Mike Fellman

How can a Danish pension fund even invest in US Treasuries when it's liabilities are in DKK???

The Fed bullies the bond market all the time, they just won't for the benefit of Trump.

Denmark or any country's investment in US Treasuries is actually largely irrelevant.

Annexing Greenland would still be an outrage.

M4A works by cramming down on providers. So doctors just move to another state under state level single payor.

That said, if the entire country went on M4A, providers would face a ~20 percent pay cut but would have nowhere to go since US docs would still be the highest paid in the world.

The Convex Housing Supply Curve and Its Causes In one of my first posts, I explained what supply and demand really mean in economics. The supply and demand curves are functions which map quantities to prices, not quantities themselves.

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

Vienna's Social Housing Model Holds Promise and Perils Vienna was perhaps best known as the seat of the power of the Habsburg Empire, but in modern times it is better known as a large city with an extensive stock of public or government subsidized housing...

Vienna's Housing Model Holds Promise and Perils

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

Are VA Home Loans a Good Deal? Mostly yes, with some caveats

Veteran's Day Post

Are VA Home Loans a Good Deal?

Mostly yes, with some caveats

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

Explainer: Home Prices and Baumol's Cost Disease You’ll notice a funny thing when you look at a list of states by median home price.

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

The Rise of Data Centers Could Paradoxically Lower Electricity Rates But also present risks for existing rate-payers

By popular demand, my first foray into non-real estate topics.

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

Diseconomies of Scale Plague Dense Housing And make it tough for density to address affordability

Housing production suffers from diseconomies of scale, which helps explains high housing cost.

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

Zoning Probably Makes Housing Cheaper, And That's a Problem. By inefficiently allocating housing across space, it reduces the value of the housing stock.

New Housing Hell

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

I support proposals 2-4 on the NYC ballot, which would make it moderately easier adjust zoning for higher-density housing development. I have to say, seeing how controversial this is among people I know is giving me some new sympathy for the angry YIMBYs online.

Tokyo is not a YIMBY Dreamland It's just a deflated bubble

New Housing Hell

Tokyo is not a YIMBY dreamland, it's a deflated asset bubble.

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

Evaluating the Impact of Fees, Property Taxes, and Construction Delays in California and Texas The much anticipated Rand Corporation report comparing multifamily housing in Texas and California came out in April 2025.

New Housing Hell

I analyze the impacts of the Texas and California real estate tax regimes on housing production.

Spoiler alert:

Cali comes out better than critics would expect.

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

Vacancy Rates are a Silly Way to Estimate Housing Shortages Housing costs have been incredibly salient in the zeitgeist since 2021.

New Housing Hell

Vacancy rates a housing shortage do not make.

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

Stop Comparing Argentina's Rent Control to Rent Stabilization in the United States Argentina’s President Javier Milei is a libertarian darling who abolished rent control by decree in late 2023 upon taking office.

New Housing Hell

Stop comparing rent control in Argentina to US Rent Stabilization

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

Developers and Landlords Interests Largely Align Rising rents are needed for private multifamily development to deliver required rates of return and secure financing.

New Housing Hell

Developers are not the enemy of landlords. Landlords are their customers

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

San Francisco, YIMBY Success Story?!?!? Not exactly, but land use rules did not prevent a solid building cycle which flattened rents.

New Housing Hell

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

She already said she would only serve one term. That's already disqualifying and forces Ds to potentially have to defend an open seat in 2032 years.

SB 79 is Law. Don't Expect Much Building SB 79 is now law, having been signed by Governor Newsom.

New article.

SB 79 brings some welcome changes, but don't expect a building boom.

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

Wall Street did not cause home prices to surge. But the Internet still gets it wrong. Every few weeks, a viral tweet blaming institutional investors incenses YIMBYs.

New Substack

Wall Street didn't cause the housing crisis, but YIMBYs still get the economics wrong (per usual)

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

The Quantity of Buildable Land doe not Determine its Price. People in the YIMBY movement have at times asserted that upzoning magically reduces land prices, or at least the price of apartment-zoned land.

New substack

No matter what some YIMBYs say, the quantity of buildable land does not determine its price.

open.substack.com/pub/precon/p...

But in order for it to be speculation, land prices have to be detached from rents!

The simple and straightforward answer is that it is not speculation. Land prices are rising because the rent that the land can generate is rising. It's not that deep.

But this is an inherent contradiction, since for some on the left, land "speculation " is driving rents higher

In other words, land prices detach fully or partially from the returns(rents) that land generates. Land prices are higher than what rents would justify.

We could define "speculative" demand as any price above which land provides a return which is BELOW a return (adjusting for risk) that equals returns in other asset classes.

Suppose land prices are anchored by the same zero arbitrage equilibrium condition that anchors all asset prices.

Here, land must be priced such that it does not provide a higher risk adjusted return than other asset classes

JW and I have a paper on housing coming out soon, and we agree on this.

I've thought about how land speculation would drive up rents, and I just don't see it.

Quick thread

Did they lower the price of a single family home in a walkable neighborhood?

@jameskerlindsay.bsky.social

Why did you take "statehood" out of your intro?

Your videos on state emergence are some of your very best!