The American mortgage market is currently performing its final, pathetic wheeze, and frankly, it’s about time. For decades, the citizenry has been fed the saccharine hallucination that 'home ownership' is the pinnacle of human existence—a white-picket-fence-lined gateway to middle-class nirvana. In reality, it has always been a sophisticated feudal system where the serfs pay for the privilege of maintaining the manor for their banking overlords. Now, that system is sputtering toward its inevitable demise, and the proposed 'cures' are coming from the very architects of the next catastrophe. It is a slow-motion collapse being treated with the urgency of a brunch reservation.

The news that America’s gargantuan mortgage market is 'slowly dying' is the kind of polite euphemism that only a financial journalist with a hefty mortgage of their own could muster. It isn’t just dying; it’s a necrotic mess held together by the duct tape of government guarantees and the desperate prayers of a populace that thinks a 30-year fixed rate is a fundamental human right. Enter Donald Trump, a man whose relationship with debt is more intimate than his relationship with the English language, proposing remedies that promise to turn this smoldering train wreck into a high-octane explosion. The 'remedies' in question are about as therapeutic as a lobotomy performed with a rusty spoon.

The Right’s solution is, as always, to remove the 'shackles' of regulation. They look at the bloated corpses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the government-sponsored enterprises that somehow managed to socialize the risk and privatize the profit for decades—and think, 'What if we just let them run wild again?' It’s the intellectual equivalent of trying to fix a leaky nuclear reactor by removing the cooling rods because they’re too 'restrictive.' The argument is that privatization will magically lower costs, ignoring the fact that private markets are currently allergic to anything that doesn't involve a 15% return and a sovereign guarantee that the taxpayer will pick up the tab when the inevitable 'oopsie' occurs. It’s a recurring comedy of errors where the punchline is always the middle class losing their shirts.

On the other side of the aisle, the Left continues its performative dance of 'affordability initiatives.' They love to talk about down-payment assistance, which is effectively a way to pump more air into a balloon that’s already overstretched. It’s economic arson masquerading as charity. By giving people more money to buy houses they fundamentally cannot afford, you simply drive the price of those houses higher, ensuring that the next generation is even more thoroughly priced out of their suburban dreams. Both sides are fundamentally allergic to the one thing that might actually restore sanity: letting the market crash until prices reflect the reality of stagnant wages rather than the fever dreams of real estate agents and venture capitalists.

The mortgage market is currently a $12 trillion monstrosity, a debt-fueled Leviathan that sustains the entire American economy. If it stops breathing, the whole circus collapses. Trump’s remedies—which include a likely push for deregulation and a potential tinkering with the Federal Reserve’s autonomy—are designed to provide a short-term sugar high to a patient in the middle of a massive cardiac event. Inflaming a housing crisis is just a byproduct of a worldview that prioritizes quarterly growth and optics over the long-term survival of the species. It is a cynical play to keep the bubble inflated just long enough for the current crop of grifters to exit the building.

We are witnessing the terminal phase of a civilization that decided houses weren't places to live, but speculative assets to be flipped, borrowed against, and packaged into 'securitized' garbage. The fact that the average American now spends half their income just to exist within four walls is treated as a minor statistical anomaly rather than the systemic failure it is. We are told to fear the death of the mortgage market, but why? What exactly are we saving? A system where you spend thirty years paying for a pile of drywall and particle board that will eventually be reclaimed by the sea or a private equity firm?

The cynicism is baked into the foundation. The 'remedies' on the table are not meant to help you; they are meant to preserve the solvency of the institutions that hold your debt. Whether it’s the performative empathy of the Democrats or the chaotic greed of the Trumpian Right, the goal is the same: keep the wheels of the debt machine turning at any cost. If that means another housing bubble, or a total collapse of the dollar, or a generation of permanent renters living in 'luxury' pods owned by BlackRock, so be it. The American Dream didn't die; it was just foreclosed upon by people who knew exactly what they were doing.