Wall Street and the City of London are bragging about engineering a record housing bubble in California, and particularly in Los Angeles County, even while the county’s morticians and emergency medical workers are hauling away COVID-19 corpses in greater numbers.
The situation calls out for the piercing wit and powerful satire of Giovanni Boccaccio in The Decameron, which he completed in 1351. In the book, seven young women and three young men, in order to escape the bubonic plague of 1346-52, flee Florence to live in a secluded villa, where they spend their time, each telling a story a day for 10 days, or 100 stories. But the tension is that the reader knows that not far away in Florence, the death wagons rattle at night carrying away the dead, as the plague would wipe out one-third of the Europe’s population in only a few years.
In late December 2020, the S&P CoreLogic Case-Schiller Home Price Index reported that in October 2020, home prices in L.A.County had risen 8.4% over the same home prices a year earlier. The U.S. had a housing bubble from 2002 to 2008, which was punctured in the infamous 2007-09 crash, reaching its low point in June 2012, and then, driven by banksters, a second housing bubble commenced. Looking at Case-Schiller data, between June 2012 and October 2020, home prices in L.A. doubled. Worse, prices of low-tier homes—the least expensive homes for low- and middle-income families—increases by nearly two and half times during this period.
