1943, the LVRG published world-leading empirical studies demonstrating that site-value rating —that is, the imposition of municipal Rates on land values alone, exempting the values of buildings —is more conducive to economic growth than alternative systems that include buildings in the tax base. Expressed in qualitative terms, that conclusion should be obvious: taxing buildings deters construction and consequently impedes the industries that lie upstream or downstream of construction or require accommodation for workplaces and workers —in other words, it impedes the whole local economy —whereas taxing the value of land cannot reduce the supply of land, because neither the land nor its value is produced by the owner.
Excerpt:

In 1943 the Canadian land economist H. Bronson Cowan, director of the International Research Institute on Real Estate Taxation, visited Melbourne to conduct research in the municipalities of Brunswick and Camberwell. His techniques inspired a number of local professionals to form the Land Values Research Group (LVRG). Under its founding director, Allan R. Hutchinson BSc MIEAust (1907–1988), the LVRG published 37 major documents.  >>> more

Stupid Property Owners
By Dr. Gavin Putland,
Director, Land Value Research Group
January 2009
"The 'taxes' that property owners hate most are the ones that hurt them least and are most likely to be spent for their benefit." - Dr Gavin Putland

Excerpt:
Land and taxes
In any tax jurisdiction, the supply of land is fixed. From the viewpoint of the taxpayer, the supply of land zoned for any particular purpose is also fixed, as is the supply of land within acceptable distance of any particular services, infrastructure, or markets. Yet access to suitably located land is essential to economic participation. Therefore land values, expressed as rent or as interest on purchase prices, are competed upward until they absorb the economy's capacity to pay. As that capacity increases — as it usually does — so do land values [1]. That's why economic growth doesn't make housing more affordable. That's why we load ourselves with debt in order to “own” our homes as soon as possible. This much is obvious even to the unschooled; they may not know anything about economics, but they know where their money goes.

Most taxes target transactions (or the results thereof), causing otherwise viable transactions, hence otherwise viable enterprises and industries, to become unviable. In this way, most taxes take far more money out of the private sector than they deliver to the Treasury (and thence back to the private sector through public spending). The margin by which the cost to the private sector exceeds the benefit to the Treasury is what economists call the excess burden or deadweight cost of taxation. In simple terms, most taxes take more than they give.
>>> more

Part 4
United States
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Following the September 11, 2001 (9/11) catastrophe -
Banks introduced a short-term fixed interest strategy to encourage "Boomer" homeowners to re-enter the market, led by the ‘Bush-push': “Support the economy! Take a holiday! Build an extension! Buy a boat!”
Several personal friends, well-educated 'professionals’ took out a 2nd mortgage on their fully owned homes and had their mortgages ‘foreclosed’ when the
3-year fixed interest rates expired and variable rates were introduced:
Their homes were taken from them, while first-time mortgage owners lost their home and their deposit, and they had to pay foreclosure legal costs.

Looking back, from Noam Chomsky's perspective:
“Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the media” (1992)
Following the 1987 Stock Market crash, Chomsky's film credits celebrated the accumulating effects of community-based initiatives - local newsletters/papers, community radio and tv stations supporting an international popular outpouring of collaborative 'community activism'.

Withdrawal as a survival strategy

• Palliatives for cultural withdrawal
• Addiction and consumerism
• Alienation and division
• Interpretation and perception is everything.

Concepts such as Post Modernism, Consumerism, and Globalization defined cultural meanings as numerous and fragmented, rather than an homogenous construct (e.g. the American culture or the European culture). Consumer culture was viewed as a social arrangement in which the relations between lived culture and social resources, between meaningful ways of life and the symbolic and material resources on which they depend, are mediated through market.
– Arnould, E. J. (2005). Consumer culture theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research, Journal of Consumer Research

"The cost to construct a given house is roughly the same in any region or metropolitan area of the United States. Yet, in the places were economic activity is robust and population dense, the land component of a residential property can equal 50 percent or more of the purchase price of a property. This occurs because the rent of land is lightly taxed and is therefore capitalized by market forces into a selling price, a selling price driven upward by speculation, hoarding and liberal access to credit. Henry George rightly observed that the rent of land should be fully collected by society to pay for public goods and services, leaving capital goods (e.g., buildings, homes, machinery) unburdened by taxation. If this was done, he felt confident there would be no need to tax income or commerce." – Edward Dodson, economist and political scientist, and curator at The School of Cooperative Individualism.

Corruption of Economics
Professor of Economics at University of California, Riverside since 1976,
Mason Gaffney (1923-2020), co-authored (with Fred Harrison and Kris Feder) the authoritative documentation of The Corruption of Economics (1994) – a detailed history of the suppression of Classical Political Economic theorem in favour of the current neo-classical speculative system, to reveal the precise manner in which Classical Political Economic theorem was 'neutralized':

In short,
(i) economic modelling became fundamentally corrupted via blurring of the traditional distinction between capital and land and hence between earned and unearned income,
(ii) by glossing this blurred distinction with jargon and abstract models, and
(iii) by recasting economics generally to make free-riding by landowners seem just and moral.
See excerpt here.

Before the 2008 GFC
Not much fizz left in the global economy
by Stephen Roach, Chief Economist of US investment bank Morgan Stanley
Financial Times, August 14, 2006

Excerpt:
There is nothing like the seduction of a boom. The recent vigour of global economic growth is a siren song. By International Monetary Fund metrics, world gross domestic product growth probably averaged 4.8 per cent over 2003-06, the strongest four years since the early 1970s. As tempting as it is to extrapolate this into the future, that may be a serious mistake. There is a much better chance that global growth has peaked and the boom is about to fizzle.
The world’s main growth engine, the US, is slowing. That is the verdict from the labour market, with job growth in the past four months running 35 per cent below average since early 2004. It is the verdict from the housing market, where an emerging downturn in residential construction activity is knocking at least 1 percentage point off the GDP growth trend of the past three years. And, notwithstanding July’s temporary bounce-back in retail sales, it is a message from the consumer, whose inflation-adjusted spending growth fell to 2.5 per cent in the spring period – one percentage point below the heady trend of the past decade.

The US Federal Reserve is under fire - again.
CNBC Business News' Rising Risks reporter Diana Olick shares her comprehensively informative overview.

'Critics slam the Fed as home prices rise at a historic rate'
by Diana Olick
March 30, 2021
CNBC News
Can more of Australia's finance and property experts "slam" the RBA for blowing our housing bubble?
Because it's an enormous issue and systemic risk.

KEY POINTS
• Home prices nationally in January were up 11.2% year over year, according to the latest S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Index. That is the largest annual gain in nearly 15 years.
• As of last week the Federal Reserve held $2.2 trillion of agency mortgage-backed securities.
• "They've continued on autopilot. I don't think there's been any discussion within the Fed," said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Advisory Group.
Home price gains are accelerating at an alarming pace, fueled by Covid pandemic-related inflation, which some claim is not getting enough attention from the Federal Reserve.
Home prices nationally in January rose 11.2% year over year, according to the latest S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Index. That is the largest annual gain in nearly 15 years. >>>more