Executive Summary

• The Fed Won't Be Able To Soak Up Bad Mortgages Like It Once Did
• Chinese Capital Will Dry Up After Capital Controls Are Imposed
• The weakening petro-dollar will weaken demand for high-end housing
• The inevitable symmetry of bubbles will force a price mean-reversion

If you have not yet read Part 1: How Much Longer Can Our Unaffordable Housing Prices Last? available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we looked at factors that limit further home price appreciation—mortgage rates that can’t go much lower and stagnant household incomes—and factors that could continue to push prices higher in islands of strong job growth and global demand.

Here in Part II, we’ll look at several dynamics that could deflate the current Housing Bubble #2, even in areas currently experiencing high demand for housing such as New York City and San Francisco.

The Fed Will Encounter Political Headwinds in Pushing Money to the Wealthy

Setting aside cash buyers from overseas, a major factor in the inflation of Housing Bubble #2 was the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing programs that expanded the pool of money available to the already-wealthy while prompting very little “trickling down” of this new money to the bottom 90% of households.

The one Fed policy that aided the bottom 90% was buying $1.75 trillion of home mortgages. This unprecedented buying spree helped push mortgage rates down to equally unprecedented lows.

But as this chart shows, the Fed is no longer expanding its holdings of mortgages; it is buying enough to keep the portfolio stable, but it isn’t expanding it. This means the Fed is done with this policy; it has achieved the goal of pushing mortgage rates to historic lows, and there’s nothing more to be done.