A report from the Beacon Online in Florida. "Volusia County’s overall property values and the tax base have reached new record highs. The real estate market and the tax base are rising, despite the coronavirus pandemic. 'Hotels were hurt. Restaurants were hurt. Places were forcibly closed,' Property Appraiser Larry Bartlett said. 'Unfortunately, some of the smaller businesses closed [permanently].' While there was a slowdown in the commercial sector, he added, housing forged ahead and is still going strong. 'Thanks to residential real estate, it’s the engine that is pulling us through,' Bartlett said."

The New York Post. "Manhattan’s commercial landlords, stewards of a half-billion square feet of office floors, will be sweating out the usually restful season between Memorial Day and Labor Day, praying that the much-anticipated return to offices really happens. Compounding their anxiety are out-of-date rules for workplaces that were drafted by the state in the pandemic’s terrible early phase — and will make office return on a meaningful scale all but impossible if they’re not quickly overhauled, many major developers and property owners privately say."

"One prominent landlord who wouldn’t be named lest he antagonize notoriously vindictive Gov. Andrew Cuomo said: 'This is a nightmare for owners and for our tenants. Everyone wants to bring employees back, but the state rules make it impossible to plan for how many and how soon.'"

The Houston Chronicle in Texas. "Month after month for more than a year, Harris County postponed its foreclosure auction as the pandemic raged and unemployment soared. Tuesday morning, to the surprise of investors, homeowners and lawyers, the auction was back on."

"'Since the inventory is low, what we have here is a panic-buying situation,' said Reggie Nelson, a real estate broker who also flips and rents houses. 'They’re overpriced now.' But Lonese Herbert, who was scoping out the auction for the first time, felt differently. As a real estate agent, she could pull up what what homes being auctioned off had previously sold for. 'This last one, it said the initial purchase price was $425,000,' she said. 'And today it sold for $266,000. That’s a deal.'"

From CBC News in Canada. "It's a bit harder to qualify for a home loan as of today, as the federal government has raised the minimum financial bar that anyone applying for a mortgage must meet. Ottawa raised the level of the "stress test" for mortgages today, setting the new level at 5.25 per cent — or two full percentage points above the borrower's mortgage rate, whichever is higher. That's an increase of about half a percentage point from where it was before."

"Launched in 2017 to cool down the overheated market of the time, the stress test is a minimum threshold that anyone applying for a home loan in Canada has to meet. It doesn't make the loan itself any more expensive. Rather, it ensures anyone getting a mortgage will be able to pay it off if rates go up."

"There are already signs the market may be cooling even ahead of its implementation, says James Laird, co-founder of rate comparison website Ratehub.ca. 'That's not to say the housing market is slow, it's just slower than it was in March of this year,' he said in an interview. 'Regardless of this rule change, March 2021 is probably going to be the peak.'"

The Edmonton Sun. "Canada’s real estate market has gone through the looking glass. It’s so impossibly hot that some Canadians are now in favour of using higher interest rates as a means of cooling housing demand and limiting the out-of-control price growth that’s driving buyers from the market in droves."

"That’s the key takeaway from a new Nanos/Bloomberg poll, which found that 49 per cent of those surveyed either 'support' or 'somewhat support' the Bank of Canada increasing interest rates as a means of capping housing prices. 'Even though there is no consensus, the fact that 1 in 2 Canadians is good with a rate hike speaks to the appetite to cool down a hot housing market,' says Nanos Research chairman Nik Nanos."

"But you can’t raise the overnight rate and affect homebuyers alone. When the overnight rate shifts upward, so does the prime rate commercial banks charge their customers. That would mean higher rates on any variable-rate loan you might carry, like a personal loan or a line of credit. The Bank of Canada has the power to influence the housing market by sharply raising rates, but no mandate to do that, BMO chief economist Douglas Porter points out."

"'Their remit is to control inflation more broadly, so they have to aim their policy at the whole economy, not just housing,' he says, adding that the only case he can recall of the BoC aiming policy at housing alone was in the late 1980s, when the Greater Toronto Area market was burning up. 'The BoC was cranking interest rates to control it. But that ended up wounding the entire economy,' says Porter."

"David Fleming, an agent with Bosley Real Estate in Toronto, says using a juiced-up overnight rate to control housing prices is 'one of the most bizarre ideas' he’s ever heard. 'They have no idea what they’re talking about,' Fleming says of the Nanos survey takers. 'How many of them understand that if interest rates went up, it would have a massive effect on the Canadian economy? Or that if rates went up, these (people) would have a harder time buying because they would qualify for less?'"

"Rather than hoping policymakers could concoct a recipe for price relief that wouldn’t poison the entire economy, buyers should look at what they can do proactively to improve their chances of landing a mortgage and buying a home, says Century 21’s Sarah J. Stevens in Barrie, Ontario."

"'Start with you,' Stevens says. 'Can you make a change to drive your income, or purchase a house in a different way, like with another person, or by buying a home with a rental component? If you want to buy a house and don’t have the money, you have to ask yourself, ‘How am I going to do it?’ You don’t need to look to a governing body.'"

"It may not change anything, but Fleming says homebuyers have their reasons for barking up the wrong treehouse. 'You have to cling to something if you don’t want to accept reality,' he says. Reality, in this case, is a market that’s moving too fast for the average Canadian to keep up with."

The Guardian. "Like all plagues, Covid often felt like the hand of God on earth, scourging the people for their sins against higher learning and visibly sorting the righteous from the unmasked wicked. 'Respect science,' admonished our yard signs. And lo!, Covid came and forced us to do so, elevating our scientists to the highest seats of social authority, from where they banned assembly, commerce, and all the rest."

"We cast blame so innocently in those days. We scolded at will. We knew who was right and we shook our heads to behold those in the wrong playing in their swimming pools and on the beach. It made perfect sense to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not grasp the situation. Reality itself punished leaders like him who refused to bow to expertise. The prestige news media even figured out a way to blame the worst death tolls on a system of organized ignorance they called 'populism.'"

"But these days the consensus doesn’t consense quite as well as it used to. Now the media is filled with disturbing stories suggesting that Covid might have come — not from 'populism' at all, but from a laboratory screw-up in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this?"

"My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month; a few weeks later everyone from Doctor Fauci to President Biden is acknowledging that the lab-accident hypothesis might have some merit. We don’t know the real answer yet, and we probably will never know, but this is the moment to anticipate what such a finding might ultimately mean. What if this crazy story turns out to be true?"

"The answer is that this is the kind of thing that could obliterate the faith of millions. The last global disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, smashed people’s trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the New Economy, and eventually in the elites who ran both American political parties."

"In the years since (and for complicated reasons), liberal leaders have labored to remake themselves into defenders of professional rectitude and established legitimacy in nearly every field. In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a sort of cult out of science, expertise, the university system, executive-branch 'norms,' the 'intelligence community,' the State Department, NGOs, the legacy news media, and the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general."

"Now here we are in the waning days of Disastrous Global Crisis #2. Covid is of course worse by many orders of magnitude than the mortgage meltdown — it has killed millions and ruined lives and disrupted the world economy far more extensively. Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger."

"There are strong hints that some of the bat-virus research at the Wuhan lab was funded in part by the American national-medical establishment — which is to say, the lab-leak hypothesis doesn’t implicate China alone. There seem to have been astonishing conflicts of interest among the people assigned to get to the bottom of it all, and (as we know from Enron and the housing bubble) conflicts of interest are always what trip up the well-credentialed professionals whom liberals insist we must all heed, honor, and obey."

"The news media, in its zealous policing of the boundaries of the permissible, insisted that Russiagate was ever so true but that the lab-leak hypothesis was false false false, and woe unto anyone who dared disagree. Reporters gulped down whatever line was most flattering to the experts they were quoting and then insisted that it was 100% right and absolutely incontrovertible — that anything else was only unhinged Trumpist folly, that democracy dies when unbelievers get to speak, and so on."

"The social media monopolies actually censored posts about the lab-leak hypothesis. Of course they did! Because we’re at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to the true and correct faith — as agreed upon by experts."

"If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way."

"Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are 'too big to fail,' mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them."