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Frontrunning: August 25
- Bernanke to print dollars for seven more years, as Obama is set to announce a $2 trillion increase to budget deficit (FT)
- BofA denies misleading its investors on bonuses (WSJ), in other news its CRE loans are all fairly reserved at par
- Ball in Shanghai stock market roulette falls on red today (MarketWatch)
- Goldman's town hall (MarketWatch)
- Futures up presumably as massaged Case-Shiller data leaked; market attention span drops to sub-minute levels (Bloomberg)
- GM can't afford to retain open, must concentrate on US, trust chairman says, who apparently is unaware that GM has unlimited funding now courtesy of Obama's second term (Bloomberg)
- Fewer catching up on lapsed mortgages (WSJ)
- Unemployment in California hits post WW II highs (LA Times)
- John Taylor's non-defense defense of the Taylor rule (Bloomberg)
- Buy and hold is dead (LA Times), most betting on 00 appearing for 30 miliseconds
- Anonymous blogging: take it or leave it (The Atlantic)
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I think the GM story should read "GM can't afford to retain Opel..."
I thought it read "GM can't afford to remain open"
And was not surprised one bit.
Redbook retail sales - continue to fall first 3 weeks Aug -0.7% v July. Down 4.4% YoY.
I wonder when Wall Street will wake up to the fact that a lower dollar means it buys further things. In other words it's a tax on consumption! Oh and wages are deflating!
Yippee!
Bernanke back for 7 more years.
House prices up 1.4% m/m.
Everything is going to be alright. Buy, buy, buy!
We've had the Greenspan Put and the Bernanke Put on the market for 22 years now. It seems as if there is now a Bernanke Call on the USD.
This is the time of it
good articles; good articles 4 slow news day ..http://www..
hat tip: finance news & finance opinions
Futures up presumably as massaged Case-Shiller data leaked; market attention span drops to sub-minute levels
Arguably the best comment EVER
That BB story says Treasuries selling. Note the 30 year is nicely bid. Someone's taking the long view.
(Hardest captcha yet: (minus six) times 26 equals )
(Hardest captcha yet: (minus six) times 26 equals )
I assume you are being facetious!?
YAY! Big Bens back! Everything is gonna be okay! BUY, BUY, BUY!
No thanks, I'll keep saving thank you very much. I have more in the bank now, even though unemployed, than I have had in years.
Ball in Shanghai stock market roulette falls on red today
May be your best ever, seriously. I laughed so hard, great start to the day. thank you TD.
I read that and couldn't decide if that meant good or bad in red china
Consumption is continuing to fall, and devaluing the dollar will make it buy less. Genius! Perhaps Ben Bernanke could tell us how devaluing the currency will help an economy that is 70% consumption based, and has a consumer who is heavily dependant on the car?
I wonder at what price Wall Street flips like a maniac and decides that higher crude is bad for consumption. $75, $85, $100. I dunno.
Actually, BofA's CRE loans are reserved at about 107, not par. Hasn't there been an executive order issued that all such fixed income securities be valued using a 0% discount rate?
look at those FX bars in the last hour... No messing around, squashing a chance at having a follow
good articles; good articles 4 slow news day ..http://www..
hat tip: finance news & finance opinions
a 1.4% MoM increase? during the height of the buying season?? with the most unbelievable amounts of stimulus??? is reason to celebrate?????????
Im sorry, with the HUGE level of shadow inventory, and the Alt-A reset surge upon us (but not in June really), there is NO way housing has bottomed.
Agreed.....prolly should be Opel, not open. GM has managed to kill everything it ever touched.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know what the numbers looked like for m-o-m change last year during the same time? ie, did we get a bump then in the case shiller too? I know we are down 15% y-o-y, just cant remember if we got excited last year at this time cause we thought FOR SURE housing had bottomed then....
To my knowledge, C-S had been down from late '07 until last month consecutively.
No bump in the NSA Composite 10 last year. Raw data can be found here: http://www2.standardandpoors.com/portal/site/sp/en/us/page.topic/indices...
Go check out the calculated risk blog. He has several graphs that should answer your question.
If you look at the seasonally adjusted numbers, it is only a 3/4% increase MoM. I have to go check, but my recollection was that the press picked up on the SA numbers last month, but this month it is the NSA?!?
Just watched Bloomberg brush off 10% unemployment, with Alan Knuckman of Agora saying it was a lagging indicator and he'd rather look at the stock market or oil as an indicator of recovery than the daily data? These people are idiots!
I disagree, they're not idiots, rather, they're intentionally placed in media outlets to decieve teh sheeple...
Someone has it wrong.
Case Shiller: 1.4% MoM increase.
National Assoc. of Realtors existing home sales report from last Friday (which coincidentally sent the market screaming up...):
" Prices are coming down which is one major reason for the improvement, at a median $178,400 for a 2.0 percent decline on the month. The National Association of Realtors, which compiles the report, doesn't expect prices to stabilize until year end. "
+1.4%, -2%... What is this, a confidence interval?
You are comparing two very different methodologies which react quite differently to changes in the sales mix.
Most of the inventory selling is at the lower end which is depressing the median reported by the NAR.
Case-Shiller does a regression of same house sales, which is telling us that the frenzy at the low end is bidding up the price of that inventory a bit.
Also, the NAR numbers are for July, while C-S is for June.
1.) If I read your post correctly you are saying that C-S increased because all sales occurred at the bottom end of the market. This allowed sales to uptick slightly for that range and, since few purchases are being made of homes above the median price, the slight sale price uptick in the lower bracket pulled the entire regression up. That would explain the falling median value reported by NAR. A market with transactions occurring purely in the "bargain" range is not a sign of economic strength. It seems very fair to say that C-S is overstating current housing conditions. This scenario seems to validate the original post.
2.) The June NAR report showed price declines too.
Obama takes massive bribe from Big healthcare and lies about it to the american public:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/13/internal-memo-confirms-bi_n_258...
Then it turns out that he looted the taxpayer and lied about that as well:
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/08/breaking-white-house-confirms-...
WhoT!
As the residential real estate market troubles migrate to the "better" neighborhoods can it be any wonder that the median price index is up?
Interesting take...
Rescued bank employee surmising that stocks have further to rise, especially financials, that Fed/Treasury bail out programmes should stay in place shocker...
The more I read the greater my concern grows. I peruse as much of the financial press as possible, listen to podcasts on economics, finance and markets, assess things myself. The (somewhat predictable) common theme is simply that 99% of interviewees, analysts, authors that either work for a bank or are somehow connected to the administration are bullish.
Yet the vast majority of 'independent' subjects and economists, those employed in pure brokerage positions (i.e. no inherent bull/bear bias) etc simply are not. I appreciate the obvious biases but the extent of the dichotomy is ridiculous.
Why does anybody care what an economist/analyst at a bank has to tell them? Sometimes I feel like I'm living in alternative existence. Really.
AP:
"NEW YORK (AP) -- Home prices posted their first quarterly increase in three years, signaling the housing market has turned a corner"
Bloomberg:
"The S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index for 20 U.S. cities declined by the smallest amount since April 2008"
Only here in bizzaro land can a slowing of decreasing prices be interpreted as home prices increasing.
Case Shiller will resume month-on-month drops. This little fillip is seasonal. Long-term, they're going to print money at a rate to allow houses to appreciate, fooling voters and letting banks get out from under their overhangs, but they'll appreciate at less than the rate of inflation, so in real terms savers will be fall progressively farther behind every year.
Consumer confidence at 54?? wtf??? something is very rotten here, VERY rotten......
Of course it is 54, the market has been screaming higher...American consumers want nothing more than to spend and if the govt keeps the market higher then they will of course feel confident enough to spend...
Time to see how long markets can subsist on seconds since US consumers will not give first derivative anything to anybody.
Consumer confidence is just being pumped by MSM...that will change this fall
goldmans leaked the correct confidence number about 10mins before the announcement
Does anyone happen to know what time the FDIC quarterly report is released today?
OK, so if home prices in Cleveland are up 4.2% for the quarter that now means the house that cost $2500 in Q1 now costs $2605 in Q2...you think I am kidding, right? Uh, not exactly...this whole thing is a joke cause trust me there is nothing glorious about the housing market in Cleveland (and I happen to even like it here). The majority of sales in this market are probably well under $75,000
arket review as proposed by Kaufmann, market up an additional 50. Bernie reapproved,
good articles; good articles 4 slow news day ..http://www..
hat tip: finance news & finance opinions