Housing Market

"Australia has benefited from China’s growth over the past decades, but has become a less diversified and commodity dependent economy in the process. It is now exposed to China’s slowdown, and may be unable to re-engineer itself quickly enough to avoid the end of the commodity super-cycle. The worst is yet to come, in our view."

If Congress understood the Austrian theory of the business cycle, it would have allowed the recession that followed the housing bubble’s inevitable collapse to run its course. Recessions are the economy’s way of eliminating the distortions caused by the Federal Reserve. Attempts by Congress and the Fed to end a recession via inflation and government spending will only lead to future, and more severe, economic downturns.

While the rest of the US economy was slowly but surely reentering a recession, with the only two pieces of silver lining being the relatively strong, if unbelievable, jobs data (driven by low-wage paying jobs) and the US housing market, moments ago we just got the latest confirmation that one of these two final anchors is slowly falling apart when the perpetually optimistic housing industry organization, NAR, reported that August pending home sales dropped -1.4%, on expectations of a 0.4% increase, and down from a 0.5% jump the month before. Confirming that the Chinese "hot money parking" bid is finally ending, this was the fourth consecutive miss in a row.

If you borrow cash then it’s not income. No one in his right mind borrows to buy consumer goods... But what if someone else borrows, is that your income?

Some people will never learn... ever. What is happening today is nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The iceberg has been struck, we’re taking on water, and this sucker is going to sink. Game Over.

The global race to the bottom continued on Thursday as Norway and Taiwan moved to cut rates sending NOK plunging to its weakest level against the dollar in 13 years and pressing Tawain dollar forwards to six year lows. 

Home building is a miserable business. First you borrow to buy land, then borrow some more to develop land, then more to build, while paying out exorbitant executive compensation all along. Years later, you finally sell the finished product, maybe for a profit, maybe at a loss. Builders have been buying more land at much higher prices in hope for a continuation of optimal conditions. Lucrative margins can turn into large losses, much like 2006-07. Unless the Yellen Fed comes up with a big surprise, shorting rallies will be the way to go.

While Asian trading overnight started off on the right foot, chasing US momentum higher, things rapidly shifted once Europe opened as attention moved back to global growth fears, global central banks losing credibility, as well as miners and the ongoing Volkswagen fiasco.

News That Matters

After an almost incessant rise since January, Existing Home Sales in August plunged 4.8% (the most since January and dramatically worse than the -1.65 drop expected). This is the 3rd biggest monthly collapse since the financial crisis. While the Northeast saw no change, The West (down 7.8% MoM) and South (down 6.6% MoM) saw the biggest plunges in sales as median home prices fell for the 2nd month in a row. It appears the one brightspot in the economy (according to mainstream media) has burned out as affordability and excitability come to a turning point.

For those of you who don’t want to take the time reading through the ponderous 7000-word transcript of yesterday’s FOMC press conference, we bring you the shorter Janet Yellen, translated from Fedspeak into plain English. Enjoy!

It is time for a radical denationalization of money, a privatization of the monetary and banking system through a separation of government from money and all forms of financial intermediation. That is the pathway to ending the cycles of booms and busts, and creating the market-based institutional framework for sustainable economic growth and betterment. It is time for monetary freedom to replace the out-of-date belief in government monetary central planning.

"There have been a number of studies that have been done recently that have tried to take account of many different ways in which monetary policy acting through different parts of the transmission mechanism affect inequality, and there's a lot of guesswork involved, and different analyses can come up with different things. But a pretty recent paper that's quite comprehensive concludes that the -- that Fed policy has not exacerbated income inequality."

The long awaited day is finally here by which we, of course, mean the day when nobody has any idea what the Fed will do, the Fed included. Putting today in perspective, there have been just about 700 rate cuts globally in the 3,367 days since the last Fed rate hike on June 29, 2006, while central banks have bought $15 trillion in assets, and vast portions of the world are now in negative interest rate territory.

NAHB Sentiment jumped (again) to 62 (from 61) - its highest since 2005. The last time homebuilders were this exuberant, home sales collapsed.. reminding us of Upton Sinclair's classic line, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” In this case, with mortgage applications indicating anything but a healthy housing market, "It is difficult to get a homebuilder to admit all is not well when his entire career depends on his ignorance of reality."