September 2026: the world today, as seen by one Polish guy
Does America’s housing weather reach Poland?
Spots 
My instinct says that whatever happens to American
My instinct says that whatever happens to American mortgages arrives here a little later. The research half agrees. House prices across rich countries move together, more so with each decade, and the IMF’s explanation is financial conditions that mirror America’s. After the American bust of 2006 it took about two years to reach us. In 2021 our central bank raised rates five months before the Fed, and both markets froze in the same year.
This time I do not need the research
This time I do not need the research, because I have spent the past year looking for a house. The headline says Polish banks lent a record 14.8 billion zloty for housing in July. Look underneath it. The average loan is at a record because prices are, and more than a fifth of new lending is people refinancing old loans. Meanwhile developers in the seven biggest cities sit on a record 70,000 unsold flats, nearly 30 percent of them stale stock. Sales fell by about a tenth in the second quarter, though they were still above a year earlier, new supply is shrinking, selling takes longer and prices have stopped rising without coming down. Analysts disagree on why: some point to dearer credit, others to fear, with four in ten consumers expecting unemployment to rise. It looks like the American picture, for partly different reasons. Volume freezes, prices stay put and sellers wait.
And the Polish loan is the worse product
And the Polish loan is the worse product. An American locks in a rate for thirty years. Here the regulator’s minimum is five, which is what most banks offer, and a single bank, BNP Paribas, goes to ten. Its own example this month shows a five-year fix at 5.95 percent, about a point below America’s 6.97, for one sixth of the certainty. After five years the rate floats, and the risk is mine.
News
September 2026: the world today, as seen by one Polish guy
Does America’s housing weather reach Poland?
@spots
Source: Hacker News