Nick Fountain

Susan says if this became a pattern and then something went wrong and the value of those mortgage-backed securities dropped, we might end up having to bail out Fannie and Freddie.

Sound familiar?

Did you watch Trump's Davos speech?

I did.

Did you see the part where he said, basically, a lot of Americans' wealth is in their houses and I don't want to crash the housing market.

I don't actually want to bring down prices.

Yeah, there's this weird tension here.

Actually, one of the most clarifying things I've ever heard about the housing crisis was during a conversation with Caitlin, the UT Austin professor.

She said, we as Americans think we can have it all, that we can have lots of affordable housing when we're young and lots of housing wealth when we're old.

And those two things, those are in tension.

Because if we want homes to be cheap, we need a lot of them.

And if we want them to be stores of wealth, we don't.

We want scarcity.

Yes.

Why is it important for you to own a house?

As a reminder, you can see Planet Money in person on our book tour in April.

We're going coast to coast.

I'm going to be at the L.A.

show.

Erica, you are going to be at the Pittsburgh show.