In order to get the news, Americans need to turn to independent blogs, or overseas sources. Take the case of the miraculous recovery of the US housing market, which has somehow seen a rise in prices despite historically low demand, as exemplified by the historically low mortgage applications. Only a massive and concerted decrease in the supply of housing can bring about such a rise a prices.
Referring to the housing bubble, the Guardian Newspaper of the UK reported, “This rise in price is, by all accounts, artificial. Housing, like all products, responds to the laws of supply and demand. When supply decreases – when there are fewer homes on the market – then prices will rise. This is what is happening now.
There is evidence that lenders are controlling the housing supply by reducing the number of houses for sale. Last year, AOL Real Estate‘s reporting suggested that as many as 90% of available properties were not even really on the market, but just polished for sale and being held back to keep supply low.
Then, last month, three major banks, including Citigroup and Wells Fargo, halted all their sales of homes in foreclosure; this also reduced the supply of homes on the market. The reduction in housing supply, then, is largely artificial, designed by the banks and institutions that hold thousands of houses and thus have the most to gain from higher house prices.
The result is what looks like a housing recovery to the rest of us, but is, in fact, something of a trap. Fitch, the ratings firm, issued a warning that the alleged recovery in housing is moving too fast and could reverse.”
In the United States, the reporting goes something like the following, as exemplified by the Oregonian newspaper’s Elliot Njus. He wrote, ”In fact, negative equity has helped limit the number of homes on the market, which has in turn pushed prices higher.”
Njus is a propagandist, not a reporter, and certainly not a journalist. If Njus was, he would have written in explainable terms what the Guardian reported above, that the big banks have conspired to withhold houses from the market in order to force prices higher, which, coincidentally, is a violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. This is called a conspiracy in restraint of trade.
The result is that the 99 percent are illegally being forced to pay higher prices than what an untampered with market would demand, both in terms of the price of the homes, and by the artificial raise in interest rates that has risen upward with the price of homes. In other words, this is a big income redistribution scam that shifts money from the 99 percent to the 1 percent via the higher corporate profits, rising share prices and enhanced dividends.
The big banks have taken a million homes off the US market since 2010, and almost two million more than they held off the market in 2007. The corporate media doesn’t want you to know this, so they give you meaningless blather, as what Njus wrote above on June 13, 2013.
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