Mortgage rates are now at their highest rate since 2008, during the Great Recession. On Thursday, Freddie Mac reported that mortgage rates jumped over 6% in the week ending September 15th, up from 5.89% the week before. Last year, it was 2.86%. The reason cited was stubbornly high inflation.
But for Joe Biden, this is just one of the many sacrifices he expects us to make as he continues his policy of sticking it to the Russians at the expense of the rest of us. Who cares if we can’t afford to buy a house? We’re sticking it to the Russians, Team Ukraine is now in the lead, and that’s all that matters.
Yes, we know that the Federal Reserve controls interest rates. But this is part of a chain reaction. Joe Biden has the brilliant idea of using the tensions in Ukraine as an excuse to stick it to the Russians. Predictably, oil prices skyrocket, since Russian oil is being taken off the market. Since it costs more now to transport goods around the world, prices of everything else goes up. The Federal Reserve, whose job it is to combat inflation, raises interest rates in response. Lenders, whose interest rates follow the prime rate, raise their rates in return. People find it much harder to buy houses. Yes, interest rates and inflation were already going up when the “Special Military Operation” started. But Joe Biden’s response only made a bad situation worse.
Even if Ukraine “wins,” at what cost will that be? Bill Clinton’s “win” in Yugoslavia, done for the purpose of “stopping genocide,” may have served its purpose, but it laid the groundwork for failed policies such as Iraq and Afghanistan. In the same way, Ukraine may “win,” but Russia’s conventional military may be so decimated that it relies more and more on its nuclear arsenal, putting all of us at risk. Or the US pumps so much money into propping up Joe Biden’s “Rules Based International Order” that the inflationary costs of the next bailout dwarf the inflation we have today.
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