[mikeyouse]

Consumer debt is also low; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CDSP

And metrics like credit card delinquencies are at historic lows: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRCCLACBS

ARMs actually aren't very popular - fewer than 15% of new mortgages are ARM.

> BlackRock bought what, 10-15% of the houses sold in 2020?

People vastly overestimate how large players like Blackrock are. There are something like 80 million single-family homes in the US. Of these, Blackrock owns 80 thousand. If they bought every one of those homes in 2020 (they didn't) - it would represent more like 1% of homes sold that year. And of course there are millions of condos not figured into my denominator. They're huge, but way under 1% of purchases.

[analyte123]

Good point but it works against your overall argument - the investors who buy 10-20% of houses are far less sophisticated than Blackrock and far more likely to start panic selling when their Airbnb income can’t pay their bills.

[ameister14]

Of the 80 million single family homes in the US, how many are sold each year? For your math to work (80,000 as 1%) it would have to be 8,000,000 or 10% of the overall supply.

I can actually answer for you - roughly 820,000 single family homes were sold in 2020.

So if BlackRock bought 80,000 homes then, that'd be about 10%.

[mikeyouse]

You're conflating some figures -- 820k new homes were sold[1] -- along with roughly 5.6 million existing homes[2].

[1] - https://www.housingwire.com/articles/new-home-sales-historic...

[2] - https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/ehs-01...

[ameister14]

ah, you're right, it was 5 million existing single family, I was pulling from the census and misread. My mistake.

[alphabettsy]

Naïve question, but what happens if something like 5-10% of those ARMs default and the traditional default rate increases too?