As Predicted, The Housing Crash is Here

Three months ago, Chris told our paying subscribers he was predicting the coming collapse of the U.S. housing market. Unfortunately, he was right, and it is here. (Scroll down to see the original video.)

The data is now confirming his early prediction as you can see below. And, as our Peak Insiders learned in May, it’s time to make plans to either hunker down and weather the storm, or make big moves to find a safe haven. The news can no longer be ignored. Sales are down markedly and it will impact more than just real estate.

Fox News contributor Charles Payne took it a step further giving us an undeniably bleak visual of how far we’ve fallen in just eight months.

And then there is this bombshell chart below. Every component of the housing cycle is in steep decline.

Unfortunately, it’s more than personal home values currently at risk. There is the downstream economy which is imploding along with it.

When sales and applications and permits all take a dive, construction, supply and retailers all go down with the ship.

Banks are shedding mortgage components and laying off employees. Sales are trending downward for Lowes, and if demand continues to crater, the recent uptick for other home-related retailers like Home Depot and Ace Hardware will be short-lived.

If you're in a position to purchase a new home (somewhere less volatile than major cities), prices should go your way. If moving is not in the cards, consider other options like a sale-leaseback. (Obviously, do your research first.)

Bottom line: Chris has a strong track record of surfacing important issues long before the mainstream catches on...and while we didn't want to make this article a hard sell about membership, our subscribers were forewarned months ago. Take a look at our subscriber options and consider upgrading your subscription if this kind of news and advanced warning is important to you and your family. The video we are making public below is the very kind of information we give regularly to our subscribers. If you're reading this, you know you don't want to miss out on it. Stay ahead of the curve with us.

Here’s Chris’ original story and video on this unfolding situation:

The Great Real Estate Crash of 2022/23

(Published May 3, 2022)

I know it seems quite unlikely to people who have been struggling to buy a home that a real estate crash is possible, but I assure you that one is not only possible but has already started.

How do I arrive at this conclusion? It’s partly from data, part deductive and part inductive.

Also, this isn’t my first rodeo. I was front and center in the 2007/08 real estate crash and was one of the earliest analysts calling for a housing bust. It was just too obvious. NINJA loans, Vegas hairdressers with 19 homes bought with extreme leverage, and the pervasive attitude that real estate could never go down again were all factors.

This time it’s price-to-income ratios that are more extreme than 2007/08, slowing sales, and sudden price corrections that have already begun from "the outside in.” Canada, New Zealand, Australia and multiple small city locations in the U.S. have already experienced steep price corrections very quickly.

Certainly, a part of this is the quick rise in mortgage rates which, truthfully, have a long way to go yet before they will be done rising.

So, my advice is to build cash and wait for better prices if you are in the hunt. They will come.

However, the crash will not be contained to real estate alone. The Federal Reserve is now very publicly committed to reducing its balance sheet by an astonishing $95 billion per month. The data says they have already stopped growing the balance sheet.

Sounds boring and arcane but I assure you this is the single biggest financial event of recent times.
It’s all fun and games on the way up, but devastating on the way down. Particularly for the unprepared.

Stocks and bonds are going to get slaughtered as they owe much of their currently lofty prices to all that magical money printing which is now set to go in reverse.

As they say, prices take the escalator up but the elevator down.

Can the Fed manage to run off its balance sheet to this the tune of $95 billion per month without causing the biggest financial asset crash in all of history? Possibly one that ruins economies and tosses us all back into the dark ages? All while food and fuel shortages mount?

It’s doubtful.

It’s equally doubtful that they’d let things run that far before they toss in the towel and resume money printing. Which means the final phase of currency destruction and hyperinflation is what lies in our collective future.

My best guess? This all plays out this calendar year.

The Fed – and all of us by extension – are caught in a box canyon of their own making. There is no path forward, it is blocked. To the left, we have a hard place (crashed financial markets and a resulting Great Depression), and to the right, we have a rock (hyperinflation, destruction of the currency system).

The policy errors that brought us here aren’t a couple of years in the making, but several decades. They won’t be easily fixed. It’s a right proper mess, it is.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://peakprosperity.com/as-predicted-the-housing-crash-is-here/

Us Digital Security

How do you think the newly planned US Digital Currency described in Executive Order 14067 will impact the housing market? Also, do you think this will be end of US paper currency?

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Housing Slum Worsens

Unfortunate typo: slum instead of slump. ?
Beware of those graphs where the axes don’t go to zero. They make things look better/worse than they actually are by distorting the proportions.
Late last year Chris was warning about inflation, so I managed to get a fixed rate for the rest of my bond (65 months) and the rate I got is already below inflation. South Africa’s official inflation rate is the highest it’s been in the last 13 years.

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the good thing “or bad thing” is this “program” is pretty standard across the globe…they are not really deviating much… Madated vaccines/ lockdowns, vaccine passports… etc… they are doing the same program everywhere just at different speeds… look at “no fertilizer” for Sri lanka and see whats coming for the netherlands and canada and ireland… in a year or 2… For digital money look at Israel no cash transactions over $4,000 allowed, or gas Qrc codes in sri lanka…all for criminal activity prevention of course… you can get a 6-12 month preview if you pay attention to which other countries they are further down the implementation plan .

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Energy/net Energy

100 million bpd of crude or crude oil equivalent is a valid number. Condensate is just more hydrocarbons, not some useless “liquid” that you can’t use. Ethanol is “different” from diesel the same way gasoline is “different” from diesel. Is this argument being simply and misrepresented to make a point about net energy? Maybe, but it is simply wrong.

That said, watching this end August, he is frighteningly right about everything else so far. Evergrande is in limbo, and Fitch simply stopped rating them rather than admit they are in default! NAHB is down to 50! Time to go long bullets and cyanide pills.

Wolf has a pretty good article on the subject. Some series I recognize (from FRED) and some I don’t.
https://wolfstreet.com/2022/08/23/sales-of-new-houses-collapse-in-the-west-by-50-inventories-supply-spike-to-high-heaven-worst-since-peak-of-housing-bust-1/

  • 11 months of “supply” (omg!)
  • traffic chopped in half
  • number of homes sold chopped in half
  • but price - almost no change
    Seems like: sellers are still stuck back in February.
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you can get a 6-12 month preview if you pay attention to which other countries they are further down the implementation plan .
Nicely put. I agree. One issue though: how will the police, in the corrupt countries, get their bribes if it all goes digital?
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Crash Starting Anecdotal Evidence

Ok so my spouse and i live in a nice upperclass neighborhood where the housing spike raised our home prices 30% or so in the past couple years. You know the type of area. Large lots, nice lawns, nice newer cars. Well anyway for the past couple weeks while we are up around 5 am we have been seeing the repo man tow truck drive through the neighborhood and leave with a nice new car. This is the first time we have ever seen this living here. We’ve also seen more people suddenly moving out. Not sure if that is due to rental house price increases (there are some rental houses in the neighborhood) or people walking away from high price mortgages. Strange times…

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But I Have A Chris-tall Ball!

That title is a tilt of the hat to Chris, and to Frank Z, and what I see in my Chris-tall ball by my light is that the crash crisis in fall will justify the agenda put forth in Pres. Biden’s Executive Order 14067 and what some are calling C-Day, Dec 13, 2022. I don’t know why it would be on a Tuesday. But, perhaps the crisis is the opportunity to pull a Roosveltian confiscation/conversion/rescue to the US-CBDC that has been speculated about for some time.
Jim Rickards, X-consultant to the military-industrial complex and hero economist certainly thinks so in his new sales pitch.

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There will always be a medium of exchange outside the system. Gold, silver, food, sex, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes.

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Ugh.

Threats and actual violence.

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China

When talking about China, you really need to keep in mind that China is a closed society. Anything coming out of it is from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). We are talking pure propaganda all the time, 24/7.
The normalcy bias surrounding China is just off the charts. Stick with what you know. Keep it local. Or else you are going to get seriously burned.
Fitch, the S&P, and Moody’s lied through their teeth before. Since then, they have just doubled down.

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Fitch, the S&P, and Moody’s lied through their teeth before. Since then, they have just doubled down.
I'll go further - the whole cesspool of Wall Street, the ratings agencies, the Federal Reserve, and a host of off-shore entities are all in cahoots to loot and steal with impugnity. It's gotten far worse with every crisis as moral hazard is now a policy being enacted, not a thing to be avoided.
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More Anecdotal Evidence

I work for a small to medium mortgage company, and starting about two months ago we started shedding jobs across the board - loan officers, processors, underwriters, tech support and admin personnel. Two weeks ago, in a perfect example of “nothing is confirmed until it is officially denied,” our company owner held a zoom call explaining why the recent layoffs don’t mean we’re in trouble, how this rough market will end soon, and how we’re “uniquely positioned to not only weather this storm, but to come out stronger on the other side.” Needless to say, I started keeping my eyes on other jobs right after that call.
In addition, I’m seeing higher and higher debt-to-income ratios on loans coming through the pipeline, (loans we wouldn’t have considered before) as well as such slow volume from RE agents I often work with it’s astounding. A client of mine who is shopping for a place has experienced in the span of three weeks that sellers have gone from multiple competing bids to offering $5k or $10k seller concessions. GONE are the days of buying without asking for an appraisal, selling for above appraised amounts, etc.
In my opinion, this is all a good thing (maybe not for my bank account) because maybe housing costs will finally come back down into the range of affordability again.

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into the range of affordability again.
for that you need income too.
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Are Peak Prosperity Prediction ‘that’ Accurate?

I remember purposefully noting more than a year and a half ago the bold prediction made here that maximum Feb 2022 the stock market would have lost 30 - 50 % of its value or something along those lines and that it would include the housing market loosing that type of value.
The language was strong laced with words such as “at the latest”. Then I have seen this time line come and go without the prediction being realized.
So I’m feeling irritated when I read that Chris Martenson — again predicted something right. I would like to see more of the reservation that I’ve also seen here in the past that was put in terms like: “I might be wrong but I’m not confused”
Here is a request to folks that are reading here: is there anyone who have tracked more closely than I’ve done the prediction on this site so we can know just how closely the language match the reality of this and would you be willing to share your observations here if you did so?

When the tide goes out…
I’m always amazed at how much risk people are willing to take on to support a lifestyle.
I get that people want to live well while they’re young enough to enjoy it, but the amount of credit they will take out to do so just blows my mind.
Within your means folks!!
I can’t forget 2008, it’s burned into my memory - but human behavior doesn’t change much, does it?

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From the transcript written above -
“The policy errors that brought us here aren’t a couple of years in the making, but several decades. They won’t be easily fixed. It’s a right proper mess, it is.”
That’s the part I focus on, and I do believe it pretty well sums up the tone of this web site in general.
It’s a complex system coming apart, generalities can be made, predicting the exact route of decay is much harder to do.
Just for myself, I accept the anomalies on those terms.

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