Re:‘Housing in ‘07 wasn’t a bubble” is a true statement that...
by throwawaycities on Friday April 08, 2022 @04:44PM
(#30962284)
> there was a general economic expansion… with the gains concentrated in a fair small segment at the top, which it covered by (non-sustainably) paying for continued debt-fueled lifestyle improvements for groups that weren't seeing real income gains.
That’s one long sentence.
The thing is it’s impossible to decouple any economic expansion from 2000-2008 from the trillions of dollars that flooded into the economy during that period as a direct result of the artificial housing prices and newly available debt.
I agree with you though to the extent that any actual wealth that was generated was concentrated to the top, it always is. There hasn’t been real income gains for the working class in about 50 years, but the explosion in household and consumer debt in that time is incontrovertible from about $300B in 1970 to $11.5T in 2010.
This is false. There is no doubt that, while there was a short recession in early-mid 2001, there was a general economic expansion, not a recession, after that; to the extent that housing market was exploited to paper over something, it was the unusually top-loaded distribution of the benefits of that expansion, where the bottom 3 income quintiles and the fourth quintile was basically flat, with the gains concentrated in a fair small segment at the top, which it covered by (non-sustainably) paying for continued debt-fueled lifestyle improvements for groups that weren't seeing real income gains.