This is nonsense. 99.99% of renters can’t buy enough JPMorgan to make a difference. They don’t have the money and that’s why they’re renting.

But if tomorrow JPM decides to invest like Kathy Wood and lose all the money, the renters will be without home equity and the JPM equity.

> It’s turtles. JPMorgan is publicly traded. The renter can just buy as many shares of it as he wants and pretend it’s his home equity.

Try asking your brokerage for $400,000 of margin at 5% on a $20,000 account and see what they say.

There's no financial instrument even remotely close to what a 30 year mortgage is for the average individual.

I believe you can get higher leverage on treasury bonds at your broker. My 1 year treasury bonds use less than 2% margin.

What's the rate? You're not getting free money.

It’s 1% above what you make on the treasury. Less than mortgage rates for sure, and if interest rates drop it might become free money, of course if interest rates go up you are swimming naked.

I suppose, but can't really beat 2.5% on a house (remember, if you're living there, you're not paying rent.. hopefully!)

Good luck getting 95% leverage to buy $500k worth of JP Morgan stock.

Equity is the part of the mortgage paid off (unleveraged value in the house).

Then everyone would have to rent.

Not if prices fell. And they’d save a small fortune in interest over the life of the loan.

A fortune? I'll be paying a little more than $100k over the life of my 30y mortgage. I think that is very fair for the amount I borrowed (3x that...)

What was the interest rate?

> We should bright back 50% down, five year mortgages and cut the rest of the stuff out.

Well, in that case, good luck convincing the majority of the population to adopt a policy that will catastrophically crash their net worth. Government involvement in mortgages is what keeps our society civil at this point.

How much of that profit is passed on to shareholders vs benefitting land owners directly? There’s also the matter of not being able to live in those shares, having to still pay rent, still pay massively inflated property taxes yourself…