I generally agree - these "victims" are greedy assholes who think that they are about to pull one over on somebody else by knowing this secret insider pump information.

They thought they were going to make somebody else be a bagholder, but were instead the rubes holding the bags. I don't have a lot of sympathy for that.

On the other hand, this is becoming endemic across social media, and is starting to be a serious sociological issue.

Look at the subreddit "MMAT," which was a gaggle of ignorant dumbasses focused on trying to create a short squeeze, but they didn't understand what they were investing in, and now own worthless private, untradable shares of a defunct oil field.

BBBY (the subreddit for Bed Bath and Beyond short squeeze investors) and GME or Superstonk (for Gamestop short squeeze investors) are basically headed down the same path - there just isn't a hard conversion event forcing those groups to fail immediately like with MMAT. But inevitably both companies will see a long, slow slide into obscurity and/or bankruptcy and we're going to have a ton of dumbasses shrieking that they lost all their savings.

At the end of the day, these pump and dumps, or these short squeeze conspiracies - it's all the same crazy nonsense mixed with greedy rubes who think that they're the ones who know some secret, and that they're going to pull off some hijinks to eat somebody else's lunch.

Normally, nobody would have to care that a bunch of mouth breathers lost their shirts by gambling on some dumb investment scheme.

But these are becoming so prevalent now that the general public is starting to lose its sense of normal. People are beginning to not be able to see these conspiracy cults and/or scams for what they are.

Hi Con,

I'm a financial services attorney - not in the real estate space specifically, but a lot of my practice overlaps with that and other markets.

A hot button topic today (though perhaps it has always been so) is affordable housing, and how we encourage development of and access to it as a critical resource.

My question for you is this: Do you think that entities like the FHLBs can actually help the affordable housing problem? And if so, how?

I have always been skeptical of traditional mortgage-related "help" offered to consumers, as it appears to me that, while they might help the individual borrower in the short term, these programs ultimately inflate the market such that everyone is stuck with higher prices in the long run.

People tend to calculate the house they can afford by reverse engineering it - they take what they can afford in a monthly payment, and then work it backwards to arrive at a total house value. Thus why interest rates effect the value of housing, as you well know.

So, my concern is that mortgage programs which make it easier for people to bid higher on property just inevitably get baked into the value of all property, and within a short period of time everybody is back to square one as prices have adjusted to include whatever subsidy you've introduced in the system.

Do you see any way around this fundamental problem? In your view, is there a place for mortgage programs and/subsidies in the quest for affordable housing?