Housing Bubble

Two weeks ago we asked, rhetorically, "Whose Housing Bubble Is Bigger?" and showed the April home price increases in the UK and China.  Today, we have our answer. As the WSJ reports, "U.K. house prices rose at the fastest monthly pace in almost 12 years and to the highest level since before the global credit crisis in May, a survey showed Thursday, as demand for homes continues to outpace supply despite tougher new mortgage rules."

Month after month, they came up with new excuses. Now they’ve used up all the good ones, but sales are still tanking.

Today you can’t go 10 minutes without tripping over an investment manager using the phrase “Minsky Moment” as shorthand for some Emperor’s New Clothes event, where all of a sudden we come to our senses and realize that the Emperor is naked, central bankers don’t rule the world, and financial assets have been artificially inflated by monetary policy largesse. Please. That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.

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Having gone from the sublime (zero-money-down mortgages for Chinese homes) to the ridiculous (when China's largst property developer says "the period in which everybody makes money out of property is gone,") the latest desperate act of a dying Chinese property bubble is stunning. As WSJ reports, Season Joy City (a remote suburb of Beijing) offers not only a party bag of bonuses to lure potential buyers; but the development's big selling point is "buy one floor, get one free." The government's reluctance to bail the nation out may soon be tested as Barclays notes "this downturn is more serious than in 2008."

China may be bad, but there are far worse places to be.

The housing "recovery" since 2010 can be summarized in four phrases: diminishing returns, unprecedented central state/bank intervention, unintended consequences, end-game. The unintended consequences of the Fed's unprecedented interventions will rip the heart and lungs out of the housing market

If you said San Francisco, you are very wrong (as recently shown in "Bizarro Housing Bubble Spills Over Into "Overbid Madness"). No, according to the latest Case Shiller data, the one city (out of 20) where home prices dropped in March, somewhat inexplicably considering the ridiculous flipping of houses taking place in the ultra-luxury segment, was New York.

After the crisis, many expected that the blameworthy would be punished or at the least be required to return their ill-gotten gains—but they weren’t, and they didn’t. Many thought that those who were injured would be made whole, but most weren’t. And many hoped that there would be a restoration of the financial safety rules to ensure that industry leaders could no longer gamble the equity of their firms to the point of ruin. This didn’t happen, but it’s not too late. It is useful, then, to identify the persistent myths about the causes of the financial crisis and the resulting Dodd-Frank reform legislation and related implementation...."Plenty of people saw it coming, and said so. The problem wasn’t seeing, it was listening."

I have the good fortune to live in Palo Alto, and - mercifully - I bought my house way back in 1991, which was three bubbles ago. Over that time, the house in which I live is worth nine times what I paid for it. Those outside the Silicon Valley might find perverse comfort in the relative bargains of their own neighborhood.

While US central bankers shudder at the idea of admitting their could be a bubble in real estate or stocks (unless its obvious in hindsight); and England's Bank of England explains 'if there is a bubble, it's not their fault, but there isn't so there'; it appears the Chinese are more comfortable with the truth. As Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports, China's central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said, China may have a housing bubble only in “some cities,” - an issue that’s difficult to resolve with a single nationwide policy. As concerns mount of dramatic over-supply on the back of extrapolated urbanization dreams, Zhou notes, “The economy has slowed down a bit, but not very much," adding that "we should keep vigilance on whether it continues to slow down." Which is odd because US talking heads have made up their minds that China is fixed...

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Another right of perfectly round number supports: while the Shanghai Composite once again dipped below 2000 overnight to as low as 1991 only to close modestly higher, and the Nikkei followed suit, also sliding below the psychological support level of 14,000 to an intraday low of 13,964 only to close just above 14,000 if in the red, it was the USDJPY that has suffered the most technical pain when shortly after 2:30 am eastern time, the USDJPY dropped by nearly 40 pips, hours after the BOJ indicated that not only is it happy with where in the QE process it stands, but hinted there may well be no more QE, and certainly nothing imminent . In the process, the USDJPY fully smashed the 200 DMA, with the next key parallel support being the 200DMA in the EURJPY at 138.08 (which was at 138.34 last). When that too gives way, it is a straight line to double digits in the USDJPY, and the countdown to the end of the Abe regime begins in earnest.

One of the most deplorable aspects of Greenspan’s monetary central planning was the lame proposition that financial bubbles can’t be detected, and that the job of central banks is to wait until they crash and then flood the market with liquidity to contain the damage. In short, China didn’t “save ” America into a housing crisis; the Greenspan Fed printed America into a cheap debt binge that ended up impairing the residential housing market for years to come. In any event, for those Millennials who do manage to accumulate a down payment by the time they are in their early 30s there is precious little starter home inventory available.  The Greenspan mortgage debt serfs from the previous generation are blocking the way. Monetary central banking is an economy wrecker.  Here is just one more smoking gun of proof.

China's or the UK's?