Mark Blyth

speaker

294 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Aug 2024 last heard 3 Jul

Mark Blyth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Taking Stock · Inflation and its many uses · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

Another way of looking at it is that prices in general have gone up so much for goods such as houses that you need two incomes in order to get that good.

So rather than this being a cause of celebration, we could actually say, well, in actual fact, we're both working twice as hard.

for almost half as much money in real terms because it takes twice as much to buy that house in the first place.

The only solution to the housing crisis that's global is we basically stopped building houses for normal people back in 1980.

We privatized whatever public housing stock we had, and we left it to the private sector.

The private sector will build for the top 30% because that's where the money is.

So there's no solution in this.

All you get is turning housing into an asset class, and you need two, if not three, incomes now to get one.

Yeah, that's the only way to do it.

If basically, if supply is constricted and there's infinite demand, the price is going to go through the roof.

And if you then turn these things into ATMs, if you turn them into cash machines, as they rise in value, you can take out equity against the house and use that for consumption.

Then you're just going to have a one-way train in house prices.

And that's what we've seen globally in global cities over the past 30 years.

So unless you start building massive amounts of public housing, you're just not going to get anywhere with this.

Well, yeah, but we forget that spending money on someone's cancer care is a net cost.

Spending money on defense is a net cost.

If the government builds a house and it borrows at four and then it rents it out to people at six, it makes two.

Also, these are assets rather than costs.

You keep them on the state's balance sheet.

You're actually improving the state's balance sheet by putting assets on it rather than liabilities.

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