What are your mid-year housing bubble predictions? Six months ago: "US housing price declines will continue at an accelerating rate, as investment firms who used leverage to purchase real estate near peak mania levels recognize the need to offload inventories before incurring even more massive losses than they have already."

Another said. "They’ll never get away with QE again. I think it’s been relegated to the dustbin of history. The damage was too great, too transparent, and the FED is taking enormous heat, even from virtue-signaling billionaires who benefited. Jay Powell has egg all over his face. These people have turned into a laughingstock."

And another, "1. Inflation will come down to 4 to 5% and the Fed will throw in the towel that this is the best they can do.
2. No recession. With massive gobmit spending, the GDP will be made look positive.
3. Rate cuts will start in second half. We will end at 3% FFR with 4 to 5% inflation by Dec 31.
4. Housing will stabilize. Prices will start to climb in the fall.
5. Stonks, generally up 20% from today.
6. BTC back to 50K.
7. Hunter Biden will be not see a day in jail.
8. SBF will get a light sentence of 1 to 3 yrs.
9. Biden mental decline will be so severe that you will go without seeing him on TV for weeks or months.
10. Dems will lay the massive voter fraud ops for installing Gavin Newsome and his black/latino/trans female running mate as your next overlords."

One year ago, "1. Fed stays on the interest rate escalator. They simply must. Countries (ruling classes to be more precise) can survive austerity/depressions, but massive inflation brings down governments. They will probably slow down the pace after summer but it will continue to rise. Also you can’t push on a string forever by pulling all this demand forward with 0% rates forever. Nobody invests in anything real. a. This comes as a massive surprise to BSD’s on wall street and some hedgie somewhere gets caught on the wrong side of a trade and some pretty massive dislocation happens. b. the Fed however lies about actually selling their useless MBS because nobody wants them and god forbid they actually get a fair value (cuz that too crashes everything) but they continue to run off 30year treasuries which of course brings up the long end. c. fuel prices are not going down, even with massive demand destruction. Which of course continues to fuel inflation and the recession/depression (4 quarters, which we’ll be at by Dec). Nobody is investing in new O&G production and refining when it can all be removed at the stroke of a pen. d. Lots of zombie/scam companies start to go under. This is a good thing but it’s going to be painful. Free money equals massive malinvestment. Expensive money removes those. 3. Housing prices make a massive dump in late summer but then slow their pace of falling as people freak and realize they are underwater and don’t want to/can’t sell. Housing prices are always sticky and it’s going to take time to go down. Nobody wants to lose 10 to 500k if they can. Plus if you get massively underwater (like in 2008) you just stop paying and it takes months to years for the banks to get off their butt and actually throw you out."

The Marina Times in California. "Marcus Miller, MA, founder at HELM Real Estate is optimistic. He believes the fact that Google, Apple, and Meta are insisting that employees return to the office — if only for three days a week — means more people will return to San Francisco and the Bay Area’s urban centers. As a consequence, demand for housing will only increase. 'Eventually, I know we’ll return to some level of normalcy, which means that San Francisco will recover from its current commercial vacancy and residential real estate deceleration issues,' Miller said. 'Demand for living in this world-class city will be restored, and the market will take off again — reaffirming real estate as the extraordinary finite commodity that it is when you live in a city surrounded on three sides by water.'"

Market Watch on California. "San Francisco’s reeling commercial real-estate market remains at risk of more falling 'dominoes,' according to Moody’s Analytics. Owners of San Francisco’s largest mall and two of its biggest hotels in June walked away from mortgages on their properties, putting the spotlight on a mountain of debt coming due in the city on office properties, where vacancy rates are at record highs and recent distressed sales paint a grim picture. A key concern is that 'the city is in a bit of a snowball situation which is placing its needed critical mass in question,' a Moody’s Analytics team led by Thomas LaSalvia, head of commercial real estate economics, wrote in a recent client note."

The Union Tribune in California. "A group of seven downtown businesses has filed a claim against the city of San Diego, seeking $2.5 million in damages related to the deepening homeless crisis they say has decimated their livelihoods. The businesses want San Diego officials to clean out the encampments in their neighborhood or they will consider taking the city to court. In the claim, the businesses say their neighborhood has become 'an open-air drug zone' where 'laws are violated with impunity' and residents are subject to violence and property damage as property values have fallen."

The Los Angeles Times in California. "For borrowers the Supreme Court ruling comes at a time of financial precarity as they struggle to make ends meet — especially in high cost regions such as Los Angeles and the Bay Area — with exorbitant rents and rising food and gas prices. The ruling adds intensifying pressure of their personal budget reckoning, with student loan repayments set to restart in October after a three-year pandemic reprieve. On Friday morning, Sadia Khan, 28, had tried to ignore any news about the ruling. A day earlier, she received a call from Berkeley about a missing payment. Now she is bracing for her return home, where she’ll sit down and figure out how much more she can cut. But she is running thin on options. A trip to the fair with her son this year now looks out of reach."

"She had urged friends and former classmates to fill out an application for loan forgiveness. Now she feels guilty for giving them false hope. 'I was getting so many people hyped for it and am now realizing, holy smokes, we’re screwed,' she said."

The Boston Globe in Massachusetts. "City leaders are clearly pushing hard to bring excitement back to Boston, to make it more family-friendly, to compensate for vacant offices and dark storefronts. They know they can’t let Boston become San Francisco, where many families, stores, and office workers have decamped for the suburbs. But the magnitude of the post-pandemic problem may be larger than we can yet imagine. And the solutions may have to be far more radical. What’s the problem? Taxes fund services, and Boston’s tax base is facing a serious threat."

"While most of us think of the pandemic as a thing of the past, the changes wrought by COVID will take years to ripple through commercial real estate. 'It’s a slow-motion dynamic,' says Andrew Nelson, a real estate economist. 'It takes a while to play out.' Even if employers typically trim their space by only 10 or 20 percent, that will still be a huge hit to the market, Nelson warns. 'The vacancy rate is basically the highest it’s ever been, and this is at a time when office employment [rates are] at a record. What’s going to happen when we finally have a recession or a slowdown? The pain is going to get worse,' he argues. 'There’s no question.'"

From Fox News. "Austin, Texas, is planning to revitalize its historic Sixth Street by amending building codes and making the area more family friendly. Attorney Richard Suttle, speaking on behalf of Stream Realty Partners, said the realty group is planning to revitalize the area and encourage new businesses. During the meeting, he offered a harsh assessment of what Sixth Street has become. 'Sixth Street has become a real problem, and it’s in what I would call a ‘death spiral’ because you’re not going to get anybody in there,' Suttle said, according to the Austin Monitor. 'It has become a shooting gallery.'"

The Globe and Mail in Canada. "When Olivia Chow moves into the mayor’s office in a couple of weeks, one of the biggest issues on her desk will be what to do about Toronto’s homeless encampments. Unruly collections of tents and tarps have sprung up in parks, ravines and underpasses around the city. There are a staggering 270 of them, twice as many as a year ago. They are not nice places to live in. Fires, overdoses and fights are common. They are not nice places to live near, either. Neighbours and passersby often complain about noise, garbage and discarded needles."

"One of the most troublesome is just a few blocks from Ms. Chow’s downtown home. It stands in front of a historic Anglican church, Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields, on College Street in the city’s teeming Kensington Market neighbourhood. Staff at the Westside Montessori School down the block say that they often see people urinating, injecting drugs, fighting or screaming at each other. The school stocks special gloves for picking up the used needles they find."

"Several times a week the teachers have to bring the kids in from the playground because something is going on in the street or back alley. A serious fire broke out in the camp this spring. Parents dropping their kids off at school come across people smoking from drug pipes right there on the sidewalk. The local city councillor, Dianne Saxe, says the disorder at the camp worsened dramatically earlier this year. 'What we began to see was horrible, violent outbursts – crimes being committed, people being harassed, the children being frightened, teachers being chased. It’s just not something that we can continue to tolerate.'"

The Telegraph in the UK. "Top economists failed to predict the rate shock – yet many continue to blame millennial and Generation X families for not spotting the ticking time bomb on their mortgages. John Martin, a 46-year-old HGV driver from Long Stratton, said that his bill was about to more than double from £250 to £700 a month. 'We had a very low deal at 1.5pc which we took out around five or six years ago,' he said. 'It was incredibly nerve racking watching the interest rates keep rising, and now we are looking at a deal of 4.25pc. I am the main earner of the house so it depends on me to pay for most of this,' he added. 'We had to extend our term by five years in order to afford it – food prices and energy prices have gone up so everything is stretched.'"

"House price to income ratios have rarely been so stretched. The average house price to income ratio was around 3.3 when most baby boomers bought their first homes, according to estimates from the wealth manager Quilter. That rose to 5 for Generation X and then to 6.7 for millennials. Before the pandemic, very few expected rates to climb up so soon – and so quickly – again. A Bloomberg magazine ran a cover story with a picture of a deflated dinosaur headlined 'Is Inflation Dead?' in 2019 – just two years before it rocketed to levels not seen in four decades."

The Australian Associated Press. "At 3.30pm on Friday Ronald Brown learnt the company building his dream house had suddenly collapsed. Along with dozens of other anxious Bentley Homes customers, he started his weekend unsuccessfully trying to reach insurers and liquidators to determine the fate of the partially built homes. 'Everything we have is in that house, it just breaks your spirit,' Mr Brown told AAP."

"He and his wife have paid close to $300,000 for their home in Doreen in Melbourne's north but are now unsure if they will be able to move in as planned in September. The couple work five jobs between them and fear they will be unable to pay their rent and mortgage if there are any more delays. 'It's not like we can just take on more work because we're already at capacity,' Mr Brown said. 'Our biggest concern at the moment is the financial stress and worry about how we're going to continue paying for everything.' Mr Brown visited his home under construction early on Saturday and contractors had already loaded materials onto trucks."