8 ms·

It's not just raising prices - it's holding prices steady at some point without the concurrent pressure to sell, for example, or manipulating other markets in o

It's not just raising prices - it's holding prices steady at some point without the concurrent pressure to sell, for example, or manipulating other markets in order to raise or lower prices in an area, or using other mechanics to manipulate pricing, across the entire market, depending on the intended actions. If they intend to purchase properties, it benefits them to depress pricing in the area, if they intend to rent, they can afford to impose artificial scarcity until they force renters to meet their rates, and so on. Normal landlords don't have effectively infinite money with no forces bearing prices down, nor do they have the capabilities to influence markets. Even tiny percentage shifts can result in significant fluctuations in the prices consumers see. It's a very nuanced and complex system in which these institutional investors have very outsized influence.

estearum 10mo ago
This is extremely silly. Prices are high because we don't build enough houses which is mostly because it's really expensive to build houses, then the houses we have built are all owned by empty nesters and people with 1 - 3 investment properties. Everything else you're describing is completely ridiculous.
- fc417fc802 10mo ago
  > which is mostly because it's really expensive to build houses, Assuming you're referring to the typical high CoL areas, the shortage has very little to do with the expense of building. The zoning laws don't permit sufficient supply in those areas. And that's quite unlikely to change (at least quickly) because anyone pushing such reform would be obliterating the average Joe's net worth.
  - packetlost 10mo ago
    In areas with low CoL the cost of building houses and the cost of selling a house has a massive impact on the number and type of homes that get built. If it's not profitable for a builder to build a home they simply won't, whether it's because of bureaucratic red tap or economic conditions. There's very strong incentives for builders to take the path of least resistance and highest margin.
    - hparadiz 10mo ago
      The profit margin has to be significantly higher than simply plopping that cash straight into an index fund. The risk of a project failure is simply too high.
      - packetlost 10mo ago
        I imagine the margin necessary scales with the size of the project.
    - fc417fc802 10mo ago
      > If it's not profitable for a builder to build a home they simply won't, Agreed. They will generally build as tall and as dense as they are permitted to because (within reason) it reduces unit cost. Obviously there are limits to that. No one wants to build a high rise in the middle of nowhere. But within high CoL areas they are generally severely limited on both of those aspects. That's due to zoning laws. Of course that's not the whole story. Infrastructure has to be upgraded to keep pace with growth. But that's on the local government to plan and execute properly. Right now they largely just say "no".
    - kelnos 10mo ago
      > If it's not profitable for a builder to build a home they simply won't, whether it's because of bureaucratic red tap or economic conditions. Right, and that bureaucratic red tape is one of the things that makes the cost of building higher. If the builder expects they won't be able to break ground for two or three years because dealing with the planning commission takes forever, or because they'll have to deal with environmental lawsuits before they can build, then they will need to target higher-end buyers (by building a higher-end property) in order to make a profit. And if they can't do that... right, they simply won't.
  - estearum 10mo ago
    Not true. Cost of living is high because local incomes are high which increases the price of land and labor which increases the price of building. Restrictive zoning is bad for lots of reasons, but solving it does not solve affordability. https://www.nber.org/papers/w33694 https://www.nber.org/papers/w33694
    - postflopclarity 10mo ago
      that's a great paper, but did you read it? I don't see the authors reaching this conclusion. in fact, they seem pretty emphatic that restrictive zoning is a major driver of supply bottlenecks.
  - davidw 10mo ago
    Eh, reforms are starting to happen, like here in Oregon. https://bendbulletin.com/2025/12/13/middle-housing-slowly-densifying-bend-neighborhoods/ https://bendbulletin.com/2025/12/13/middle-housing-slowly-de... Or this: https://bendyimby.com/2025/06/12/detached-townhomes-come-to-bend/ https://bendyimby.com/2025/06/12/detached-townhomes-come-to-... And it continues: https://www.sightline.org/2025/06/04/oregons-zoning-reforms-are-working-but-they-need-some-upgrades/ https://www.sightline.org/2025/06/04/oregons-zoning-reforms-... It generally does not drop values, just allows for cheaper options.
    - fc417fc802 10mo ago
      > It generally does not drop values, just allows for cheaper options. That can only be true if you suppose that the current values aren't driven by supply and demand. How do you propose to explain that?
      - bombcar 10mo ago
        "drop" is doing a lot of work there; as these things are slow and take time, the "drop" is often a reduction in the rate of appreciation (which, everything else being the same, should roughly be equal inflation ± some fudge factor for desirability of the area).
  - throwaway2037 10mo ago
    > anyone pushing such reform would be obliterating the average Joe's net worth. This what Obama calls the false choice dichotomy -- "Damned if you do, damned if you don't." In your scenario, if we build more homes, then existing home owners are "obliterated". This is untrue. We can easily build twice as much in high cost areas (with the strongest job markets) with little impact on existing home owners.
    - fc417fc802 10mo ago
      What I'm describing is a systemic dysfunction due to financial incentives. The "crisis" is specifically the high cost of housing. So if whatever you do doesn't lower the price then by definition you've failed to solve the problem. It's certainly a dichotomy but I don't see how it's false? > We can easily build twice as much in high cost areas (with the strongest job markets) with little impact on existing home owners. It's certainly possible to encounter nonlinear behavior. If some aspect has saturated then we might build quite a bit without seeing any substantial price movement. But eventually prices would start to decline.
    - kelnos 10mo ago
      That doesn't really make sense. The problem we're trying to solve is that housing is too expensive. If we do things that end up lowering the cost of housing, then the saleable value of "average Joe's" house will also go down. You can't say that newly-built housing will be (for example) 20% less expensive, but existing housing will keep its value; that's just not how the housing market works. I'm not sure if "obliterated" is the right word to use, but if making housing affordable means a 20% drop in home prices (which is perhaps not even enough in some places), average Joe existing homeowner is going to run into financial trouble once that happens. > We can easily build twice as much in high cost areas (with the strongest job markets) with little impact on existing home owners. If that's the case, then all that new housing will also cost more or less exactly the same as the existing housing stock costs, and the problem will not have been solved yet.
      - sokoloff 10mo ago
        Also known as “housing cannot be both a good long-term investment and simultaneously remain affordable over a long period of time.” Many people have been sold on the former and will (fairly understandably) act to protect the value of their single largest purchase which often has a large mortgage attached to it.
  - patagurbon 10mo ago
    The zoning laws are far from the only tool used by municipalities to dramatically reduce supply. Permitting, requiring expensive changes at various points in the process, local building boards requiring extraneous modifications and often forcing scope reductions, affordable housing requirements, etc all make building more expensive. Often by a very large amount. These processes are intentionally labyrinthine
    - fc417fc802 10mo ago
      I don't believe this has much impact on the current situation (relative to zoning) but would be interested to learn otherwise. Can you provide verifiable examples for any of it?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - thaumasiotes 10mo ago
    > anyone pushing such reform would be obliterating the average Joe's net worth. Only in a purely illusory sense. Suppose you have all your net worth tied up in a house. If your house magically vanished, you'd have nothing but your job. The price of houses falls to $500 and you potentially go bankrupt. Then, you buy a house for $500. You, personally, are now better off than you were before. Some examples: --- 1. You have $200,000 of equity in a $700,000 house. After the price drop, your net worth in dollars has improved by $300,000. Your net worth in "stuff" has risen dramatically; you kept your job, and now you have 100% of a house instead of having 30% of a house. 2. You have $700,000 of equity in a $700,000 house. After the price drop, your net worth in dollars is down by $699,500. Your net worth in stuff is unchanged. Assuming you always need to live in a house, this will never have any negative impact on you. You retain the option to live in the house you have (which leaves your life unchanged), and you also retain the option to sell your house and use the proceeds to buy another house (and this option looks a lot better than it used to; given the crash in prices, you can probably afford a much nicer house). 3. You have $200,000 of equity in a $700,000 house. You also have $15,000 of "equity" (resale value) in a car that you owe no money on and bought for $50,000. After the price crash, you lose your house and your car, and then you buy another house for $500. Replacing your car will cost you $50,000. You are in a similar position to the guy in example (1), but $50,000 poorer. So now we ask: was it better to be $500,000 in the hole on your house before, or to be $50,000 in the hole on your car now? --- There isn't a way for the average Joe not to come out ahead. There is a way for someone else to lose out on the price crash: if you had more than one house before, you lost everything on the houses you weren't living in. But that's got nothing to do with the average Joe.
    - fc417fc802 10mo ago
      That is an excellent way of putting it. However I fear that it will be nigh impossible to convince the average Joe that the numbers going down was actually good for him.
      - thaumasiotes 10mo ago
        > was actually good for him. In the past tense it should be easy to do. Since he is better off, and he has a good view of how he's doing personally, you don't really need to do much. The difficulty is in convincing him that it will be good for him, not that it was good for him. Compare congestion pricing in NYC, or self-service gas in Oregon.
- kapone 10mo ago
  [dead]
- patrick451 10mo ago
  "We don't build enough houses" does not explain the massive spike in prices we have seen in the last 5 years.
tptacek 10mo ago
You're telling a just-so story, and you can tell because there isn't a simple schematic 1-2-3 story you can make from this about how these people exert control over home prices. Words mean things; wielding scarcity requires you to control enough inventory to manipulate scarcity, and REITs and corporate buyers empirically don't. I get why people like telling stories like this: it suggests there's a single boogeyman that can be dispelled to solve the affordability problem without painstakingly goring people's oxes state-by-state and municipality-by-municipality. But it's a fantasy. If you can tell this story in simple step-by-step form, you will. I think you could tell a story about how a large corporate buyer clears out all the marginal buyers for some thin market like an individual subdivision or tranche of new construction housing in the Sun Belt. But I don't think you can tell a realistic story for them being "a huge driving force in setting and manipulating prices" across the whole market. I look forward to seeing your attempt, though.
- observationist 10mo ago
  I don't mean to convey that it's intentional. There's no conspiracy of cigar smoking financiers in tuxedos smoking cigars in dark rooms. It's just like the Carlin observation - there doesn't have to be a big conspiracy. They just know what's good for them. They behave accordingly. The do things that they can, and because those things are relatively new, it's a type of information asymmetry and policy / good intentions / competence arbitrage that we haven't had to cope with before. You might end up banning certain types of institutional participation in the housing market, because there's no way to protect against the negative consequences that doesn't have even worse consequences for either the participants or the population at large. It'll probably have to be arbitrary, and the cost will be a bunch of firms no longer get the opportunity to make a bunch of money by leveraging their resources in that way. And we see the influence and impact constantly, with outlandish asking prices being immediately met by institutions that have decided they want a particular property in a particular region. Or house prices being set to an outlandish level with no reduction in price over months and months on the market, because they can afford to sit and wait for the market to change. And if they can afford to do that, then all of a sudden they've got an incentive to drive prices up in that region, because local and state governments, banks, and realtors tend to use the same basic rubric to evaluate price. If a lower valued area sees home prices go up, properties in the higher valued area will be raised accordingly. There's no secret quant voodoo, it's just using a level of liquidity and staying power not accessible to non-institutional homeowners. Supply and demand normally influence pricing feedback at much more granular levels which benefits individuals, and our policy and regulation and evaluation models are largely built around those assumptions. Without the negative feedback driving prices down, bad things happen for consumers, good things happen for those who already have lots of money and property.
flave 10mo ago
This just isn’t true - I sort of wish it where. > If they intend to purchase properties, it benefits them to depress pricing in the area Yeah, that’s true of everyone but how would a bank/individual do that? By selling… But if they sell while they’re depressing prices, they lose money! > Normal landlords don't have effectively infinite money with no forces bearing prices down Neither do banks. They have quarterly earnings, tax bills, they need to buy more stock, cost of capital etc etc. > It's a very nuanced and complex system in which these institutional investors have very outsized influence. Just saying ‘it’s complex’ is trivially true. But, supply and demand isn’t some small factor in that calculation - it’s an iron law that exerts itself at all times. If a bank wants to ‘manipulate prices’ then, without a monopoly, the only way to do that is to dump or buy. But if you buy up homes to ‘push up prices’ … then you end up with a bunch of homes which you paid more than their current value. Not a great business. The person who has the real unfair advantage in the US happens to also be the most sympathetic person - the owner occupier.
misja111 10mo ago
> it's holding prices steady at some point without the concurrent pressure to sell Earlier you were arguing that investors were acting as marketmakers and now you say this. Marketmakers make their profit from the difference between buying and selling some asset. They don't want to hold prices, they want turnover. If investors really are acting as marketmakers it's actually a good thing because marketmakers have the effect of adding liquidity to a market.
skeeter2020 10mo ago
if they controlled even a notable minority share this might make sense, or the majority of a specific region or type of stock where there are limited alternatives, but I don't see any examples of this. We didn't even see this type of phenomenon in the biggest US crash markets where banks owned entire neighbourhoods; even they were not immune to overall market forces. To suggest PE has anything like infinite money and/or time totally ignores that everyone is subject to opportunity cost. A fund that under performs for any length of time because they're playing some sort of marginal long game won't exist for long. You just haven't presented any evidence or even a hypothetical where this does or could happen.

estearum 10mo ago

This is extremely silly. Prices are high because we don't build enough houses which is mostly because it's really expensive to build houses, then the houses we have built are all owned by empty nesters and people with 1 - 3 investment properties. Everything else you're describing is completely ridiculous.

fc417fc802 10mo ago
> which is mostly because it's really expensive to build houses, Assuming you're referring to the typical high CoL areas, the shortage has very little to do with the expense of building. The zoning laws don't permit sufficient supply in those areas. And that's quite unlikely to change (at least quickly) because anyone pushing such reform would be obliterating the average Joe's net worth.
- packetlost 10mo ago
  In areas with low CoL the cost of building houses and the cost of selling a house has a massive impact on the number and type of homes that get built. If it's not profitable for a builder to build a home they simply won't, whether it's because of bureaucratic red tap or economic conditions. There's very strong incentives for builders to take the path of least resistance and highest margin.
  - hparadiz 10mo ago
    The profit margin has to be significantly higher than simply plopping that cash straight into an index fund. The risk of a project failure is simply too high.
    - packetlost 10mo ago
      I imagine the margin necessary scales with the size of the project.
  - fc417fc802 10mo ago
    > If it's not profitable for a builder to build a home they simply won't, Agreed. They will generally build as tall and as dense as they are permitted to because (within reason) it reduces unit cost. Obviously there are limits to that. No one wants to build a high rise in the middle of nowhere. But within high CoL areas they are generally severely limited on both of those aspects. That's due to zoning laws. Of course that's not the whole story. Infrastructure has to be upgraded to keep pace with growth. But that's on the local government to plan and execute properly. Right now they largely just say "no".
  - kelnos 10mo ago
    > If it's not profitable for a builder to build a home they simply won't, whether it's because of bureaucratic red tap or economic conditions. Right, and that bureaucratic red tape is one of the things that makes the cost of building higher. If the builder expects they won't be able to break ground for two or three years because dealing with the planning commission takes forever, or because they'll have to deal with environmental lawsuits before they can build, then they will need to target higher-end buyers (by building a higher-end property) in order to make a profit. And if they can't do that... right, they simply won't.
- estearum 10mo ago
  Not true. Cost of living is high because local incomes are high which increases the price of land and labor which increases the price of building. Restrictive zoning is bad for lots of reasons, but solving it does not solve affordability. https://www.nber.org/papers/w33694 https://www.nber.org/papers/w33694
  - postflopclarity 10mo ago
    that's a great paper, but did you read it? I don't see the authors reaching this conclusion. in fact, they seem pretty emphatic that restrictive zoning is a major driver of supply bottlenecks.
- davidw 10mo ago
  Eh, reforms are starting to happen, like here in Oregon. https://bendbulletin.com/2025/12/13/middle-housing-slowly-densifying-bend-neighborhoods/ https://bendbulletin.com/2025/12/13/middle-housing-slowly-de... Or this: https://bendyimby.com/2025/06/12/detached-townhomes-come-to-bend/ https://bendyimby.com/2025/06/12/detached-townhomes-come-to-... And it continues: https://www.sightline.org/2025/06/04/oregons-zoning-reforms-are-working-but-they-need-some-upgrades/ https://www.sightline.org/2025/06/04/oregons-zoning-reforms-... It generally does not drop values, just allows for cheaper options.
  - fc417fc802 10mo ago
    > It generally does not drop values, just allows for cheaper options. That can only be true if you suppose that the current values aren't driven by supply and demand. How do you propose to explain that?
    - bombcar 10mo ago
      "drop" is doing a lot of work there; as these things are slow and take time, the "drop" is often a reduction in the rate of appreciation (which, everything else being the same, should roughly be equal inflation ± some fudge factor for desirability of the area).
- throwaway2037 10mo ago
  > anyone pushing such reform would be obliterating the average Joe's net worth. This what Obama calls the false choice dichotomy -- "Damned if you do, damned if you don't." In your scenario, if we build more homes, then existing home owners are "obliterated". This is untrue. We can easily build twice as much in high cost areas (with the strongest job markets) with little impact on existing home owners.
  - fc417fc802 10mo ago
    What I'm describing is a systemic dysfunction due to financial incentives. The "crisis" is specifically the high cost of housing. So if whatever you do doesn't lower the price then by definition you've failed to solve the problem. It's certainly a dichotomy but I don't see how it's false? > We can easily build twice as much in high cost areas (with the strongest job markets) with little impact on existing home owners. It's certainly possible to encounter nonlinear behavior. If some aspect has saturated then we might build quite a bit without seeing any substantial price movement. But eventually prices would start to decline.
  - kelnos 10mo ago
    That doesn't really make sense. The problem we're trying to solve is that housing is too expensive. If we do things that end up lowering the cost of housing, then the saleable value of "average Joe's" house will also go down. You can't say that newly-built housing will be (for example) 20% less expensive, but existing housing will keep its value; that's just not how the housing market works. I'm not sure if "obliterated" is the right word to use, but if making housing affordable means a 20% drop in home prices (which is perhaps not even enough in some places), average Joe existing homeowner is going to run into financial trouble once that happens. > We can easily build twice as much in high cost areas (with the strongest job markets) with little impact on existing home owners. If that's the case, then all that new housing will also cost more or less exactly the same as the existing housing stock costs, and the problem will not have been solved yet.
    - sokoloff 10mo ago
      Also known as “housing cannot be both a good long-term investment and simultaneously remain affordable over a long period of time.” Many people have been sold on the former and will (fairly understandably) act to protect the value of their single largest purchase which often has a large mortgage attached to it.
- patagurbon 10mo ago
  The zoning laws are far from the only tool used by municipalities to dramatically reduce supply. Permitting, requiring expensive changes at various points in the process, local building boards requiring extraneous modifications and often forcing scope reductions, affordable housing requirements, etc all make building more expensive. Often by a very large amount. These processes are intentionally labyrinthine
  - fc417fc802 10mo ago
    I don't believe this has much impact on the current situation (relative to zoning) but would be interested to learn otherwise. Can you provide verifiable examples for any of it?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- thaumasiotes 10mo ago
  > anyone pushing such reform would be obliterating the average Joe's net worth. Only in a purely illusory sense. Suppose you have all your net worth tied up in a house. If your house magically vanished, you'd have nothing but your job. The price of houses falls to $500 and you potentially go bankrupt. Then, you buy a house for $500. You, personally, are now better off than you were before. Some examples: --- 1. You have $200,000 of equity in a $700,000 house. After the price drop, your net worth in dollars has improved by $300,000. Your net worth in "stuff" has risen dramatically; you kept your job, and now you have 100% of a house instead of having 30% of a house. 2. You have $700,000 of equity in a $700,000 house. After the price drop, your net worth in dollars is down by $699,500. Your net worth in stuff is unchanged. Assuming you always need to live in a house, this will never have any negative impact on you. You retain the option to live in the house you have (which leaves your life unchanged), and you also retain the option to sell your house and use the proceeds to buy another house (and this option looks a lot better than it used to; given the crash in prices, you can probably afford a much nicer house). 3. You have $200,000 of equity in a $700,000 house. You also have $15,000 of "equity" (resale value) in a car that you owe no money on and bought for $50,000. After the price crash, you lose your house and your car, and then you buy another house for $500. Replacing your car will cost you $50,000. You are in a similar position to the guy in example (1), but $50,000 poorer. So now we ask: was it better to be $500,000 in the hole on your house before, or to be $50,000 in the hole on your car now? --- There isn't a way for the average Joe not to come out ahead. There is a way for someone else to lose out on the price crash: if you had more than one house before, you lost everything on the houses you weren't living in. But that's got nothing to do with the average Joe.
  - fc417fc802 10mo ago
    That is an excellent way of putting it. However I fear that it will be nigh impossible to convince the average Joe that the numbers going down was actually good for him.
    - thaumasiotes 10mo ago
      > was actually good for him. In the past tense it should be easy to do. Since he is better off, and he has a good view of how he's doing personally, you don't really need to do much. The difficulty is in convincing him that it will be good for him, not that it was good for him. Compare congestion pricing in NYC, or self-service gas in Oregon.
kapone 10mo ago
[dead]
patrick451 10mo ago
"We don't build enough houses" does not explain the massive spike in prices we have seen in the last 5 years.

tptacek 10mo ago

You're telling a just-so story, and you can tell because there isn't a simple schematic 1-2-3 story you can make from this about how these people exert control over home prices. Words mean things; wielding scarcity requires you to control enough inventory to manipulate scarcity, and REITs and corporate buyers empirically don't. I get why people like telling stories like this: it suggests there's a single boogeyman that can be dispelled to solve the affordability problem without painstakingly goring people's oxes state-by-state and municipality-by-municipality. But it's a fantasy. If you can tell this story in simple step-by-step form, you will. I think you could tell a story about how a large corporate buyer clears out all the marginal buyers for some thin market like an individual subdivision or tranche of new construction housing in the Sun Belt. But I don't think you can tell a realistic story for them being "a huge driving force in setting and manipulating prices" across the whole market. I look forward to seeing your attempt, though.

observationist 10mo ago
I don't mean to convey that it's intentional. There's no conspiracy of cigar smoking financiers in tuxedos smoking cigars in dark rooms. It's just like the Carlin observation - there doesn't have to be a big conspiracy. They just know what's good for them. They behave accordingly. The do things that they can, and because those things are relatively new, it's a type of information asymmetry and policy / good intentions / competence arbitrage that we haven't had to cope with before. You might end up banning certain types of institutional participation in the housing market, because there's no way to protect against the negative consequences that doesn't have even worse consequences for either the participants or the population at large. It'll probably have to be arbitrary, and the cost will be a bunch of firms no longer get the opportunity to make a bunch of money by leveraging their resources in that way. And we see the influence and impact constantly, with outlandish asking prices being immediately met by institutions that have decided they want a particular property in a particular region. Or house prices being set to an outlandish level with no reduction in price over months and months on the market, because they can afford to sit and wait for the market to change. And if they can afford to do that, then all of a sudden they've got an incentive to drive prices up in that region, because local and state governments, banks, and realtors tend to use the same basic rubric to evaluate price. If a lower valued area sees home prices go up, properties in the higher valued area will be raised accordingly. There's no secret quant voodoo, it's just using a level of liquidity and staying power not accessible to non-institutional homeowners. Supply and demand normally influence pricing feedback at much more granular levels which benefits individuals, and our policy and regulation and evaluation models are largely built around those assumptions. Without the negative feedback driving prices down, bad things happen for consumers, good things happen for those who already have lots of money and property.

flave 10mo ago

This just isn’t true - I sort of wish it where. > If they intend to purchase properties, it benefits them to depress pricing in the area Yeah, that’s true of everyone but how would a bank/individual do that? By selling… But if they sell while they’re depressing prices, they lose money! > Normal landlords don't have effectively infinite money with no forces bearing prices down Neither do banks. They have quarterly earnings, tax bills, they need to buy more stock, cost of capital etc etc. > It's a very nuanced and complex system in which these institutional investors have very outsized influence. Just saying ‘it’s complex’ is trivially true. But, supply and demand isn’t some small factor in that calculation - it’s an iron law that exerts itself at all times. If a bank wants to ‘manipulate prices’ then, without a monopoly, the only way to do that is to dump or buy. But if you buy up homes to ‘push up prices’ … then you end up with a bunch of homes which you paid more than their current value. Not a great business. The person who has the real unfair advantage in the US happens to also be the most sympathetic person - the owner occupier.

misja111 10mo ago

> it's holding prices steady at some point without the concurrent pressure to sell Earlier you were arguing that investors were acting as marketmakers and now you say this. Marketmakers make their profit from the difference between buying and selling some asset. They don't want to hold prices, they want turnover. If investors really are acting as marketmakers it's actually a good thing because marketmakers have the effect of adding liquidity to a market.

skeeter2020 10mo ago

if they controlled even a notable minority share this might make sense, or the majority of a specific region or type of stock where there are limited alternatives, but I don't see any examples of this. We didn't even see this type of phenomenon in the biggest US crash markets where banks owned entire neighbourhoods; even they were not immune to overall market forces. To suggest PE has anything like infinite money and/or time totally ignores that everyone is subject to opportunity cost. A fund that under performs for any length of time because they're playing some sort of marginal long game won't exist for long. You just haven't presented any evidence or even a hypothetical where this does or could happen.