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Jul 12, 2021Liked by Bernard Hickey

Another good commentary Bernard. On the mortgages as a percentage of incomes, does this suggest that houses have doubled in value in around 3 years and mortgages as a percentage of incomes has gone down? Does this make sense? I assume this is aggregated data on all mortgages to income, given the large increase in investment properties where renters are paying the mortgage how is this accounted for? I have insights from some investor segments that they are investing in houses without bank funds, this segment may be quite large.

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Yep. Overall and averages. Some have a lot more debt than others, but even then, the rates are so low and equity so large there’s little risk of a catastrophe.

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i'm having trouble understanding the 6% of disposable income calculation... surely this is not just homeowners? looking at the rba dataset it just mentions households not homeowners. in which case i guess that the percentage is diluted by all of the people who don't own houses. otherwise... how do we make sense of 6% of disposable income? the median pre-tax income in nz was approx $100k. so obviously the disposable income is much less. so how small exactly is this loan servicing amount? who, that has a mortgage, is paying that little to service it. what am i missing here?

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