Big shots.

Loudmouths who don't know anything about economics and are living large on predatory rents justify pumping rents and house prices through the roof with the slogan "Economics 101: Supply and Demand!" to tar as a dunce any critic of the practice and heap blame on "immigrants" for amplifying "demand," to which the only possible response, they claim, is to demand higher and higher rents.

This crowing lasts until interest rates go up, free money ends, and the real estate equivalent of a margin call – variable rate mortgages ballooning – descends

Big shots spend their cash flow while the good times roll, as well as appropriating the equity someone needing a roof over their head is buying for them and totally neglect diversifying into securities whose prices positively track the price of debt, like bank stocks, to hedge against central banks increasing their key interest rates to fight the inflation that results from relentlessly escalating house prices and rents. "Have your cake and eat it, too" illustrates big shots' utter ignorance of actual economics.

When the hammer falls, speculators run like crying babies to the courts arguing their "property rights" require tenants to pick up the tab for their ballooning interest payments and bail them out.

Banks when flush with free money have to loan it to make a profit – hence the runaway inflation in house prices and rents – and hedge the mortgages they sell against rising interest rates by making them variable rate. No one thinks, of course, about how sharpies speculating on rental units will make vastly bigger payments in the event. Tenants will make them, they assume, if they assume anything.

Well, they do assume one thing: that banks and speculators always make money and creditors never lose. Someone can always be kicked out onto the street to make a speculator whole, and "investors" somewhere to whom the bank sells bundled mortgages, now bad, can always take the hit. Tenants will pay. "Investors" will pay. Not the banks. Not speculators owing now-unserviceable loans. Because creditors always win and "landlords" always win, because they are so much smarter than the average person.

"Economics 101: Supply and Demand!" explains everything: why house prices and rents always go up and how "investment" works.

Except it doesn't. The entire housing house of cards is built on interest rates high priests in central banks tune to keep the party going and the dominoes from falling. Until the rock (free money) and the hard place (asset-price inflation) inevitably meet.

The solution to these contradictions is to definancialize housing and manage it as a public utility.