Every now and then I like to look at government numbers and see what they really mean. I ran into this batch several months ago but hadn’t had time to play with them till now. What I found shocked me so badly that I ran them three times on a calculator and once using exponents. As you’ll see below, these are “Oh my God” numbers.
Here are facts:
The average US house sells for about $300,000, and the Federal Reserve is buying $40 Billion dollars’ worth of mortgages per month. (If that sounds like a bunch of numerical gobbledegook to you, please hang on for just a moment.)
The Fed has been very public about this, by the way. They explain that they are purchasing “mortgage-backed securities” (for your safety, of course), and they surround the discussion in financial-speak. But, in the end, they are buying houses, plain and simple. It’s all there, for those who wish to check.
Now, here are those numbers:
$40,000,000,000 per month, divided by $300,000 per house = 133,333 houses per month.
Let’s round that down to 130,000 to account for the various financing fees and transfer taxes.
So, Ben Bernanke is buying 130,000 houses per month. Kind of shocking, no?
That means that since this program began in September of 2012, the Fed has bought 1.43million houses.
And, by the way, there is no end in sight.
In Fairness to Ben
Now, to be fair, I should clarify that your kids are not really buying all those houses for Ben Bernanke personally – they’re buying them for his bosses – the owners of the Federal Reserve.
You didn’t think the Fed was owned by the government, did you?
Oh, no. It is owned by the big banks. I’d tell you exactly who, except that no one knows exactly who. We know that people own shares of the Fed banks (there are twelve of them in all), but the US government is keeping the details secret.
Think I’m making that up to be flamboyant? Please, check it out for yourself! They admit that “the big banks” own the Fed, but they never say which ones. A list did circulate in the 1930s, but that was the last time.
