But the "best solution" to this is not for the government to somehow prevent people from buying non iPhones so my AAPL stocks don't go down. The best solution is for me to recognize that placing highly leveraged bets on the stock market is extremely risky and that I just lost money because I made a bad bet.

What you are describing is socialized losses, privatized gains. Why is that a good thing?

To fix this, there are going to be losses. The question is, who should primarily suffer them? The homeowners who reasonably relied on official policy, or the banks who promoted and benefited from that policy?

> What you are describing is socialized losses, privatized gains.

It isn't. The losses would otherwise be suffered by a majority of American families, which sounds pretty "socialized" to me. Those are also who would receive the gains from inflation.

The best place to actually put the losses would be the government, except "the government" doesn't actually have any money, it just spends your money which it takes through taxes or inflation. And the money has to go to homeowners/borrowers rather than come from them, so what you would effectively need is a tax on creditors, which is what inflation is.

It's essentially the same logic as the 5th Amendment Takings Clause. If the government is going to take your property they should compensate you for it. Normally this doesn't apply to things like zoning changes for pragmatic reasons -- the taken value would be too large for the government to afford and then they could never make zoning laws. Which is nothing but a pragmatic injustice. If we can avoid that we should, and in this context inflation would allow us to do it.

Inflation is a type of tax and you're just making the equivalent argument to "all taxes are theft".

The best place to actually put the losses would be the government, except "the government" doesn't actually have any money, it just spends your money which it takes through taxes or inflation.

Yes. So homeowners and banks have been exploiting renters like myself. Because "the government" is at fault, you'd like the government to continue exploiting renters like myself in order to prevent the homeowners from suffering a loss.

It's essentially the same logic as the 5th Amendment Takings Clause. If the government is going to take your property they should compensate you for it. Normally this doesn't apply to things like zoning changes for pragmatic reasons...

While the takings clause might apply to downzonings, since downzongings restrict property rights you previously held, they definitively do not apply to upzonings. Your property rights simply do not include the right to prevent others from competing economically.

I'm going to speculate that you hold a leveraged long position on real estate, and you want the government to protect your investment?

The problem is it isn't current homeowners. Current homeowners are the ones who have paid twice as much for their home as it ought to be worth because there was no other option.

And if you just let nominal housing prices fall, the banks get to keep their unearned gains. The homeowners still owe them the full mortgage amount.

It also doesn't work, because people won't be willing (or able) to sell a house for less than what they owe on the mortgage, so the property becomes unsellable, which keeps it off the market and keeps prices higher longer. Or we get a huge number of defaults and relive the housing crisis, and then the banks keep the foreclosed homes off the market as they did last time.

> Yes. So homeowners and banks have been exploiting renters like myself. Because "the government" is at fault, you'd like the government to continue exploiting renters like myself in order to prevent the homeowners from suffering a loss.

How does it continue to exploit you? Are renters creditors?

You are being exploited the same as homeowners because high housing prices result in high rents. Reducing real housing prices will reduce real rents to your benefit. Reducing nominal housing prices is politically and economically intractable, so the alternative to inflation is that you continue to pay real high rents.

> While the takings clause might apply to downzonings, since downzongings restrict property rights you previously held, they definitively do not apply to upzonings. Your property rights simply do not include the right to prevent others from competing economically.

And yet from a practical perspective the result is the same; the property value has gone down (and the mortgage debt hasn't). Which makes causing that to happen politically infeasible, leading to our current predicament.

> I'm going to speculate that you hold a leveraged long position on real estate, and you want the government to protect your investment?

I want real housing costs to come down. Do you have a better idea, that won't be defeated politically by existing homeowners?

Some homeowners will default and the banks will suffer too.

Or we get a huge number of defaults and relive the housing crisis, and then the banks keep the foreclosed homes off the market as they did last time.

The reason banks did this is they wanted to pretend bad homes and bad loans were still valuable, in order to use them to satisfy capital reserve requirements. There's a very simple solution to this problem.

You are being exploited the same as homeowners because high housing prices result in high rents. Reducing real housing prices will reduce real rents to your benefit. Reducing nominal housing prices is politically and economically intractable, so the alternative to inflation is that you continue to pay high rents.

This is simply not true. The housing bubble was manifest in the price vs rent ratio, which skyrocketed. The only way to reduce rents is to produce more housing. If that tanks the price of existing houses, I don't really care.

I want real housing costs to come down. Do you have a better idea, that won't be defeated politically by existing homeowners?

My mistake, I thought you were discussing whether this is something we should do. I didn't realize you were merely discussing what is politically possible.

I don't believe that fixing the US is politically possible. In spite of this being the Flight 93 Election [1], I think the odds that Trump will save us are close to zero. I don't plan to be here for the end.

[1] http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-electio...

And then we relive the housing crisis.

> The reason banks did this is they wanted to pretend bad homes and bad loans were still valuable, in order to use them to satisfy capital reserve requirements. There's a very simple solution to this problem.

And what is that?

> The only way to reduce rents is to produce more housing.

Of course it is. That is the only way to reduce real housing prices in general. But if you propose to tank the nominal prices of existing houses, more people will oppose you than you can defeat. Meanwhile you can produce more housing without existing homeowners fighting you that hard if it means their nominal home prices don't go down.

> My mistake, I thought you were discussing whether this is something we should do. I didn't realize you were merely discussing what is politically possible.

What we should do is constrained by what is possible.

Sometimes you have to swim upstream and convince people to do the hard thing because it really is necessary, but convincing millions of homeowners that they should vote for a policy that will cause them to go underwater on their mortgages is just never going to happen. So we need some way to reduce real housing costs without causing that to happen. Inflation is one way; I'm open to alternatives.

> I don't believe that fixing the US is politically possible.

It isn't a question of whether it will be fixed, it's a question of how bad things have to get first before people develop the will to fix it.

The thing is, this is exactly what happens with everything else that an American consumer purchases with a loan: cars, boats, RVs, everything that is purchased with a credit card.

As has been said before, a house is just a wooden box that you leave out in the rain for 30 years. But yet we expect that this box will become more valuable over time...

In other words you are asking the government to steal value from people who own debt and give it to people who owe debt. That is neither fair nor an obvious win in the long run.

Value of your dollar holdings= (value of all dollars) * (number of your dollars / number of all dollars).

You assert that nobody is promising the value of your dollar holdings will remain constant. I agree that this assertion is true, but it's also obvious that failing to maintain the "value of all dollars" is a good way to impoverish all dollar holders, possibly permanently. Convincing people that you aren't going to allow them to maintain the value of their dollar holdings is a good way to encourage them to sell dollars.