Norbert Michel

Jan 23, 2025 | cato.org | Norbert Michel

Most Americans—not just the richest—experienced solid income growth over the past five decades. From 1967 to 2023, the share of households earning (in real terms) less than $35,000 fell from 31 percent to 21 percent, and the share earning between $35,000 and $100,000 fell from more than 53 percent to 38 percent. The share of households earning more than $100,000 essentially tripled, from 14 percent to 41 percent.

Jan 21, 2025 | forbes.com | Norbert Michel

For the past few weeks, we’ve run a series of blog posts on Cato at Liberty under the heading Questioning the Housing Crisis. It argues that the U.S. housing market has not been experiencing a crisis under any standard definition of the term, and it would be unwise to craft housing policy based on the crisis story. The series acknowledges that the housing market still has problems, but there’s a huge difference between a market imperfection and a crisis.

Dec 16, 2024 | cato.org | Norbert Michel

The Wall Street Journal reports President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers are exploring “pathways to dramatically shrink, consolidate, or even eliminate the top bank watchdogs in Washington.” These kinds of reforms can’t come soon enough. As Cato’s new report to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) explains, US financial markets have too many regulations and too many regulators. Many of the regulations protect incumbent firms, exacerbate instability, and inflate costs.

Dec 13, 2024 | cato.org | Norbert Michel

Before getting into the details, I want to cover a few angles in this debate that are too often ignored. First, countless groups call for more widespread mortgage lending as a response to higher home prices, but that policy causes home prices to rise. The easier it becomes for people to get mortgages, the more buyers it enables to bid on the same set of houses. Holding all other factors constant, that influx puts upward pressure on prices.

Dec 12, 2024 | forbes.com | Norbert Michel

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and government shutdowns, the United States experienced an abnormally high rate of inflation. As prices took off, so did interest rates, and the cost of housing rose rapidly, with the median home price increasing almost $100,000. Many potential homebuyers were—and still are—extremely upset. It’s also no surprise that politicians latched on to this issue, offering various proposals to deal with what many call an affordable housing crisis.