TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #718: The Housing Market Is Lying To You with Melody Wright

Episode Date: February 21, 2026

Marty sits down with Melody Wright, housing market analyst and investigative researcher, to discuss the deepening cracks beneath the surface of the U.S. housing and labor markets — from record-low home sales and rising mortgage delinquencies to corrupted government data, municipal fiscal collapse, and the broader consumer credit stress that mainstream financial media continues to ignore. Melody on X: https://x.com/m3_melody Melody’s Substack: https://m3melody.substack.com/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/4pOv2L4 Promo Code: TFTC99 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc Lygos: https://bit.ly/4koiJmB Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. All right, take two. Melody, welcome back to the show.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure to be here. Well, like I said, it's timely talking to you. Somebody settling on a house next week may not be the best market to do it, but I got to get my forever house. And for anybody who didn't catch the first interview with Melody in Q3, beginning at Q4. Last year, just a little background, Melody's a housing market analyst

and independent researcher. She's based in Tennessee. She runs the M3 underscore Melody Substack, which is great. I highly recommend subscribing to it if you want to stay up to date on this. She's doing deep dive analysis on housing data, labor markets, and the intersection of government policy with real estate, former mortgage industry professional, who now does investigative field reporting, literally visiting homeless camps, detention centers, in distressed neighborhoods to ground truth the data she studies um collaborating with other researchers and getting uh data from fred nar census and county level records and uh like i said i think your most recent newsletter that you dropped last week talking about uh home sales in

december uh the retail sort of credit situation and the stress the consumer is under is something that many people are not aware of because we're being told that the economy is running hot. It's the best economy ever. But if you look under the hood, things are not all well from your perspective. So what are you seeing out there, Melody? Yeah, no, I think you summed it up nicely. I mean, you know, we've been seeing this under the covers trouble for some time, especially in what I'll call government subprime FHA. You know, when those student loans started reporting to credit again, it really impacted a lot of the people who should be forming households. And so you had people going from 750 credit scores to 550. And so very quickly, you know, credit got

cut off. At the same time, you know, in the mortgage market specifically, guardrails went on the FHA program, which were being taken advantage of. A lot of fraudsters were taking advantage of it but essentially you could just keep not paying over and over and you would go get another workout and another workout and so guardrails went on that program so um you could when we look at stuff in the aggregate marty i think this is where everybody you know can have that false sense of calm because it looks okay like oh you know home equity that looks like that's great not unlike the last time people will often say but there's so much going on that's new that people don't understand.

Like today, for instance, Klarna reported, right? And they had a loss and they are very much some of the people that use Klarna, buy now, pay later, are the exact people that would be, that we would hope would be out there buying homes.

But unfortunately, they have to, you know, basically finance their burritos. And so, you know, you look at the youth unemployment rate. I mean, so I guess in it, There are so many things, so much weakness under the surface that almost no one is paying attention to. And so in all pockets of the market, be it in mortgage where you're starting to see delinquency rise and we're going to see that from here, you're actually starting to see the prime books get impacted and they always come after the subprime, you know, when the layoffs happen.

And the issue now is a lot of this lending was made on inflated credit scores and that did not include, you know, the student loans and things like that or, you know, those eviction moratoriums. And now those inflated credit scores are coming down with student loans reporting. So it's just a much murkier picture than what people and I don't know how anyone can say anything positive. I mean, existing home sales last year were the worst since 1995, and we've increased population by over 20 percent. I mean, so, you know, this market is completely frozen. You had a lot of rage delisters last year that couldn't get the price they wanted. And so they just took it off the market. But what you've seen since the recent Bitcoin route, kind of what happened there and the wobbliness in the stock market is inventory is flying to the markets.

i had had been coming off but now it's flying on non-seasonally this isn't the time of year you would typically typically your inventory bottoms in february so well i thought it was interesting that you covered uh the bitcoin price drop and gold and silver in this newsletter because i'm not sure if you caught on to this meme but i think bitcoin is a leading indicator of liquidity right yeah it trades 24 7 365 uh it's very easy to sell and get cash and so if a liquidity crisis is pending it's one of the first assets to go and so that's what we've been talking about in the bitcoin space with this this price drop of 36 percent 48 since the highs of late october early november last year is that something's got to be wonky in the back of the

system from a liquidity perspective and i think a lot of the data that you highlighted in your newsletter last week points to this i mean looking at um credit card spending in december alone looks like people were tapped out of cash and really pulling out the plastic to to do their spending around christmas time and then i think it would also be important to really dive into the um the new home listings and in home sales in december because those are some pretty historic lows in terms of what's coming to market what's actually being sold yeah so uh specifically uh on the new home side we're gonna get uh results tomorrow for both november and december and and we you know we've been going off we only got october because census

is the one who prepares that but on the existing home side i mean yes a lot of people wanted to blame the storm, Marty, but California is our biggest housing market out there. And the storm came very late in the month. It was just, I mean, these were just really bad sales, like worse than January, 2007, worse than January, 2008. And, you know, again, the population is much higher. I think there's some things going on though, that a lot of people don't understand, which is, I think that the National Association of Realtors, these listing sites, the MLS, they're losing relevance. And so I think that we're actually having there are quite a few transactions that aren't being captured in their statistics because you had a lot of people. They did this back in the 80s, too, when rates rose is you had a lot of seller financing because, you know, people couldn't get approved at the higher interest rates.

And so the seller would say, I'll finance this for you. Um, those and, and selling homes. So some of those, some of the transactions are just not being captured a lot of them by the investors as well. And so, you know, we're just, the housing market has always taken it. The indicators are very lagged. Uh, the data is not real time because a lot of it to really get accuracy is pulled from County records. And, uh, that is, that can be, there's over 3000 counties in the country. And some of them, believe it or not, are not on any kind of e-record platform. They're still mailing stuff in.

So, you know, I just say that because all those sales are horrible. I mean, they're just absolutely horrible. I think we are missing a component of the housing market right now with these private note actors that are out there transacting not on the MLS. So I just kind of wanted to state that Um, because I think people are going to be surprised when they realize, um, how much inventory is out there. And because I talk to them all the time, they say, well, look, look at what was on the MLS

in 2008, there were 4 million homes and now we only have a million. And I'm like, um, yeah, but there've been studies that 50% of transactions aren't like, let's say in Austin weren't handled through the MLS. So we have, we're just, it's a very murky, muddy picture that hopefully I haven't lost everyone on those details. But what we are starting to see is median listing price. So that's the idea that the median of whatever the listing price was, that has now come in negative year over year for two months in a row. It's now under $400,000 for the first time since 2022. You know, while the builders, on the other hand, for their prices, they have been selling under the existing home price for almost a full year.

In the last cycle, we saw that one month, one month in June, I think, of 2006. And so you've got these crazy fundamentals where the new homes are selling below $400,000, a median price. And then that's not even including the $50,000 of incentives they're putting on top of that. And so we just got builder sentiment and it went down again as well. So I'm really looking forward to new home sale results tomorrow because it'll give me a clearer picture. But at this moment, last year was the worst we've had in over 30 years, which is insane. Just anecdotally to confirm one of your theses there, I mean, the house that I'm buying, we did it off market. So it didn't hit. We're in a neighborhood where you have a bunch of aging out boomers who want to hand it off to younger families.

And so we're able to do that transaction directly. And I think there's a lot of that going on, at least where I am. I do, too. And then, you know, if you're not pulling from public record, then no one really knows what the median price is out there. you know if homes aren't selling that are you know uh or they're selling but not being captured in the mls then we really have no idea what is going on out there but what you can get a sense of you know because i track 85 markets is there's price cuts everywhere they're just not selling those houses they're just continuing to do price cuts and so it's going to be one of those gradually then suddenly things you know when you actually can get someone in the market to buy but that's the thing there's just nobody left to buy and the institutionals are not interested at these

price levels well this comes back to something else you covered in last week's newsletter which is not farm payrolls and the revisions and i think that's um one thing that always makes me chuckle is you get the the headline number and then nine months a year later you get the revisions and nothing's as rosy as it was originally reported no and that just seems to be happening on every front. Right. And so I, I think, you know, just take the new home, uh, sales price for a minute. They, they shaved almost, they revised five years of history through the COVID and shaved $30,000 off of the new home price high. Okay. Peak they, it was at 496. They revised and said, no, then they didn't tell us why they really tell us why, but now it was at the peak was 460,000

on the new homes and just five years of what we thought was reality just got wiped out and so i that that's the limitation i think of the data and that's why i think you have to go look for yourself and you also have to you know track non-traditional uh metrics because um there's just we're not getting the full picture out there in any way yeah well sticking on the jobs market too i mean you highlight that there's a bit of a jobs mirage with education and health services carrying the entire labor market and we've come to find uh with health services specifically it's a lot of that's driven by overt fraud exactly that's where a lot of those somalis uh jobs were you know that's where they sit and so what happened after the american rescue plan

is all this money went out to the municipalities and they they created all these programs like housing affordable daycare programs whatever and they employed a lot of people theoretically although I think a lot of it was fraud. And so that's why you've seen that job growth. But what's happening now, Marty, is these municipalities have run out of money and it's not coming. I mean, California is a great example

of they are in so much trouble. Chicago, another example, they don't have any more money to fund these programs and they're not going to get it from federal. They might get a little, but they're not going to get enough to sustain them. And so we're looking at a bunch of municipalities in crisis which will impact those education and health services jobs which is the only jobs that

were created last year really yeah and if you're not getting a health service or education job you're getting a second job which is well right right you know that's the highest percent of workers holding two part-time jobs ever right now yes ever in the series since i think it goes back to the 60s so yeah that's nuts it's so two two part-time jobs just to make ends meet i mean that's insane yeah and then i mean we don't want to be too dimmerish here but we're trying to just tell exactly what's going on you also mentioned like private credit in last week's newsletter and that was actually funnily enough the fomc meet uh meeting minutes from last month came out earlier this week and private credit was an area that the the board highlighted as something to pay

attention to and that is wearing them and this is another thing that's not tracked in this space like so so what you know you have your old traditional hard money lenders which would like you you don't it's like a personal loan um but they were very they're they were usually regional and they would make you pay a huge down payment or an exorbitant interest rate to kind of cover their risk. What private credit did is they came in and when they thought they're sophisticated underwriting models, they weren't that sophisticated. They just went off the credit score basically. And so I've talked to people in this space that are freaking out because they know those credit scores were inflated i mean look at clarna today like that that is we knew this was

coming uh because we knew that the numbers they were reporting for delinquency could did not add up but yeah and so you've got a ton of private credit out there and the banks have lent to um you know people like tricolor and and those actors who have gone out and lit money and they're not recording deeds uh so we don't know if there's money lent against the house and they're also many of them aren't reporting to credit you know and so it's it's just a big and and we know that the shadow market is about two and a half times bigger than it was during the last crisis yeah i saw a headline yesterday about subprime auto loan delinquency rates skyrocketing and Obviously, 90 plus day delinquency rates on real estate are rising as well.

I'm just wondering how much of that is due to the immigration policy of the last year and how many immigrants that were here illegally but were able to get FHA loans and subprime auto loans simply had to leave the country, which is driving that up. But regardless, there's no one can really track that. you know i've been trying to get good data on that but there's just not really good data yeah well you're talking about the 90 plus day delinquency rates um in real estate specifically and there's some sort of foreclosure game going on oh the sub two uh yeah i'll talk about so i'll i'll talk about what's going on in delinquency so um basically uh when the guardrails went on that FHA loss mitigation program, which was just basically an open till to whoever wanted to come take advantage of it. That meant that we were going to see serious delinquency increase because

they are no longer eligible for some of these workouts, or they have to do things like make a trial payment. So let me give you, I have one borrower and one of my client books who went back six times and has been delinquent for the past two years, but nowhere near foreclosure yet, Marty and so you know because all that government intervention and workout and so that that's all finally running out believe it or not and will run out over the next 12 months and so that serious delinquency is going to go up it will get a little bit of improvement we always do in the spring with like bonus payouts and tax refunds and things like that what'll be interesting to track is how much, because like for auto, it didn't help last year.

So we'll be watching all of that. But what you are talking about, so this is something the mortgage industry has no ideas going on. It's called sub two, are subject to mortgages. And what these investors did is they would, when you are in default, the servicer has to record something called a notice of default or a list pendants saying that you're about to be a complaint will be filed against you. Um, so the investors will go research those and then they'll go contact you and they'll say, Hey, listen, um, I got a deal for you. I could take over your mortgage payments for you. Um, and if you sell me this house, um, and I could maybe give you an equity sweetener, or you could rent from me for a little while. And this investor is

trying to find someone, uh, while they're doing all that, they're trying to find someone to buy the home from them. What's happening now, initially, these investors would record those deeds. But there's this thing called a due on sale clause, that if you sell your home, your note becomes immediately due and owing. So what's happening now is these investors as we as I knew they would, because they always do. They walked away. And now the borrower is on the hook because they're still on the note um and so they're being you know foreclosure proceedings are going against them they may not even be living in the house anymore marty but this is a huge uh kind of it's part of that private note shadow market that i was talking about and i think this

is one of the things that's kept delinquency lower um but people can no longer when home prices aren't appreciating you cannot get a buyer to come in and just you know pay ridiculous money for that house anymore and so they're they're you know they're walking away they can't make the payments so there's just a ton of stuff going on in this market and that's up to carry the the investors are walking away because they don't have the cash or are they just saying hey this isn't worth it and yeah those things yeah uh it's not worth it or they don't have the cash so freaks if you've been listening for a while you've probably heard us all talk about bitkey it's a bitcoin wallet built for people who want self-custody to actually fit into their lives

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it out yeah last month or the fomc it's becoming abundantly clear that private credit is in trouble and we had what was a blue owl last night stop uh stop redemption some other retail oriented uh private equity funds it seems like right all the cash that was printed and flushed into the economy in 2021 2020 it's not getting the return that those investors hope they would no and you know especially there's so much private credit in real estate you know like 20 to 25 percent of loans and private credit i mean of commercial real estate or private credit loans and i mean so yeah this This is a dumpster fire and it's, um, you know, and I guarantee you that a lot of the people that are at these firms know how much trouble they're in, but they're not telling

anybody, you know, it takes a long time as we can see. I mean, Blackstone, for instance, is in a ton of trouble and, um, you know, and, and it's, but they, they can keep up appearances, but they're running out of time. Um, they're losing enough on the commercial real estate. They're losing enough on their single-family rental business that I think we're going to start seeing impacts in Breit, for instance. You know, we'll hear about them gating redemptions again as well, probably in the near future. That's been one of my sort of tinfoil hat theories with Trump announcing that these investors can't buy single family homes anymore. And his $200 billion mortgage buying facility, I don't know if it officially launched, but he announced it. They'd already been doing it. They'd already been buying the MBS. Yeah.

Yeah, particularly with the former though. It's like, is it just a slight bailout? You're going to say they can't buy them. It's a total bailout. Yeah, that's a bailout for them. Because I was in the room with one of them in September, and he's like, we've been chasing price for a year. They don't get a homestead exemption, so their taxes are much higher. Their insurance is higher. And so they can't – as soon as these long-term rentals, the leases expire, they're rehabbing them and selling them, which is why you're seeing price declines in places like San Antonio and Atlanta and Tampa because you have very large institutional presences in those cities.

yeah it's a bailout marty i mean that's i i guarantee you this is phase one oh you can't buy these homes anymore phase two is like hey you know we'll give you a deal if you sell these homes uh you know through one of our affordable housing programs well that's what i was saying it maybe they have like a btfp uh btfb facility we're gonna say hey we'll just buy we'll buy these assets of par for 100 i i i bet we'll get there yeah and so where where do you think the sort of rubber meets the road and this becomes obvious to the market oh i don't know you know the fact that we're in an election year like um you know i i think that there is like there's a it's accumulating the awareness like you know it's no longer just florida and texas like california is

on the board, like it is on the board. You're starting to see a deceleration in the Midwest and Northeast on their home prices. And I think pretty soon the Midwest will turn because they just, I mean, investors descended on them because they were the last place you could get a decently priced single family home. But I think it's going to take till the Northeast has some sort of awareness for there to be national awareness um and the northeast has a ton of problems around their demographics and you know those census updates are huge uh showing everybody they didn't quite get the population game that they thought and um you know the northeast very low owner occupancy which means um you got a lot of mom and pop investors

most of which are boomers who are aging out and will be I mean what is what's really interesting I'm seeing in the cities I track is that the the rate of folks who are deceased property owners like so you can track who's deceased is I mean in some cities up 25 percent year over year and so you know this is going and Charles Schwab did a study and said 70 percent of the time people who properties sell them. And so all these things take a little bit of time. It takes time to get through probate. But I think the demographics are going to really start to become obvious in places like the Northeast and Boston and actually Philly and Pittsburgh both have been showing price weakness. But I think until the Northeast falls, there probably won't be large scale awareness.

But with the price cuts I'm seeing, you know, once we can get activity in the market, we are definitely going to see that suddenly, you know, hit the gradually then suddenly. But we could skate for another another selling season based on, you know, hopium and promises. um but i i have a feeling we're gonna see uh some disorder in this selling season especially in places like texas and california do you think this is necessary oh yeah i mean yes i mean if they'll let it happen um they're gonna try everything but everything there's just there's a point where everything doesn't work anymore you know like everything they've tried like like i love to talk about they bought mortgage-backed securities back you know in 2009 and uh you know prices just kept plummeting um and it didn't do anything like it created a little

refi boomlet in 2010 um but now we've got people like the fed reported over 43 percent mortgage refi rejections and so people can't even uh you know they can't qualify for a refinance it's the highest in their series, you know? So it's just, it's just a slow burn that is, it's gaining speed and gaining traction. But if we could get transactions, we would see true price discovery. And yes, it's absolutely necessary because, you know, household median income is not even in the same ballpark as, you know, median homes prices. And so who's going to buy these? It's not going to be the institutionals it's not going to be uh your millennia your your you know your cohorts coming of age i mean the unemployment rate in the 18 to 24 is insane um so like we're not going to

form households until the affordability problem is fixed and so yeah i think this is necessary yeah then you have the ai boom happening which is telling the uh gen z and gen alpha don't even try to get a job right as if their lives couldn't be more depressing you know like it's just it's it's kind of yeah it's really it's really not good for that cohort right now no well you have the whole k-shaped economy meme becoming more prominent i think it's becoming more confirmed it is uh oh yeah it's not easy out there uh particularly for the younger generations and again going back to demographics and push coming to shove with boomers aging out and um just factually dying out as well like the flood of supply that just if you're just looking at the math that is due to hit

the market uh is going to be pretty significant and this goes back i mean this is something i've always been curious about with new home builds too when you consider the quality of new new builds compared to older builds particularly if they're built like 50 years uh or longer ago they're actually sturdier like the house we're buying is is very old and i feel more comfortable in that than some of the new builds coming up and this whole supply um meme that's been going out there you have podcasters like the all-in guys and the president um this administration saying we just need more supply to bring um to bring prices down i don't think that's the case And on top of that, the new supply is not a quality build at the end of the day.

No, because who was building it? And, you know, it was subcontractors of subcontractors, but they were illegal immigrants. That's who. And often, you know, on these new build sites, Marty, it's a little scary. Like you're, you're seeing, like we did one video where we just went around, got the Jack Daniels bottle, the Medela cases, empty cases, like the empty beer bottles that were just all over. I think it was Lenard job site. And so, you know, the quality is horrendous. There just wasn't, I mean, all these thousands of new home communities I went to, you didn't have, these did not look like professionals building these homes.

Yeah. and nor were they managed by professionals on site yeah so how much of like the lack of new home sales is being driven by people looking at these being i'm not buying this paper mache box right and then i think that's part of it what is the exposure to these yeah and not only that they built luxury it's like who are you building for like you know i know in 21 we saw wages rise but not like something crazy but that's what happened is all the builders went out there and built for the californian and new yorker that was coming to their town and built luxury apartments and all luxury homes like these gigantic some of the spec homes i've seen out there just blow my

mind like 13 million dollar spec house 25 million dollar spec house meaning they didn't have a buyer they just built that house and it's like this massive luxury structure that you can go in all the 85 markets i track and you can see this luxury sitting empty there are not enough people to buy those homes and so i think you're gonna have um there's gonna be a lot of bulldozing when people really finally start to deal with the problem but we're we're far from that right now unfortunately like people people are still believing that it's an inventory shortage the i mean we talked about this last time around but when i was in austin uh there was one of these luxury builds around corner from us we moved in 2021 it finished construction i believe in the beginning of 2022

when we left june of last year was still sitting there up for sale yeah and and what's crazy is a lot of these cities are still building them like phoenix i'm just like you people are nuts i mean and and they're everywhere and it's so weird it's like these developers they never just drive around the town they never just even go two blocks over like nashville is another good example if you if and when you go back like there's a attached to downtown it's just like apartment on top of a part i mean if all of those if 50 of those apartments and they're all new were filled you would never be able to leave your house because the traffic would be so bad the congestion because they just built all these things on top of one another with no parking and that's the really

sad thing about a lot of this is that uh people just you know set new builds down in cow pastures wherever they could find you know they could build they didn't think about infrastructure and so you know and i've seen some really uh sad small towns be destroyed across the country due to like okay you're outside of raleigh oh that's going to be the new apple um headquarters oh no not so much maybe not you know or whatever so um and so they went to these little towns and just like destroyed them they like bought up all these older homes and fixed and flipped them or just you know put those new build communities but there's no way to get in and out of these towns like it's all you know two lane it's just it's so it's so sad very high time preference uh describe it as

the high velocity trash economy where you're just building to build to hit your uh absolutely absolutely what do you think the knock-on effects of all this will be um well we're gonna see crime increase a bit i mean if that i mean that's that's an effect because the vacancy out there is a massive problem that nobody's talking about um and you know it's only a matter of time when all the homeless in austin figure out you know 10 miles uh south there's an empty new build that nobody's policing. It's like, why don't we just go set up shop down there? Um, you know, but I think you're seeing it already in cities like Dallas in the downtowns. Uh, they're, they're just, they're, they're terrifying. I wrote a, an article for Unica's research last week, which was

called creepy is not cool because, um, these downtowns are creepy. I mean, they're just creepy. You don't want to be in them, which means they're never going to be able to get, you know, they're not going to be able to attract new business down there either. And so I think you're going to have an increase in crime. You know, we're already seeing an increase in homelessness. And so, but later down the line, if you're not in debt and this is really important, don't get into stupid debt. And you have a job, like you have a job, maybe you're a plumber. Maybe you, you know, instead of going to school,

you went and did a trade um then you're going to be in a good position to get a home and so that that's the the long you know after a few years that's the effect and some of these markets it'll be before then um as well but yeah i mean we're looking at i i think we're going to be looking a lot of municipalities like filing bankruptcy and i think they'll probably be begging for help from the federal government to deal with these vacant homes um so and because a lot of these homes were bought with all cash during this last cycle, which means they're not sitting on a bank's balance sheet, which means you're not, the grass isn't getting cut. Uh, the pipes aren't getting winterized, the molds not getting removed. Uh, so that means all kinds of issues. I mean,

I saw it when I managed to fault during the last crisis. I mean, these homes get into the worst shape um and you almost can't even recover them because you know they're just in such a state of disrepair yeah when you say downtown dallas is great like so what do you mean specifically what are some examples so so uh what's crazy about dallas uh is they've got these massive um you know high rises uh commercial real estate completely empty and on the back of it uh you see a stroller and evidence of homeless that have been living there um and then right next door they have this massive high-rise that's being completed office building but if you walk in downtown uh dallas like it's just it's a ghost town it's a ghost town um and and it's creepy

because you're walking around it uh you know you're seeing these what looks like homeless camps in downtown Dallas so uh you know that that's and but this is every I mean it's every like San Antonio you know a very similar situation I when I was in San Antonio I saw somebody OD right in in front of us like we were in the truck like filming downtown right next to us just OD I mean it it feels as if most people haven't been to their downtown in a very long time because they just are unaware with how how creepy these places have become because they're just empty so freaks this rep is brought to you by good friends at silent silent creates everyday fair day gear that protects your hardware we're in bitcoin we have a lot of hardware that we need

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federal reserve is k-fob um do you think similarly the projection of everything is is all well and great is k-fob too and they know things are not all well under the hood and they're just trying to narrative craft until they can uh find an excuse to actually flood the system with more liquidity yeah so i you know this is a question i just i i obsess over i can't you know it's like um they have to know some of it um and and if you know but i have a feeling they don't know all of it because i talk to people in government now and about their cities and say did you know this do you know that they don't know you know um because that's what's happening now is i'm getting contacted by more policy focused people who want um to talk to me about

maybe solutions finally that's happening um but they aren't aware of how much inventory they have And in places like Texas and in some unincorporated areas across the country, you didn't even have to file permits. And so a lot of local leaders don't even know. And so I think it's funny, like Pulte followed me for years before he got, and you know, he would share my stuff. And all I ever do is talk about the inventory shortage myth. And, you know, but the day one into the administration, he, you know, sang a different tone tune. And and I actually know the CFO of Freddie. He was one of the last people standing because they went in and gutted the executives at Freddie. I mean, he was my boss during the GFC for a certain age. He has to know.

I haven't spoken to him, but there are just so many clear telltale signs if you are in the know. And so it's weird in mortgage specifically, like people who originate the loans never talk to people who service the loans. And so the originators never realize what's happening on the back end. And so I think we're still in that part of the cycle where the origination narrative is kind of driving the narrative. But in servicing, when I talk to the big servicers, they know what's what's happening. So I think it's probably a combination of they know, but they don't know the scale. But if it were me and I would never do this, I don't want to be a politician. But if I were a politician, I would I would do probably what they were doing, like just say whatever.

Like, what is it? You know, you're just he's speaking to whatever interest group in that moment. But you have to look at what the policy is. And when they put those guardrails on FHA, that was a real action. And that's going to have real consequences. And they have to know that delinquency on FHA is unbelievable. And so there have got to be people on that side of the house that understand that this is really, really bad. Yeah. Is there anything similar going on to sort of just vanilla bank loans?

I've been reading Bill Moreland's bank reg data, and he was saying that they're just disguising sort of their exposure to these delinquent loans by some sort of 12-month window that they're able to push it off the balance sheet. It looks like it's better than it actually is. Yeah, and Fannie and Freddie and FHA hasn't done as much of this recently, but they do these things called non-performing loan sales. And so they'll literally take their delinquent book and sell it. and then turn around to you and say, Hey, our delinquency is only 0.67%. Well, where'd those loans go? Okay. Well, they went to private hedge funds who then turn around and sell it to individuals who don't report to credit. And so, you know, like we just, we just don't have a very clear view of what's really, but yes, the, the, the, you know, I try to help people understand

that what they did is instead of waiting for the crisis, they took these, they took the old loss mitigation programs from the GFC and they put them on steroids and they took away all the requirements and things you had to do. Cause back then you had to virtually re-underwrite the loan. Well, they said, you don't have to do that anymore. You don't even have to ask for their financials. I mean, this is crazy, Marty. I mean, that's crazy. Like, you don't even want to know if they can pay? Like, what?

Like, why would you? It's all a game of extend and pretend. And so we've had, if you think about it, we've had enough, like the same amount of workouts that we had after the last cycle, times about two or three. And that's what's kept us skating for this long. And now that stuff's running out. So it's just like what Bill talks about. Yeah. And it's funny, too. I mean, talking about extend and pretend. And I don't know if this went anywhere, but you're mentioning Bill Pulte, the 50-year mortgage that was floated in December. What was your reaction to that?

Oh, I was furious. Yeah, I didn't want to talk about it, but like literally everybody, I got so blown up. I mean, my life went crazy for a couple of weeks, but I was just like, this is so stupid. I can't even talk about it. Because, you know, by year 11, if anyone in this country, like, knew what an emergization schedule actually looked like, they would not borrow money. I mean, but we're not taught that in school. But by year 11 of that loan, you would have paid $270,000 in interest. That is what a median home should be. Our median home prices should be around that $250,000 mark, you know? And so that's just nuts.

that's nuts you know um and it's just debt slavery it's just another form of debt slavery and and believe it or not they had them back during the last crisis as well like some people you can do them in california um and they're doing what's called a 40-year modification right now and it's not helping anybody because basically your payment goes down by like 20 and then you add 10 10 more years to your loan i mean i just hope people understand please don't do this like just please that's just you're gonna be a slave forever well you see this extend and pretend not only the 50-year mortgage but i'm not sure if you caught google wanted to issue a hundred-year bond yeah i'm there yeah sorry yeah i did to fund their uh their data center expansion and people

look at that like oh look long-term financing it's like no that's we need to get suckers at the table to give us cash so we can do this and push our exactly our payments out a century it's just so nuts some of the things you see going on right now just make your head hurt i mean you know but a lot of it is just you know it's just a lot of delusion still well what are your thoughts on this data center expansion and how does it affect i guess commercial real estate yeah i mean industrial is already uh they their vacancy is increasing i mean what i saw across the country was a lot of new data centers for sale and for lease. And, you know, although I, you know, I forget how to say his name, Torsten Slok or whatever

from Apollo, like he has this chart out there that shows that kind of data center construction peaked in 2023. So, I mean, Marty, I think we might be at a point where it like it's already happened. We're just not aware. Like, like the slowdown is already happening, even though they're all out there talking about building, you know, data centers on the moon and blah, blah, blah, blah. I think that's just the, somebody give us some money for ridiculous idea kind of thing. Um, but I think that, so two things, one, um, social media use peaked in 2022, you know, I think the numbers

from open AI, you know, they're going down. Like, I think, I think this is all peaked already and we're just we're still dealing with you know kind of the delusion and then the second thing that's um going on is uh you know the public is they're pushing back on this massively all over the country moratoriums people showing up furious at um city council meetings because their electricity bills are going up and this is i mean you know uh desantis has gotten on this early uh and then Bernie Sanders kind of got in and now the Democrats are, this is going to be a huge midterm issue in my opinion. Um, and so I think we're not going to have all that construction. I think that we're just still running through the, uh, uh, the, uh, you know, the mania mode right now. Um, but

that in reality, I think they all know that, that, that doesn't even make any sense. We should be focused on if we believe um in this technology uh we should be focused on how to to scale it you know like how to how to get the kind of power that wouldn't just take down the entire grid or whatever um but i have a conspiracy theory on this one that i actually believe a lot of what was written into the bbb is about fortifying the grid versus uh you know maybe construction because i mean uh construction for a private sector because i you know the remember when they did that big infrastructure builder and covid like what happened like nothing you know and it's like our grid is not in good shape and so i don't know if you saw the uh tweet by trump

before the storms that he was going to tap data centers for power um to shore up the grid and i so i think that some of this might actually be a way to sell infrastructure improvements um wrapped in an ai mania narrative um just to yeah i actually wouldn't be mad at that like i think it's critically necessary we need energy generation capacity expansion we need transmission expansion to your point the grid is not in a great spot right now it could certainly be better and we've seen this in bitcoin like that's i've been in bitcoin mining for almost a decade now and that's one thing we do very well is demand response and so like in ercot the tba where you are and mining operations that um we're in certain uh certain um price programs uh that we get

where we get a good deal because when and this happened three weeks ago when the storm hit when demand spikes like we get we get asked to shut down we're able to send that electricity back um to residential consumers yeah that's kind of cool i mean you know um But that's that's specific to Bitcoin. You can do that with Bitcoin miners because Bitcoin is a distributed system. And so shutting down mining operations in Tennessee because it's cold doesn't disrupt the Bitcoin network. It may slow down block production by a few seconds to a few minutes, but that's not going to stop transactions from ultimately being processed. And so you have a unique use case within Bitcoin mining where you have this sort of responsive, controllable load that can turn off in a moment's notice. But when it comes to the AI, particularly if you're training models and running inference, like those operations can't be disrupted. Bitcoin is called disruptible load that exists. And so if we are going to build out these data centers and this infrastructure, I think the Bitcoin mines need to be there.

The AI data centers need to be paired with Bitcoin mines that provide that disruptible load to send electricity back to residents when they need it, when demand spikes. Right. Yeah. I'm actually going to be doing a trip here soon to Stargate and a bunch of the different data centers in the South. um you know i because i want to see what's really going on there i'm you know we can't trust what we're being told that's that's what you know uh my conclusion and the way that i really understood what was happening in housing was i went out and looked and so that's what we're gonna do is go go look at some of these big sites and see you know the ones in memphis uh i mean that that that's going to be a very interesting case it looks uh you know uh they're getting sued um so you know i i just think this is there's going to be a ton of pushback on these i saw ed dowd

tweet something funny that i actually believe in that i think what they're doing is spurring this anti-technology movement like people are saying i mean i don't want smart technology in my house i don't you know i don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night when amazon aws goes down and my bed like bolts me out of bed by raising up or or suddenly it's 150 degrees in my bed like and and these are the types of things that you know i just we don't need that that's just stupid like what does that do and then you know these these appliances that they're all smart uh they die in like two years the software dies like whatever and you know so there's no quality so i think actually what we're probably going to see is kind of the rise of a um you know

i don't know more i don't want this stuff you know a bunch of uncle ted acolytes coming out of the woodwork to say hey right yeah it's uh i'm i'm very big anti smart home guy but again so i've been using ai uh tftc to help just automate some stuff on the back end it's been extremely helpful but to your point it's sort of threading the needle and figuring out what the what the appropriate trade-offs are like how to use this appropriately then i'm sure you saw yesterday that sort of white hat hacker research group found out that the company doing kyc aml for open ai is just automatically piping all the information to the government and you have this surveillance panopticon that is being erected behind the scenes alongside this ai technology

and yeah there's a right way and a wrong way um to do everything including ai right and all layers of it from the energy like to the data center um discussion and the pushback against it we've learned this in bitcoin mining too and i think bitcoin miners actually have it worse because the machines create so much noise you have to be very specific with where you plop these data centers down. They should be in rural areas where you're not going to disrupt residential

neighborhoods because the sound's too loud or it's just ugly and eyesore. I saw earlier this morning in New Brunswick, I'm not sure which state, the citizens there were successfully able to convince their city council to deny

a data center construction. The point being is if your straight office is the right way a wrong way to do it i think ai is figuring that out bitcoin miners figured it out uh beginning of 2020 2021 um you got to be very strategic where you plop these down and absolutely unfortunately due to the state of the grid and generation capacity uh your options are limited but i think we need to get to the base of this industry which is generation capacity and smartly plop down generation in areas where it's not going to disrupt residential consumers yeah i wish we were having conversations about what we want this to be you know it just it feels

like it's so much hype there's not really any like okay what what what do we really want here and you know they're the techno cultic group i cannot uh you know the technocracy um but i put cult in the middle of it uh you know they have very things that i don't think any of us really know and understand as their angles um you know like the by what is the vitalism movement or whatever transhumanism yeah transhumanism um we you know our biggest problem is that we die you know these things and very tower babble type stuff um so we're not really sitting down and talking about what we want this to be like the larger society like the tech bros have a very specific idea and i just wish we'd have that conversation but i'm just going to give you a funny example for you

know for people to like how much of this is narrative how much is reality like you know when that software route happened last week or a couple weeks ago time is just i don't even know anymore. You know, it was because theoretically Anthropic came out with this legal and marketing service. On the same day, I was talking to someone at a conference, a builder conference where the attorneys are now making bank because they're suing people that used AI for contracts and they're incorrect. And in fact, I was a expert witness on a case where the guy called me in to review he filed a complaint he used ai to file the complaint and i had to go to him and say this is all patently false there's not a single iota of evidence of what you claim in this complaint

well no the letter said and i'm like bring up the letter what did the letter actually say and so there was this moment where his brain is just you know and he he's told me because i i'm a skeptic i believe in certain aspects of the technology but i think the hype is crazy and so he's like you're wrong on ai this was two weeks before and then you know basically his entire case was it was not a single uh fact was correct in the complaint um so i just you know we're just not there yet and i and i say all the time you can believe in the technology not the hype but we're not being we're not having real conversations about it in my opinion and what i saw in corporate america is they don't have the the gumption they don't have the stick-to-it-ness like the you know

perseverance to actually see any of this through they give up and they send it offshore they send it to india like they just give up because it's hard work it's really hard work yeah you have to it's not out of the box like some jarvis like wizard that can do everything right you have to know what you're doing you have to know what models do what specific tasks the best and then you have to check the work too yeah you got to check it out yeah well that's what i mean my biggest worry talking about tinfoil hat like conspiracy like i tying the epstein files into this i worry about like a hegelian dialectic situation being put forth where everybody's like look it's all corrupt the epstein files are proving this we need a solution

And then the transhumanist tech bros come in and be like, AI, and we get to minority report, you know, and that's the solution. Everybody welcomes it with open arms because they point at the Epstein files and say, this is abhorrent, which obviously, objectively, it is, but they get, that's how you get the Antichrist and the fake solution. yeah you know i mean i worry about that too and i worry that you know we are the noise out there is so massive right now you know it's just like dialogue conspiracy and i don't mean like conspiracy like that it's i think we can all realize now that the people that were called conspiracy theorists were just the ones paying attention you know right yeah exactly um and so So I, but just the amount of information we're getting, like the, I mean, it's just like, it's, it's, there's a good theory out there for everybody right now to kind of keep them distracted. And I honestly think that's to keep them distracted from what's going on in the economy. yeah sovereign individual predicted this in the 90s the noise to signal ratio is going to

you know so out of sync it's impossible to discern unless you have your facilities about you and your faculties about you and are able to actually take the time to filter the signal through the noise yeah what um bringing this back to housing before we get too far down the uh transhumanist techno rabbit hole i mean the demo of this podcast is interesting it's a bunch of people older than me our core demo is older than me um and so basically with what you're seeing in the real estate market our demos like older millennials gen x and boomers what would your advice to them be particularly the older generations that are sitting on a bunch of real estate and trying to think about what to do i think you have to list it i mean just go ahead

and list it. And just, you know, if you think that you're going to be selling in the next couple of years or want to sell, I think you should go ahead and get it listed because I think all of a sudden at once, uh, you're going to be in the middle of a fire sale and, um, you know, it'll come later to certain places and sooner to other places. And that's what I really try to, to talk about, but, um, you know, just list it and get a more realistic expectation of what your house is probably worth it. And to people that can afford it, I say, go get an independent appraisal, not to do with any loan or anything like that, but just pay for an actual independent appraisal. Because that Zestimate is lying to you. It's not based in reality. It's not a

helpful comparison. And so it's just, it's done a lot of disservice for people, you know? So if you have real estate, you're, you think you're going to sell in the next, you know, two to five years, you may want to consider listing it or getting a real appraisal. And then, you know, I would say for those that want to buy, like, you know, if you're aggressive, there are deals even now out there, but it takes homework. And I think that, you know, during COVID, we all got used to, you know, not doing a lot of work for things. And so you have to be aggressive. But yeah, you know, to me, what's going to happen here because of the silver tsunami is housing is going to become boring again. And it's going to correct to a point

where it is, it correlates to the median income, you know, and they've subsidized this market to death. Like they have literally, you know, so people talk about, oh, what about this new bill that just got passed it's like it's just more of the same and most people could get 25 000 in assistance for down payment in their city like all over the country already and so they've brought in everybody they can into the mortgage market i mean it's just dead it's dead like rates went down massively last week marty i mean a week and a half ago purchase applications went down this week i mean refi went up but not purchased so rates aren't gonna do it well you're certainly not seeing rising wages um so really there's one option out of this you know

and that's home prices have to correct and so if you're banking on that equity for your retirement you know don't be the last one out of the door like it just you know but if you're this is your first home and you think you're going to be here for the next 20 years and you don't have to worry as much about this kind of stuff you know you want to have reserves on hand for sure in case you lose your job uh but you know you've got a different goal uh unfortunately probably about 40 percent of the housing market though is speculation and their goal is you know uh yield and rising home prices and and cashing out that equity um to keep the party going so i mean on that last note there like how how's the airbnb economy all those uh airbnb wizards who emerged in 2021 and

2022 are they tapped out have they fire sold yet or are they still holding on they're so a lot of them are fire selling you know what's funny is they made a transition for a little while to like the whole narrative would be get out of real estate get into bitcoin before you know we kind of saw that route in april or whatever um but yeah so uh they're coming to market and like in some of the more crazy markets like severeville tennessee like you can see the distress is bad and they just built these homes that make no sense you know for families of 15 you know that That is good. It's just not. And then places like San Diego, you know, it's just a full on infestation. And so in Austin and so they're coming to market and I think they'll start, you know, as we can continue to see kind of persistent downturns in travel and that kind of thing that that's just going to accelerate because these things aren't making money and they're a headache.

i mean being a landlord is a headache um and so and airbnb doesn't care about you at all like they treat you like dirt so they're they're coming and you're seeing these like motivated seller and i mean and you're just seeing crazy crazy homes that should have never been built come to market in these in these uh in these vacation spots so yeah i'm thinking of the airbnb we stayed in when we visited austin when we were looking for a house in 2021 and i don't think you could ever sell that to somebody who would actually like want to live in that is their their residential property did it have a theme it did it did my favorite is the bananas theme in nashville that property that like there's so many of them

though like there's the barbie castle i mean there's so many themed airbnbs i mean it's i think it's all this is just an indictment of the federal government the central bank's just pretty money like you become deluded into believing that a banana themed airbnb is a good idea right something sustainable as a business right right and and i agree i totally agree and i just what's crazy is you know the other thing though i try to remind myself is when i just go out into the world and I interview people on the road or Uber drive or whatever, they are way more aware than a FinTwit of what's going on. And so I just kind of try to tell myself, okay, you know, we're dealing with a certain group, select group out there in financial media that is, you know,

a lot of them are, are, uh, in the ivory tower of some sort and they don't really understand what's going on um but the regular americans do yeah yeah in two years of like oh it was completely obvious i just didn't tell you about it oh exactly yeah we could have never seen this coming okie dokie i mean it's just math at the end of the day i mean the problem is you know most of our data is corrupt so we can't even get to the real math um yeah i don't mean is there a fix to that or is it something we just had to deal with i don't i mean surely right like you know this company placer ai can tell you how many cell phones are in one any one city at any time are you telling me we can't really figure out how many houses we have in this country i mean i just don't

i don't get that like and so uh so this a woman i met in australia did a really interesting study she used the utilities she used like the water company to really get true inventory um and i try i've i've gone to a couple different water boards to try to do that and it's harder over here than i think over there um but you know it's just we need real data um but no i think that we are in full they are just shoveling it right now just shoveling it like none of this is is true accurate at all and so i hope there is a i mean i hope that we um i hope that more people start standing up and showing up at their city council meetings and saying they're sick of this and that and you know but it's gonna be us having to take responsibility in my opinion yeah that's funny

to uh maybe just recognize this and bitcoin obviously focused heavily on cpi and um i'm guilty of it i'll put my hand i'm guilty of it myself to a certain extent but like during biden you're looking at the inflation rates you're like oh they're underreporting yeah because they're trying to mask inflation and now with trump inflation rates coming down everybody's like look look it's working it's working it's like well if the metric was manipulated under the prior administration what's to make you believe that it's not manipulated under this one right right what can you believe what can we believe these days i think what you see you know um and even then like that's kind of funny i remember after helene people would argue with me about

something i'm reporting on that i'm that was i saw it right in front of my face and they're telling me i didn't see that you know like but i did you know and i have a picture of it but it's still so i mean i think that we're at a point where it's just um it's what we can see and then sort of triangulate the data i mean i think that that's what i really try to do is like okay this picture in front of us doesn't make sense so how can we put one together like from the outside like frame a picture of what's actually happening um and i think when you can do that when you can kind of triangulate the data and then you can verify about what you see with your own eyes i think that's how we you know can sort of believe something's true

yeah look out for the btfp program for the uh i know for the uh private equity guys in their houses i think that'll be uh i think it's a sly rattle about bailout i 100 i think the same about the trump homes that's a builder bailout right there yeah i mean they're gonna buy them at a certain percent of you know a median like adjusted gross income like they'll say okay you need this to come i'll buy it from you 25 less they'll put some price floor on it actually for these builders and that is a bailout but you know these things tend to uh once they get going there's you know they can try and stop them um but the market force just takes over well we'll be observing we'll be watching we'll be reading your newsletter to follow along hopefully um we can catch up on

this at some point later this year absolutely it's gonna be an interesting spring it really is melody thank you so much everybody make sure you go subscribe m3 underscore melody on sub stack uh we'll link to that in the show notes and we'll uh we'll do this again at some point later this year thank you so much marty thank you peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like

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