PPCC: Pisitófilos Creditófagos. Veranito 2025

[Derby]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/business/crypto-industry-housing-market.html

Crypto Industry Moves Into the U.S. Housing Market

Americans are finding ways to use digital currencies to help them buy homes, and new companies are forming to help people tap their home’s value to buy Bitcoin.


Rune Fisker

The nation’s largest mortgage finance firms will begin accepting crypto as an asset on a mortgage application, another significant step by the Trump administration to bring digital currencies into mainstream finance.

This week, President Trump’s housing director, William Pulte, said he would direct Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the nation’s big mortgage finance firms — to consider home buyers’ crypto investments as part of their overall wealth in assessing whether they can afford a mortgage. Traditionally, a home buyer’s cash savings and stock investments are what mortgage lenders consider.

Fannie and Freddie, which are a critical cog in the housing market, buy mortgages from banks and establish a set of criteria for which borrowers’ mortgages they will accept.

The announcement by Mr. Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, on Wednesday comes as an increasing number of Americans have been using digital currencies to buy houses and new companies have formed to help them take advantage of their crypto holdings to buy real estate.

The crypto market and its many supporters have been pushing regulators in this direction for several years, raising concerns among consumer advocates that this lightly regulated and highly volatile investment asset is being tied to something as vital to the economy as the housing market.

And Mr. Trump has gone from a crypto critic to a big booster.

“In a world where regulatory enforcement has been largely taken off the table, the boundaries are getting pushed very quickly,” said Tyler Gellasch, a former lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission, who runs the Healthy Markets Association, a financial industry trade group.

But from home buyers and crypto enthusiasts, there is growing demand. In a recent survey, roughly 14 percent of home buyers said they planned to sell crypto assets to help get the cash to cover a down payment on a home, up from 5 percent in 2019, according to Redfin, the residential real estate brokerage company.

In 2017, David Doss sold some of his crypto holdings to raise cash for the down payment on a home in New Jersey. He said he would have preferred that there had been a way to keep his crypto while getting the cash equivalent but that option didn’t exist when he bought his house.

“The intersection of crypto and real estate is evolving pretty darn quickly,” [/color]said Mr. Doss, who advises wealthy investors on crypto investing. “It’s a meeting of the oldest asset class with one of the newest.”

Mr. Pulte’s order might have allowed Mr. Doss to keep some of his crypto holdings. It says that home buyers no longer have to sell their crypto for cash as part of the process of qualifying for a mortgage.

Crypto is gaining traction in the housing market as home sales have stagnated, leaving many unable to sell or buy a home or tap into their home’s equity through loans.

Several start-ups are already pitching crypto as a way to cut through the market’s current morass and jump start home sales.

One firm, Milo, founded by Josip Rupena, a former financial adviser at Morgan Stanley, offers investors a way to use Bitcoin as collateral for getting a home mortgage.

For a $1 million home, an investor posts $1 million worth of Bitcoin, which Milo puts into a secure account. The firm provides $1 million in cash to buy the home.

Milo then writes an equivalent mortgage that the home buyer is ultimately responsible to pay off. The interest tends to be a few percentage points higher than a normal mortgage, but the customer gets the benefit of not having to sell any crypto or pay capital gains. When the mortgage is paid off, Milo returns the Bitcoin to the investor.

Mr. Rupena said he had already underwritten $65 million of such mortgages, and he welcomed the F.H.F.A.’s policy shift on crypto.

Unlike most bank mortgages — like the ones Fannie and Freddie buy — Mr. Rupena’s firm does not require a homeowner to make a down payment. His firm finances 100 percent of the transaction, which most banks will not do and that is not likely to change with the new F.H.F.A. rule on crypto.

“This is the first step in getting crypto parity with other assets,” Mr. Rupena said of the F.H.F.A. decision.

Other firms are helping homeowners’ tap their home’s equity to buy crypto. The strategy is similar to so-called home equity investment contracts, which provide lump-sum cash payments to a homeowner in return for the right to share in the appreciation in a home’s value.

But instead of the homeowner using cash from the deal to pay for home improvements or a child’s college tuition, they are using it to buy only one thing: Bitcoin.

“Turn your home into a Bitcoin acquisition engine,’’ one of the start-up firms called Horizon, said in a post on X.

Here is how it typically works: Some of the firms loan the homeowner cash to buy Bitcoin based on the value of the equity in their homes. The firms typically make money by sharing in the appreciation in the value of a house when an owner sells it.

The deals are attractive because the homeowner does not need to make monthly payments during the life of the agreement, as they would with a traditional home equity loan.

As protection, some of the firms also place a lien on a house during the length of the contract — some of which can last for a decade.

Horizon debuted its offering at the Bitcoin conference last month in Las Vegas, where two of Mr. Trump’s sons were headline speakers.

Consumer advocates see reason for concern.

“My general impression is that taking any lien on your house to buy crypto is a terrible idea,” said Andrew Pizor, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, who specializes in mortgage financing. “This is the roof over your head, and you have to be cautious.”

All of these programs are in their infancy, so it’s too soon to say how much traction they will ultimately get.

Representatives for the companies said concerns about consumers being taking advantage of were overstated. Most prospective customers are wealthy investors. The firms also said they intended to be compliant with existing federal and state laws.

Harry W. Prahl, 35, who has been investing in Bitcoin since 2016, said he was interested in tapping the equity in both his home and in several apartment buildings he owned to buy more of the crypto currency.

Mr. Prahl has been talking to a company called Sovana, which was founded by a former Google executive, about using some of his real estate holdings as collateral to buy more Bitcoin. Sovana would buy Bitcoin, using a formula based on the equity in a person’s properties, and then put the crypto currency into a secure account. At the end of the deal, the person and the company would share the profits.

If Bitcoin drops in value, the property owner must make up the deficiency.

“It’s an alternative way to tap into that commercial equity that doesn’t effect the business,” Mr. Prahl said. “And not having to make any payment is a real killer feature.”

Though the details of the F.H.F.A.’s policy shift are scare, on its face it signals a shift in how the Trump administration is overseeing Fannie and Freddie. Under past administrations, the two firms have tended to be risk averse after nearly collapsing during the financial crisis when millions of homeowners defaulted on their mortgages.

In a post on X about the new policy, Mr. Pulte said he made the decision for Fannie and Freddie to count crypto among home buyers’ assets after “significant studying.”

He added that it was in “keeping with President Trump’s vision to make the United States the crypto capital of the world.”

[sudden and sharp]

[Derby]

https://www.ft.com/content/87683676-7de6-4642-bcea-bdf1a62ea34a

Get ready to embark on a new era of financial repression

Tariffs are not the only flashpoint; another economic policy war is shaping up


© Liv Friis Larsen/Dreamstime

The trade war unleashed by Donald Trump may be just the precursor for much larger turmoil in the global economy. Whatever tariffs look like when the dust settles, deficits, surpluses and trade patterns will still be shaped by financial flows. It is only a matter of time before another economic policy war flares up — indeed it has already begun. Welcome to the new age of financial repression.

Financial repression refers to policies designed to steer capital to fund government priorities, rather than where it would flow in unregulated markets. In the postwar decades, western countries used regulation, tax design and prohibitions to both limit capital flows across borders and direct domestic flows into favoured uses, such as government bonds or housebuilding.

The US then spearheaded the decades of financial deregulation and globalisation that led up to (and led to) the global financial crisis. The US has now made abundantly clear that it rejects its traditional role in dismantling financial walls between countries and anchoring the global financial order.

Rumours of a “Mar-a-Lago accord”, which would manage the dollar’s value down while forcing global investors to discount and lock in lending to Washington, has produced shocked disbelief by other countries. But it is not just Mar-a-Lago: several policy proposals have surfaced recently that can fairly be grouped together as measures of financial nationalism.

These include a tax on remittances, levies on foreign investment stakes by nations with policies Washington disapproves of, and the promotion of dollar-denominated stablecoins and looser bank leverage regulations. The last two would both incentivise flows into US government debt securities.

While the US represents the biggest swing of the pendulum, other big economies have the same orientation away from letting finance flow freely.

China never stopped practising financial repression at scale. It has retained a non-convertible currency and manages its exchange rate. It uses a network of state-controlled or state-influenced banks, corporations and subnational governments to steer the flow of credit to outlets indicated by various economic development doctrines favoured by Beijing over the years. The latter has had both successes (the electric vehicle industry) and failures (the housebuilding bubble). China is also working on an alternative to the dollar-based international payment system.

Europeans have long been purist about free capital mobility — originally inside the EU’s single market, but also with the rest of the world. Yet there, too, attitudes are changing.

The influential reports of former Italian prime ministers Enrico Letta and Mario Draghi have emphasised that the bloc sends several hundred billion euros abroad every year when there are huge domestic funding gaps. This invites policymakers to adopt measures to redirect financial flows.
So does the agenda to unify national financial markets.

The aim of making the euro a more attractive reserve and investment currency has also been invigorated by Trump’s seeming disdain of the dollar’s role. A big EU-level borrowing programme suddenly looks at least conceivable, and an official digital euro is on the way. In parallel, the UK is trying to coax pension funds to put more savings in the hands of British businesses.

Europe may not end up with fully fledged financial repression, but it’s now open season for policies to steer financial flows where governments, not just markets, think they are most needed. In reality, commitments to climate and digital transitions and defence-related infrastructure leave no other choice.

What should we make of this return of financial state activism?

First, note that it comes with financial globalisation already in decline. Rapid growth in cross-border financial claims by banks halted in 2008. From nearly 50 per cent of the world economy at the start of 2008 such claims have shrunk to 30 per cent. That may have been partly offset by non-bank activity but in any case it happened without deliberate policies to keep money at home.

Second, complaints about other countries’ surpluses could quickly change if we end up in a scramble for the world’s available capital that will make the trade wars look like child’s play.

Third, much can go wrong. It is not that liberalised finance has covered itself in glory (it hasn’t). But state-directed finance is a high-risk activity, prone to cronyism and misallocation without safeguards. Still, it may be necessary. If everyone is going to try to keep more capital at home, it’s even more important to put it to the best uses.

[asustadísimos]

[El modelo popcap es historia. Sí, hay mucho pleistoceno andante. Pero es residual.

Ayer hubo un gran avance en el Tuit: el editorial de ese BOE que es El País (28-06/2025), con un titular bestial: «La vivienda estrangula la economía»:
https://elpais.com/opinion/2025-06-28/la-vivienda-estrangula-la-economia.html
Está traído al blog por tomasjos:
https://www.transicionestructural.net/index.php?topic=2628.msg244951#msg244951]

Recuerdo haber usado contra el Ladrillo la metáfora del estrangulamiento ya a principios de los 2000, ¡hace un cuarto de siglo! Tuve una conversación personal con Naredo en el Colegio de Arquitectos de Madrid en la que salió varias veces.

La cosa entonces era que «o estrangulamos financieramente al Ladrillo o el Ladrillo nos estrangula la economía». También salió esta idea en la literatura del banco España, cuando le dio por aquello de que «la expansión hipotecaria tiene que parar ya».

Entonces decíamos que el Ladrillo era una losa opresora que hacía que todos los esfuerzos de productividad se perdieran como agua en un cesto. Estrangulación, losa, agua-cesto, metáforas inmemoriales que nosotros llevamos al Ladrillo cuando estaba en su máximo esplendor y te la jugabas.

Hoy, en otra situación, después de un rescate de la UE y una profundísima restructuración financiera, operación desagüe incluida, sale la metáfora abriendo el BOE. ¡Victoria por goleada!

Tengan en cuenta que cuando salen las cosas en las editoriales de los grandes medios de comunicación de masas es que la cosa está superrequetemasticada. ¿Saben por qué? Porque todos tenemos en la cabeza que el capitalismo popularcapitalista ya es historia. El modelo es otro. Como nos lleva pasando toda la vida, nosotros le tenemos puestas las metáforas a la situación: catacrack, inflación rara, suelta, desamparo, tuit.

Está asumidísimo que el Ladrillo es tóxico. En este sentido, tendríamos que hacerle un monumento a los altos cargos que estafan para poder financiar su 'tuputamadre-living' porque sus retribuciones no se lo permiten. Son Tuit viviente. En este sentido, la sentencia del confeso será supertuit. El pobretico confeso solo quería darle su palacio a su cenicienta. Y Milei, a su hermanita.

Pero hoy toca editorial de El País. Díganme: ¿es o no muchísimo Tuit?]

[Benzino Napaloni]

Pero hoy toca editorial de El País. Díganme: ¿es o no muchísimo Tuit?]

No es suficiente. Habla de "cooperar en soluciones", pero aún no se entra al detalle de que el precio del ladrillo tiene que caer, y que todo lo que no sea eso son parches.

Como informático yo mismo me he tirado años avisando de que no somos suficientes para las necesidades de la sociedad. De desarrollos necesarios, obviamente, no de apps de fotogatos o fotopies. Ya se vio la inversión en formación y las mejoras salariales que se hicieron, lo que se ha hecho ha sido completamente forzado por las circunstancias.

Pero ahora ya no hablamos de profesionales que necesitan de base una estructura mental muy concreta. Ahora ya hablamos de todo. De camareros, de policías, de maestros, de médicos, de electricistas... ¿Qué se está haciendo? Nada. Rezar a ver si hay rescate con dinero público.

La cuerda se romperá por estar demasiado tensa, y lo hará por el punto más débil. Yo no creo mucho en "el Tuit", la verdad y visto lo visto. Las noticias no van por delante de la realidad. Van por detrás. El Tuit no será más que la constatación de la realidad.

Llevamos muchas, muchísimas décadas de fe ciega en el ladrillo. ¿Creen que eso va a desaparecer de un día para otro? No basta con un crack, hace falta un periodo prolongado en el que la burbuja no vuelva a inflarse.

[Flipback]

Dos hermanos somalíes solicitantes de asilo en Holanda rechazan pisito de 55 m2 y se monta un escándalo en el país. Al parecer lo rechazan por ser demasiado pequeño y no permitir una vida de adulto independiente a cada hermano. Comprendo que los contribuyentes holandeses estén escandalizados por la ingratitud de estos refugiados y sin embargo no se me quita la sonrisa de la cara desde que he leído la noticia. No puedo evitarlo, me encanta que ocurran estas cosas que ponen el acento en la ridiculez inmobiliaria.

Debe ser toda una sorpresa emigrar desde el tercer mundo a un país desarrollado y encontrarse este panorama.

Pasen y vean: https://rmx.news/article/somali-brothers-to-be-evicted-from-dutch-asylum-center-after-rejecting-offered-housing/

[conejo]

Dos hermanos somalíes solicitantes de asilo en Holanda rechazan pisito de 55 m2 y se monta un escándalo en el país. Al parecer lo rechazan por ser demasiado pequeño y no permitir una vida de adulto independiente a cada hermano.

Probes somalines, no hay derecho.

En España no les darían menos de 80 metros…
¡Esos rácanos holandeses insolidarios! Solo quieren gastar en la OTAN.

 

[asustadísimos]

[Derby trae un artículo importante del 'New York Times':
https://www.transicionestructural.net/index.php?topic=2628.msg244995#msg244995
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/business/crypto-industry-housing-market.html

El artículo engorda la retórica engañosa de la estafa del Ladrillo con la bobaliconería de la estafa cripto.

Se supone que estaría dándose:
• «meeting of the oldest asset class with one of the newest»
• «crypto getting parity with other assets»

Son dos grandes mentiras.

El encuentro no es entre «el más antiguo de los activos con uno de los más nuevos» (nótese el vs. uno). ¡Se encuentra el humo consigo mismo! Y el humo es el segundo activo más antiguo.

El primer activo fue la manzana. El segundo, el humo con el que la serpiente la envolvió: «cométela, serás dios». El jardín del edén. El árbol, el del conocimiento del bien y del mal. Ella, Eva, engañada por la retórica reptiliana. Comió y le dio de comer a él, Adán, que comió sin rechistar: si fuera verdad que iban a morir, morirían los dos; ¿pero y si se pusieran capitalistitas?

En segundo lugar, es mentira que las cripto vayan a ser como los demás activos. Las cripto ya son como los demás activos... ficticios. ¡Incluso son mejores! Son el humo puro, sin el lastre del activo real o financiero que parasitan las demás.

La idea es simple: la retórica engañosa de la estafa del Ladrillo da un salto adelante gracias a la liquidez crediticia-hipotecaria cripto establecida por el Gobierno de los EE. UU. esta semana: los bancos prestamistas hipotecarios (préstamo como principal e hipoteca como colateral), cuando el prestatario hipotecado solo tenga criptos, también van a poder ceder el riesgo de sus préstamos hipotecarios a las entidades empaquetadoras tradicionales americanas (Fannie, Freddie), que funcionan con dinero del contribuyente.

Las cripto son los ríos que van a dar a la mar, que es el morir en el Ladrillo, es decir, el tramo usurario del precio de la vivienda que el modelo popularcapitalista te obliga a adquirir con ella.

El artículo hace publicidad de un montaje que acabará mal:
• tú no tienes dinero sino criptos con plusvalía latente; y quieres una vivienda;
• un bancasombrista te va quitar de tener que vender las criptos (y pagar impuestos por la plusvalía); va a ser, a la vez, tu prestamista de dinero-de-verdad y el depositario permanente de tus criptos (depósito regular —no irregular, como el bancario—);
• el bancasombrista se financia tomando prestado en los bancos al sol, los cuales van a poder ceder el riesgo a las Fannie y Freddie, empaquetadoras hi-po-te-ca-rias; enfatizo hipotecarias porque, para que funcione el esquema hace falta hipotecar tu vivienda —aparte de separarte de tus criptos—;
• al cabo de los años, devuelto todo el préstamo al bancasombrista, este te devolvería las criptos; pero no se extinguiría automáticamente el crédito hipotecario porque el deudor hipotecario no eres tú, sino el bancasombrista;
• el acreedor hipotecario real, los tenedores de los activos financieros fruto de la titulización amparada por las Fannie y Freddie: un fondo de pensiones escandinavo, varios fondos de Singapur, un 'private' no-sé-qué de La Castellana, una aseguradora india, una sociedad de capital-riesgo, etc.;
• por el camino, tus cripto se vinieron abajo en los 'mercaos' porque ya no somos 'popcap' (tú incluido, si no, no cambiarías criptos por ladrillos); entonces, el bancasombrista te pidió una ampliación de la garantía depositada porque a él se la pedían sus bancos presionados por Fannie y Freddie; tú te negaste; él quebró; te han embargado el sueldo; y no puedes vender la vivienda porque está hipotecada.]