Boomer assets come first WHILE GEN Z PAYS THE TAX

Remember when the Trump campaign promised to smash inflation and make the “American Dream” affordable again? Fast forward to 2026: The boss sits in the Cabinet Room and drops the mask.

“I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices UP for people that own their homes.”

There it is. Plain English.

The message to the 20-something living in Mom’s basement or the young family drowning in rent: You didn’t work hard enough. Boomer assets come first while Gen Z pays the tax.

  1. In 1963, an average worker clocked around 7000 hours to buy a median home. In 2025, that number is 14000+ hours (7 standard work-years). It’s a declaration of war on the non-owning class.

  2. There are currently around 10 million mortgages locked in at sub 3% rates, and nearly 25 million below 5%.

  3. Trump recently directed the government to buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds to force rates down. You cannot resurrect the mortgage without crashing the dollar and reigniting the very inflation that crushed Biden’s approval.

  4. Trump’s banning institutional investors from buying sounds tough. Institutional investors that’s 0.29 % of the million family housing stock.

  5. DOJ is now sniffing around homebuilders for “collusion” and “monopolization.” Let’s look at the numbers: D.R. Horton, the largest builder in America, controls less 6% of the market. The top 10 builders combined barely scratch 19% of total units built. Yes, in specific metros (Cincinnati, certain Sun Belt submarkets) concentration is high—but nationally? This isn’t OPEC. It’s a fragmented industry with thin margins being crushed by land costs and regs.

  6. While Trump tweets about “helping” low-income buyers, his FHFA chief is systematically dismantling the machinery that actually facilitates it. Pulte fired the fair lending teams, scrapped climate risk oversight, gutted special purpose credit programs, and lowered the affordable housing goals for Fannie/Freddie. The justification? Loans to low-income borrowers are “less profitable” and might weaken the GSEs’ ability to serve the middle class. Translation: We’re privatizing the boomers and socializing the GenZ.

  7. The Austrian critique holds: New money doesn’t sprinkle evenly like fairy dust. It enters at the top (primary dealers towards Wall Street towards asset inflation) and hits the plebs last (wages towards groceries). Trump’s instinct to raise asset prices is literally a vote for accelerating this wealth transfer. Every dollar of “number go up” for a Greenwich bond trader is a dollar of purchasing power siphoned from a renter in Cleveland. You cannot fight for the working class while championing the inflation of the very assets they don’t own.

  8. From 1987 to 2022, the Fed threw a 35-year party: Real mortgage rates fell from + 7% to minus 2%. That party is over. We are now in a + 3% real world. This isn’t a temporary blip; it’s a regime shift. Trump promising 3% mortgages again is like promising $2/gallon gas. It requires a depression or hyperinflationary economy.

  9. For 30 years, Boomers used their homes as ATMs. Cash-out refis padded consumption and kept the Keynesian wheels greased. That machine is kaput. With 50% of mortgages less than 5%, nobody is refinancing into 6.5% paper. It freezes labor mobility. A teacher with a 2.8% rate in Ohio won’t move to Texas for a $10k raise if it means tripling their interest expense.

  10. Banning institutional buyers sounds great until you realize that large investors are often the buyer of last resort for builders sitting on excess spec inventory. If you nuke that demand, builders stop building. If builders stop building, supply tightens further. If supply tightens, prices stay high. The EO designed to lower prices could easily trigger a supply shock that preserves high prices.

SUMMARY:

We are 55 years into a experiment where Washington subsidizes demand (FHA, Fannie, Fed QE) but restricts supply (zoning, NIMBYism, regulatory capture). The result? Prices tripled in real labor-hour terms.

You cannot fix this by yelling at Blackstone (who barely owns 0.3% of homes) or suing D.R. Horton (who builds 6% of them). You fix it by ending the Fed’s housing bubble subsidy machine and letting honest interest rates clear the market.

Classic Trump: an economic worldview suited to boomers who can’t read a balance sheet, designed to benefit their own class and preserve the status quo—while wrecking the economy.