High Home Prices Turning American Millennials Into the New Serfs?

By Marc Faber
(Excerpted from the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, March 2017)

Writing for http://www.dailybeast.com (February 4, 2017), Joel Kotkin opines under the title “The High Cost of a Home Is Turning American Millennials Into the New Serfs” that

American greatness was long premised on the common assumption was that each generation would do better than previous one. That is being undermined for the emerging millennial generation.

The problems facing millennials include an economy where job growth has been largely in service and part-time employment, producing lower incomes; the Census bureau estimates they earn, even with a full-time job, $2,000 less in real dollars than the same age group made in 1980. More millennials, notes a recent White House report, face far longer period of unemployment and suffer low rates of labor participation.”

More than 20 percent of people 18 to 34 live in poverty, up from 14 percent in 1980. They are also saddled with ever more college debt, with around half of students borrowing for their education during the 2013–14 school year, up from around 30 percent in the mid-1990s.

All this at a time when the return on education seem to be dropping: A millennial with both a college degree and college debt, according to a recent analysis of Federal Reserve data, earns about the same as a boomer without a degree did at the same age.

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Marc Faber is an international investor known for his uncanny predictions of the stock market and futures markets around the world.Dr. Doom also trades currencies and commodity futures like Gold and Oil.