by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall St On Parade:
Yesterday, the National Association of Realtors released their annual Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. It showed that by the time Americans have saved enough money for a downpayment to buy their first home in America, they will be close to middle age. The study recorded the median age of first-time home buyers as the oldest in the history of the study, at 38 years of age. (In the 1980s, first-time home buyers were in their 20s.) At the same time the age of first-time home buyers was hitting a record high, the percentage of first-time buyers was hitting a record low – just 24 percent of the market in the latest survey. That is the lowest percentage share of first-time home buyers since the National Association of Realtors began conducting the survey in 1981.
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The study reminded us of a series of articles we had written previously on the plight of college and university students who had been become debt slaves to high interest student loans from the megabanks on Wall Street and saw a bleak future in terms of being able to buy a home or afford to have children. (See here, here and here.) In the series, we quoted a complaint filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) by Allison L. of Rego Park, Florida, who had written about her loans from Citigroup’s Citibank as follows:
“I have made over $110-125K in the past 4 years with working overtime as a nurse. My base pay is $59,000. I cannot keep this pace any longer. I do not own a home, and it seems that I never will. I have paid my credit card and student loan debt on time for the past 13 years. I have paid $50,000 towards my student loans, but $25,000 has gone to interest. I will end up paying at least double on my student loan money by the time it is over. This was not clear to me when I had initially borrowed the money. Now my credit card interest rates are too high for me to be able to pay for food and gas. I am thinking about filing for bankruptcy, but of course my ‘student loan’ debt is not dischargeable.”
What Allison didn’t know about Citigroup was that as she was paying the megabank high interest rates on her student loans, it was secretly being bailed out to the tune of $2.5 trillion in cumulative loans from the New York Fed for its reckless mismanagement – with many of the loans made at ½ of one percent interest or less.
For the 38-year olds who are finally able to afford to buy their own homes, they will increasingly have to worry about those homes washing away in a raging river from a flash flood caused by two feet of rain pouring down in a day’s time as a result of record-setting global warming and the U.S. hypocrisy on fossil fuels.
Today, Kevin Crowley has a courageously honest report on the digital front page of Bloomberg News where he writes as follows:
“Today, the US is producing more oil than any other country in history. Further increases to US output are planned next year and beyond, no matter who prevails in the presidential election….”
“The US now produces nearly 50% more oil each day than Saudi Arabia….”
“…the US recently became the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas, jumping ahead of Australia and Qatar after flooding the market at home. American gas executives are scouring the world for new markets, locking buyers into fossil fuels for decades to come.”
How did the United States of America, with 435 elected representatives in the House and 100 elected senators in the U.S. Senate, become a slave to the fossil fuel industry? We explained it as follows in 2022:
“Imagine a country that allows a private fossil fuels conglomerate (or its billionaire boss, Charles Koch, the 17th richest person in the world according to Forbes) to get away with the following:
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- Meet secretly with big political donors twice a year to plot a coordinated strategy to put their chosen people in public office;
- Meet at his private club with a sitting Supreme Court justice who will then rule on key legislation that benefits his interests;
- Fund an organization that then sluices money to the wife of the Supreme Court Justice;
- Run a highly sophisticated voter registration database, data mining and get-out-the-vote operation called i360, in order to pack Congress with people who will pursue an antiregulatory agenda;
- Install dozens of its lawyers and operatives into the highest offices of the federal government;
- Run a sprawling, opaque trading operation that could potentially be raising the prices of the fossil fuel products it sells via the futures market;
- Continue to operate major factories in Russia, ignoring sanctions and a murderous regime waging an unprovoked war on Ukraine, until a pressure campaign forced it to say it will look for an exit strategy;
- Fund a sprawling network of taxpayer-subsidized front groups to deny climate change and foment hate;
- Provide funding to groups involved in sending a mob to attack the seat of government of its own home country on January 6;
- Fund groups that use dark money and propaganda to put lifetime justices on the highest court and to promote legislation friendly to the fossil fuels conglomerate.”
This is the future we have charted for our children and grandchildren. It’s enough to make you sick to your stomach – but is it enough to make you demand change?
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