Despite a frozen real estate market, home prices remain near record highs. Your local market may vary, but affordability is still out of reach for many.
Fortune noted over the weekend that homebuyers in their 70s now outnumber those in their 30s. It’s part of a demographic trend.
By this age, Baby Boomers owned 21% of the nation’s wealth. Generation X, a little less at 14%. But, Millennials, the first of whom are now turning 40, own just 4.3% of the national bounty.
That stat alone should raise eyebrows.
But the bigger issue isn’t demographics — it’s the system we’ve lived under since August 15, 1971.
Once the dollar was removed from gold, asset prices — homes, stocks, everything — have been driven higher not by productivity gains but by the steady erosion of purchasing power.
Priced in gold, not dollars, homes roughly what they were in the 50s and 80s. (Source: X/Twitter)
Homes priced in gold:
- In 1950, the middle-class home cost about $8,000—or 150 ounces of gold.
- Today, 150 ounces of gold equals roughly $510,000. That’s more than the national average home price of $421,000.
Gold continues to hold purchasing power across decades and currencies. Whether measured in houses or in stocks, the message is the same: the dollar loses ground, gold does not.
Yesterday, for the first time, we saw an independent gold survey suggesting that gold would match the trend we see in gold prices, sending prices still higher from here.
~ Addison
P.S. Still, the Fed is expected to cut rates in September. With lower rates, mortgages would trend lower and the housing market may thaw—but only because debt gets cheaper, not because the economy is stronger.
Such a move risks kicking off a “most terrifying bull market” in stocks, which sends those valuations into the stratosphere before they come crashing down to earth.
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