Niagara of Capital: How Global Capital Has Transformed Housing and Real Estate Markets

Niagara of Capital: How Global Capital has Transformed Housing and Real Estate Markets, explains how the record flow of financial capital into the real estate markets over the last decade stimulated a world-wide explosion in housing production and prices, resulting in a dramatic change in the basic structure of household wealth in most nations, including the United States. Author, Anthony Downs provides a step-by-step analysis of the role easy capital played in generating this rise in household wealth, and examines how the availability of cheap money led to the proliferation of poorly underwritten and risky loans, leading to the collapse of the subprime market and the subsequent credit crunch and stock market decline. Along with the disintegration of the subprime market, Downs outlines other scenarios that could threaten the flow of capital into real estate. Niagara of Capital serves as a primer for those seeking to better understand the role of the extraordinary influx of capital in changing the world-wide real estate market and what part it plays in explaining the current global economic downturn. Downs identifies the major sources of capital, discusses the impact the flood of capital had on housing and commercial real estate markets, describes factors that make housing more affordable or less affordable, explains conditions that cause the flow of capital into real estate to slow or come to a halt, and discusses why capital flows do not continue indefinitely.