All Forum Posts by: Dan DiFilippo

 Jeez, dude, if you're obsessed with me just say that.  Yeah, housing was due for a "wall of foreclosures" as it was being referred to.  It was supposed to hit way back in 2020.  They've kicked that can very far down the road.

The Fed is simple to explain.  It doesn't take 20/30 hours.  It's an institution that was organized by the federal government and chartered to serve a dual mandate of price stability and unemployment.  It is politically independent of the federal government except in that its leadership is appointed by the president.

And in 2020 and 2021 the Fed was still working to satisfy its unemployment mandate.  It was doing what Paul Krugman says about "credibly promising to be irresponsible".  Keep in mind, they tried to get their desired policy effect by saying they would keep rates low through 2023. They were doing what they thought the markets required in order to have continued confidence.  And before you cite the equity market (or as you call it "the stock market") for confidence, no.  Money wasn't shifting toward the equity market for confidence.  It wasn't even shifting toward the equity market because of "muh inflation".  Virtually nobody has been confident on the US consumer.  We can see that because we can see that economic activity has been very slow.  Independently of COVID and before any talk of rate hikes.

I doubt you even know what happens when the Federal Reserve "prints money".

The Federal Reserve can be shown to impact monetary policy up to about two years out.  Because the only thing it actually has real control over is funding on an overnight basis; which is the manner in which banks have historically used the Federal Funds Rate (see also LIBOR and more recently SOFR).  But if you look how the markets are trading these rates, as well as US Treasury's, into the future, they're all betting against the Federal Reserve.  If you look at UST's or LIBOR futures curves today, they are all full of kinks.  So the market is responding to the Fed where the Fed has control, but the farther down the curve you go, the more you see markets are actually suggesting that the Federal Reserve is wrong about its purported policy.

Oh, I did have to show you what was what a couple years ago.  I'd thought that was the case.

If you had a formal education on the Federal Reserve, why did you think it was a private bank?  Why are you seemingly informed by a book that has been entirely dismissed as bunk?

If you want to have nuanced discussion with myself (or evidently, anybody else here). I welcome you to act like the adult you're so proud you think you are.  You could learn a thing or two from me.

It's not though.  You don't have to get all angry just because you were wrong.  And you certainly don't have to nitpick spelling mistakes because you were wrong.  And as long as we're doing that kind of thing to each other; "two", "hits", "their", and "they're", along with a few other grammatical corrections.

The fact is that the Federal Reserve is not a private bank.  And the entire conspiracy theory that states that it operates wholly in the interest of the GSIB's is just wrong on its face.  And it's a myth that's propagated by people who have no understanding of how it even functions, what it specifically does in order to try to implement its policy.  Two books I would recommend to you are Fed Up by Danielle DiMartino Booth (who is a household name for anyone who follows finance at an intermediate level, and The Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed, which has a lot of language that's inaccessible to the more lay people, but still includes good central banking history.

But you'll definitely want to stop getting your finance/economics news from the "bro investor financial advisors".  They almost never have any sort of certification.  And even the ones who do are usually people who know strikingly little about economics/banking.  They're specialization is in personal finance.  And usually bad personal finance at that.

The fact is that the Fed is not some sort of evil institution.  But worry not.  You can still be critical of it.  The truth about the Fed is that it's incompetent and actually has very little real impact on the money supply or interest rates.  They aren't a technocratic institution.  What they do is PR.  They have the Volcker legacy and the Greenspan legacy, which are characterized by strength and savvy respectively.  And they use those to try to effect the policy results they want.  But they've even admitted in quiet ways over the last half century or so, that they don't actually know what money is, and even that they are ill-equipped to handle monetary policy effectively.

Seriously, discard everything you learned from TCFJI.

@Kenny Kuramoto how many subject books have you read? Maybe you should start there. You'll get more out of what you read on here.

@Ashlee Andrews I think the thing to keep in mind (and this applies directly in this scenario, but really for a lot of your experience with agents), is that in almost all cases, agents are only paid when they close deals. So we're essentially working "for free" when we're first talking. Every agent has a story of a buyer they showed fifteen or twenty homes to before they decided "it wasn't the right time". And the reality of being an agent is simply that that's part of the job. Good agents understand and accept that can happen. But the effect of that is we have to be selective about who we take on and how much we invest in them before we know they're serious.

All that said, if you are waiting that long for a response, that person is just not your agent. They're probably swamped in emails and texts and appointments. Probably from their recurring clientele. Definitely skip.

@Nathan G. All indicators are suggesting rates will be going back down, so that will support the housing market.

It's a big ship and it doesn't turn on a dime. And it's important to keep in mind that don't nearly have the same instability in housing as we did fifteen years ago. I see it'd be more likely that we'd have a sustained period (5-7 years) of steady or slightly declining prices.

@Jason V. Jeez, If you seriously think this, then I'm embarrassed for you.

Like bro, why give them a whole 0.5%? Just let them know that if they slept on a park bench and only ate spam, they could go deal to deal on about $80 at a time. Why didn't you offer them that?

@Matt Myre I submitted mine! I keep thinking about what I wrote and I will mention, it took a number of drafts to get down to 300 words. More than that, I keep thinking of ideas for articles I would write. Would you want either a longer version of the sample I wrote? Any interest in seeing any other sample content?