Trump Targets Institutional Home Buyers, Ignores Wall Street's Role
Donald Trump, the champion of the common person, now vows to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes to address affordability, per Bloomberg. This is rich coming from the same political ecosystem that nurtured the very conditions allowing hedge funds like Blackstone to snatch up hundreds of thousands of homes post-2008 crash. Remember when the federal government incentivized
these purchases, selling off foreclosed homes in bulk to private equity at rock-bottom prices? (See: The Guardian, 2017 ). It's vintage election-year theater: blame the symptom, ignore the disease. Where was this concern for the middle class when deregulation paved the way for massive financialization of basic human needs? One might wonder if this sudden outrage is less about housing justice and
more about a calculated rhetorical play to distract from the enduring cronyism that built these financial empires in the first place.