> Ah, understood. I remember shopping for houses after the crash, and it seemed everything was either a trash heap, or in foreclosure. The bank wouldn't take an offer, preferring to cash auction to investors at the starting price of the highest offer they had. No cash, no house, no matter how good the credit rating. The cheap house thing was basically a myth from my vantage point.

Yeah, the sort of unspoken ethos after 2008 was that people had to be saved from all the underwater mortgages. But the only way to do that is to not pop the bubble. So we got a slew of policies from the banks and the government designed to shore up housing prices, and now they've rebounded to above the pre-crash prices.

But those prices are bubble prices. We didn't pop the bubble which means we're still in it. All we did was kick the can down the road. The prices are still unsustainable and have to come down.

The best thing they did in the interim was to print a bunch of money. If you can't lower nominal housing costs because people can't have underwater mortgages then lower real housing costs by keeping nominal housing costs the same and causing sustained moderate inflation of everything else. Also very effective for devaluing other existing debt (student loans, credit cards, public debt). It's possible that we're now at the point of needing more of that.