by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
San Francisco Bay Area condo prices are the glaring exception. House Price Inflation in all its glory.
We’re not talking about miracles, such as the same house getting bigger somehow or fancier, but about how many dollars it takes to buy the same house. According to the National Case-Shiller Home Price Index for October, released today, it takes 9.5% more dollars than it took a year ago to buy the same house, meaning that the US dollar has lost purchasing power by that much with regards to houses. This watering down of the dollar is the purposeful result of the Fed’s interest rate repression and the $3 trillion it printed and handed to the markets, which triggered, among all kinds of other peculiar phenomena, a land rush.