You’re saying “our resilience”. Who is the “we” here? For the central bank, the “we” is their clients, the commercial banks, and their role in real estate is to keep the interest rates low so that this will support real estate prices, create a loan market for banks – and remember, 80 percent of bank loans in the United States and England, and probably Australia, are mortgage loans. So the function of central banks is to support the loan market for commercial banks. When you say “our”, you may be a real estate speculator, but if you’re part of the 99 percent, that’s not part of the “our” that the central bank are after. The “our” is the one percent. So you can say when the central banks say “we”, that’s the one percent. That’s the banks, the creditors, the bondholders of the banks and the stockholders of the banks. So for them, their business plan is to make real estate prices higher and higher so that anybody who wants to buy a home is going to have to borrow more and more and more from the bank and pay more and more interest in order to get a home or, if you’re a real estate speculator, to buy a home to rent out, because rental prices are going up.
Well, right now, certainly in America and in New York City, commercial prices are pretty far down. The prices that are going up are home prices. There have been so many office buildings close down. Today I had only the second trip into Manhattan that I’ve had in the last year, both trips were to the dentist, and because I wanted to buy a baseball magazine, I went out of my way. I went to Grand Central Terminal at 42nd Street and I knew that there used to be a big magazine store there where I could get my baseball annual to follow the White Sox coming up. Imagine my disappointment when not only was the magazine store closed, but all the stores in Grand Central are closed. So then I walked down toward Fifth Avenue and I
— source michael-hudson.com | Michael Hudson | Apr 7, 2021