Interesting (pun intended) to me that apparently everyone wants to talk about the rate speculation, rather than about the finding that jobs are picking up in spite of AI.
Years of ZIRP have conditioned people into believing that rates at 5% are "high", when the historical reality is that 5% is approximately the mean rate over the past 70 years. Volcker famously broke the back of inflation in the 80s by pushing the interest rate up past 20%. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
A risk-free rate of 5% (and rising) means “yields of CCC-rated borrowers — the lowest rung of junk debt — have climbed rapidly to more than 21 per cent in Europe and 18 per cent in the US as prices have plummeted, up from about 16 per cent and 15 per cent at the beginning of the year” [1].
I think the reason people are so shocked is because the principal is already so high and unaffordable that any rate increase feels like a death of a thousand cuts. A rate increase from 2% to 5% when the principal is already $400k+ feels devastating in comparison to a rate of 20% but the principal being $60k
The real estate market is effecively frozen right now because buyers can't afford houses at the current rates and sellers are still holding out hope that they will come back down to 3%.
Once reality sets in we will start to see prices slowly adjust.
What this and the sibling comment ignore is home construction. Without construction (or without cost effective construction) home prices have zero incentive to fall. Home owners will trade homes between themselves at 'inflated' prices. If you can not produce a home cheaper than an extant, equivalently sized home then prices effectively have a floor.
National average construction cost per square foot is $160. $160 * 2000 square feet is $320,000 sans the land which we can assume is 25% the cost of the home constructed on it. So we've magically hit the $400k number.
The only way home prices 'decline' is with population decline, coercion, a recession, or significant regulatory, cultural, and financial shifts.
Higher rates will bring prices down. Prices can only support what incomes can support at current cost of money, wages + mortgage [based on qualified mortgage underwriting guidelines] = prices. Asset prices are inversely correlated with interest rates. ~4M real estate transactions occur per year, sales will happen because of moves, death, divorce, etc. This sets the price direction momentum and comparables at these money costs.
("Note the trend. Just as the Fed drains M2 with quantitative tightening, time is needed to drain inflated residential real estate equity, grounded in mortgage rates (priced off of treasuries) and what wages can support.") (me, 7 months ago)
Tangentially related to how private equity is in a very unfavorable position at current valuations and continues to extend and pretend as long as possible before having to mark to current valuations and attempt to refinance debt loads at current money costs.
- “PE has a glut of 32,000 companies ($4T in equity) they can't sell and the average hold time is extended past 8 years.”
In hindsight, root cause analysis, it was not a good idea for the Fed to provide unlimited support to mortgage backed securities bonds during the pandemic. All of that money flowed from the bond market into unsustainable real estate equity valuations that are now readjusting to reality through time and transactions. Alas, we win or we learn.
- Home prices are losing momentum. The median U.S. home-sale price rose just 0.5% year over year, the slowest growth rate since March. The median asking price fell 0.3% year over year, its first decline since March. Some relief could be on the horizon for buyers.
- Mortgage rates are still a vital stat for homebuyers and sellers. The weekly average mortgage rate hit a 3-year high of 7.4% on October 8. Daily average rates have eased slightly in recent days, dipping to 7.45% on October 14 from 7.61% about a week earlier.
- The typical homebuyer’s monthly payment is $2,777, the highest level on record except the previous week. That’s due to high mortgage rates and still-increasing home prices.
- Homebuying demand remains near record low. Pending home sales ticked up 1.5% from a week earlier–perhaps thanks to rates easing ever-so-slightly–but were still near their lowest level in records dating back to 2021. That includes the end of 2023, when mortgage rates were nearing 8%. Pending sales declined year over year in all 50 of the most populous U.S. metro areas.
- Price drops are at a record high. As sellers come to terms with prices losing steam, more of them are dropping their prices: 22% of home sellers with active listings cut their asking price, up from 20.9% a year earlier and the highest level in our records. [My note: draw attention here]
Sellers who want to (or must) sell now will lower their prices. Sellers who don't will wait, and encounter lower price levels as mortgage rates continue to rise in step with the 10Y. As long as structural demographics ensure a strong labor market (which they will), interest rates will continue to rise both from the Fed raising short term rates and from a capital shortage pushing up longer rates. Forward debt price curve up is real estate price curve down, very simply.
> Years of ZIRP have conditioned people into believing that rates at 5% are "high", when the historical reality is that 5% is approximately the mean rate over the past 70 years
I don’t like this framing because since 1990, 5% is on the higher end of the interest rates. [1] That is the entire lifetime for an entire generation of people, Millennials and everyone after. We can’t point to the “golden old days” and pretend that once upon a time interest rates were high so, it’s okay and people need to “remember” things were different. The entire economy has restructured since 1990.
Also, the Volkner move in itself was a deviation from the norm, not the norm itself. Some parts of 70s and 80s was the only time we saw unusually high spikes, but before that 5% again was on the higher end. Are we saying the boomers in the 60s were also spoiled by low interest rates for decades?
You've got it backwards. Over a standard business cycle, a healthy, growing economy is generally correlated with higher (or rising) interest rates, while a weak or contracting economy is correlated with lower (or falling) interest rates. Bond investors demand higher interest rates when they have more confidence in the economy as they would otherwise prefer to invest in equities, and investors settle for lower rates when they have less confidence in the economy as they seek to exit equities in favor of low-risk alternatives.
The long-term, as in multi-century, trend has been for interest rates to fall as capital becomes more comfortable with trusting returns to come in over longer horizons.
It really depends, and its hard to saw what "low" vs "high" rates means. Within different economies, low could be 0, 5, or 10. Depending on where you are in the business cycle, high rates could actually signal a hot economy and low rates could mean a cold one(or trying to jump start borrowing). Low rates all the time and high rates all the time probably isn't good, its a dance.
Yes we have much higher interest rates in the 1980s and 1990s but house prices as a function of wages have doubled in that time [1]. Here's another view: mortgage debt service as a ratio to personal income [2].
Whichever way you look at it, the current situation is significantly worse and significantly more expensive in real terms so 10%+ interest rates of the past were actually better in real terms.
The real problem is that housing is too expensive. And that's because it's become an investment, people's retirement funds. It should be absolutely impossible for people to hoard housing.
Low interest rates cause higher house prices, because people can then afford monthly payments for bigger principals and they're all still bidding/buying from more or less the same pool of housing.
Interesting (pun intended) to me that apparently everyone wants to talk about the rate speculation, rather than about the finding that jobs are picking up in spite of AI.
> everyone wants to talk about the rate speculation, rather than about the finding that jobs are picking up in spite of AI.
The Economist had an article early September "The jobs apocalypse is postponed. An AI jobs boom is here" - https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/09/04/t...
https://archive.is/FKTT5
Rates are still too low. They need to be increased again.
Years of ZIRP have conditioned people into believing that rates at 5% are "high", when the historical reality is that 5% is approximately the mean rate over the past 70 years. Volcker famously broke the back of inflation in the 80s by pushing the interest rate up past 20%. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
> rates at 5% are "high"
A risk-free rate of 5% (and rising) means “yields of CCC-rated borrowers — the lowest rung of junk debt — have climbed rapidly to more than 21 per cent in Europe and 18 per cent in the US as prices have plummeted, up from about 16 per cent and 15 per cent at the beginning of the year” [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/fdc9a85d-d2c4-465f-99ca-609d68b6d...
I think the reason people are so shocked is because the principal is already so high and unaffordable that any rate increase feels like a death of a thousand cuts. A rate increase from 2% to 5% when the principal is already $400k+ feels devastating in comparison to a rate of 20% but the principal being $60k
The real estate market is effecively frozen right now because buyers can't afford houses at the current rates and sellers are still holding out hope that they will come back down to 3%.
Once reality sets in we will start to see prices slowly adjust.
What this and the sibling comment ignore is home construction. Without construction (or without cost effective construction) home prices have zero incentive to fall. Home owners will trade homes between themselves at 'inflated' prices. If you can not produce a home cheaper than an extant, equivalently sized home then prices effectively have a floor.
National average construction cost per square foot is $160. $160 * 2000 square feet is $320,000 sans the land which we can assume is 25% the cost of the home constructed on it. So we've magically hit the $400k number.
The only way home prices 'decline' is with population decline, coercion, a recession, or significant regulatory, cultural, and financial shifts.
Sellers are holding out knowing they already have 3%.
Higher rates will bring prices down. Prices can only support what incomes can support at current cost of money, wages + mortgage [based on qualified mortgage underwriting guidelines] = prices. Asset prices are inversely correlated with interest rates. ~4M real estate transactions occur per year, sales will happen because of moves, death, divorce, etc. This sets the price direction momentum and comparables at these money costs.
Home Prices Are Starting to Fall in Some Pockets of the U.S. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50203248 - October 2026
Stubborn Sellers Are the Last Thing Propping Up Home Prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50096330 - October 2026
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50203261
("Note the trend. Just as the Fed drains M2 with quantitative tightening, time is needed to drain inflated residential real estate equity, grounded in mortgage rates (priced off of treasuries) and what wages can support.") (me, 7 months ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47596362
Tangentially related to how private equity is in a very unfavorable position at current valuations and continues to extend and pretend as long as possible before having to mark to current valuations and attempt to refinance debt loads at current money costs.
A $300B 'Debt Wall' Is Looming over Private-Equity Backed Companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50260526 - October 2026
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50262716
- “PE has a glut of 32,000 companies ($4T in equity) they can't sell and the average hold time is extended past 8 years.”
In hindsight, root cause analysis, it was not a good idea for the Fed to provide unlimited support to mortgage backed securities bonds during the pandemic. All of that money flowed from the bond market into unsustainable real estate equity valuations that are now readjusting to reality through time and transactions. Alas, we win or we learn.
>Higher rates will bring prices down.
We've had higher rates since 2022-2023 and prices did not come down*, they flatlined or even went up in the desirable areas.
*) in EU
Humans are emotional and take time to internalize market changes and potential value loss ("loss aversion").
Wikipedia: loss aversion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
Housing Market Update: Sellers’ Asking Prices Fall For the First Time Since March - https://www.redfin.com/news/housing-market-update-asking-pri... - October 15th, 2026
- Home prices are losing momentum. The median U.S. home-sale price rose just 0.5% year over year, the slowest growth rate since March. The median asking price fell 0.3% year over year, its first decline since March. Some relief could be on the horizon for buyers.
- Mortgage rates are still a vital stat for homebuyers and sellers. The weekly average mortgage rate hit a 3-year high of 7.4% on October 8. Daily average rates have eased slightly in recent days, dipping to 7.45% on October 14 from 7.61% about a week earlier.
- The typical homebuyer’s monthly payment is $2,777, the highest level on record except the previous week. That’s due to high mortgage rates and still-increasing home prices.
- Homebuying demand remains near record low. Pending home sales ticked up 1.5% from a week earlier–perhaps thanks to rates easing ever-so-slightly–but were still near their lowest level in records dating back to 2021. That includes the end of 2023, when mortgage rates were nearing 8%. Pending sales declined year over year in all 50 of the most populous U.S. metro areas.
- Price drops are at a record high. As sellers come to terms with prices losing steam, more of them are dropping their prices: 22% of home sellers with active listings cut their asking price, up from 20.9% a year earlier and the highest level in our records. [My note: draw attention here]
Sellers who want to (or must) sell now will lower their prices. Sellers who don't will wait, and encounter lower price levels as mortgage rates continue to rise in step with the 10Y. As long as structural demographics ensure a strong labor market (which they will), interest rates will continue to rise both from the Fed raising short term rates and from a capital shortage pushing up longer rates. Forward debt price curve up is real estate price curve down, very simply.
https://www.ustreasuryyieldcurve.com/ (all consumer debt is priced off of US treasury rates, including mortgage debt)
https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-s...
https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/special-report-rising-bond-...
Exactly, with houses or bonds, prices and rates are inversely correlated.
A big part of why home prices are too high is that money has been too cheap. Most home buyers shop on the basis of a monthly payment. Same with cars.
> Years of ZIRP have conditioned people into believing that rates at 5% are "high", when the historical reality is that 5% is approximately the mean rate over the past 70 years
I don’t like this framing because since 1990, 5% is on the higher end of the interest rates. [1] That is the entire lifetime for an entire generation of people, Millennials and everyone after. We can’t point to the “golden old days” and pretend that once upon a time interest rates were high so, it’s okay and people need to “remember” things were different. The entire economy has restructured since 1990.
Also, the Volkner move in itself was a deviation from the norm, not the norm itself. Some parts of 70s and 80s was the only time we saw unusually high spikes, but before that 5% again was on the higher end. Are we saying the boomers in the 60s were also spoiled by low interest rates for decades?
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-c...
low rates are the default of a healthy confident economy. high rates are the default for a struggling economy.
You've got it backwards. Over a standard business cycle, a healthy, growing economy is generally correlated with higher (or rising) interest rates, while a weak or contracting economy is correlated with lower (or falling) interest rates. Bond investors demand higher interest rates when they have more confidence in the economy as they would otherwise prefer to invest in equities, and investors settle for lower rates when they have less confidence in the economy as they seek to exit equities in favor of low-risk alternatives.
> Over a standard business cycle
The long-term, as in multi-century, trend has been for interest rates to fall as capital becomes more comfortable with trusting returns to come in over longer horizons.
Has there been interest rates for multiple centuries?
It really depends, and its hard to saw what "low" vs "high" rates means. Within different economies, low could be 0, 5, or 10. Depending on where you are in the business cycle, high rates could actually signal a hot economy and low rates could mean a cold one(or trying to jump start borrowing). Low rates all the time and high rates all the time probably isn't good, its a dance.
I hear this point a lot and it's asinine.
Yes we have much higher interest rates in the 1980s and 1990s but house prices as a function of wages have doubled in that time [1]. Here's another view: mortgage debt service as a ratio to personal income [2].
Whichever way you look at it, the current situation is significantly worse and significantly more expensive in real terms so 10%+ interest rates of the past were actually better in real terms.
The real problem is that housing is too expensive. And that's because it's become an investment, people's retirement funds. It should be absolutely impossible for people to hoard housing.
[1]: https://www.longtermtrends.com/home-price-median-annual-inco...
[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=fXwf
Low interest rates cause higher house prices, because people can then afford monthly payments for bigger principals and they're all still bidding/buying from more or less the same pool of housing.