[bumby]

You forgot the part where people use their home equity as a revolving line of credit, which exacerbates #2.

[red-iron-pine]

aka we got a head start and are now able to leverage that head start even further

[bumby]

I was thinking of it differently, more in terms of how debt-laden Americans tend to be. This is just another mechanism of perpetuating that.

It would be one thing if people are leveraging that equity to buy appreciating assets, but too often they are leveraging that debt for depreciating assets.