r/AskEconomics

I feel like the housing market is so inflated because houses are treated like stocks by these entities. I suspect banks are a tough one to ban given the nature of mortgages, but could there be some limits placed at the very least?

If so, would it act as an anchor for other areas of the real-estate market? If a 4 bedroom house could now be bought for $300k in the suburbs of LA, theres no way people would be spending $3000 a month rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in a high rise apartment complex if they could just afford a mortgage for a place 3 times the size and half the price. I understand massive overhauls like this would cause a lot of problems, but it seems like some smaller profit margins might be worth the sacrifice to help out a hundred million Americans.

I'm not very knowledgable in this subject, but was just thinking about how little I care about most of the political bullshit being spouted on the news and was instead thinking about how real problems can be solved that most Americans, right or left, face.

A flight from Madrid to Rome is about 40 USD date dependent. Yet, a flight from comparable distances in US is often 5-7x the price.

I believe the primary costs are fuel, labor, real estate (likely rented not owned by airlines), and planes/infrastructure.

My suspicion is that real estate and labor are region dependent whereas planes, infrastructure and fuel likely have more internationally consistent. If so, it’s a little surprising that labor and real estate explain so much variance in prices.

According to which I made, gross capital formation is almost entirely cancelled out by capital depreciation (consumption), being just 6-7% of GDP at the maximum decades ago and under 2% since 2008. This means the US is barely accumulating any capital, while GDP is still growing at a decent pace. Is this a result of deindustrialisation and more emphasis on intangible assets, or have I just missed something and this is just a statistical misrepresentation?