There are lots of great artists but popularity is somewhat controlled by a handful of gatekeepers. I'd tend to agree with anticodon's point that people that are elevated tend to be in line with the agenda of those gatekeepers.
This is possible only because of the general demand for dollars. If the demand for trade with the US was based only on our goods and services, then we couldn't import as much as we do. If demand for dollars dried up, then our spending would be constrained and our quality of life would drop. So I think, anyway.
Definitions: There are two sources of demand for USD. One is the ability to purchase oil, and the other is organized international crime. I would consider crime a fair-weather investor, so the big demand for USD is really based on the ability to purchase oil.
First, examine the history of shipping tonnage [1]. Observe how quickly Chinese ports have come to dominate all world shipping. This is representative of the general trend of global supply chains coming under the centralized control of the Chinese government. Nothing presently happening in the US will improve our trade balance in the near term.
Second, examine the beneficiaries of belt-and-road [2]. All of these countries will have an incentive to have reserves of CNY. Some of these countries are significant oil exporters. If oil exporters start hoarding and regularly trading in CNY, then it's a small stretch for, at least some of them, to start trading oil for CNY.
Third, since oil is fungible, any nations trading oil for CNY will peg oil to the Yuan in addition to the Dollar.
Fourth, the governments of some nations, notably Iran, publicly believe that petro-dollars have motivated the government of the US to engage in warfare in and near their countries. They are furthermore publicly opposed to this, and publicly supportive of China ousting US hegemony.
Then, my argument. Belt-and-road gives a large number of nations a reason to hold and trade in CNY. It's a small stretch for some of those nations to start trading CNY for oil as well. Belt-and-road nations will have an expanded connection to the Chinese military, and success of belt-and-road is a face-saving issue for the Chinese government. That means efforts to oppose it could spark military tensions with the Chinese. This makes it plausible that wars to preserve petro-dollars are unlikely to succeed in belt-and-road nations.
There is almost no international demand for USD to acquire US produced goods or labor. This means USD is unlikely to succeed in an environment where it has to compete with CNY as a reserve currency for oil.
You're right, that was probably unnecessarily inflammatory, and isn't a good way to communicate persuasively. I thought I'd justified the statement later, and that would be sufficient. I'll try to allow what I communicate to stand on its own going forward.
Bubbles aren't defined by, as some commenters suggest (not TFA), poor lending practices. Please see investopedia's excellent article on asset bubbles [1].
Houses require maintenance, they go out of style, newer buildings have more amenities, etc. In general they retain their value well, but they do become used over time. Historically (hundreds of years) the value of property is highly associated with income, which is highly associated with inflation. Real estate is conventionally considered to be an asset class that maintains its value relative to inflation.
Presently, enormous amounts of money have been poured into real estate. Housing costs are now disconnected from the ability of people to afford it, or from the potential of the property to extract rents. Price-to-Income ratios and Rent-to-Income ratios are completely out of line right now.
TFA repeats the complaint that housing supply is the issue because wealthy people and financial instruments are buying all the housing and letting it sit empty to appreciate in value. In other words, TFA claims that speculation on housing price increases is evidence that there is no asset bubble. The fact that there is widespread speculation on the price increase of an asset class is, in fact, evidence of a bubble, which is why I called the article ignorant.
The fact is that ~11% [2] of housing in the US is currently vacant. But this isn't just a US issue. If this was a supply constraint it would be a geographically local problem. It's not. It's not even isolated to a single nation. Housing prices are exploding globally [3]. This is a speculative asset bubble. The fact that it's not a bubble based on unaffordable leverage doesn't mean it's not a bubble.
Finally, it's impossible that this issue resolves without a crash [4]. Since we've had inflated prices for maybe a decade now, I expect that it will take somewhere between 5 and 10 years after the crash for prices to normalize. Put it another way: do you expect housing prices to increase exponentially forever? If not, do you expect prices to remain the same, adjusted for inflation? In other words, have we reached the maximum ability of people to afford houses, and this is just the new price? If neither of those things are true, then there is only one other option.