Housing Market

"... equity markets were quick to shrug off the uncertainty and extended their gains as investors expected poor fundamentals to be followed by further policy easing."

The Great Economic Transformation! The Chinese are suckers for adjectives to describe and give power and eminence to their attributes, actions or constructions. The Long March. The Cultural Revolution. The Great Wall, the Yellow River. A good adjective always makes it sound as if it’s true. The Chinese have taken over as the superlative attributor to everything. The tallest (soon-to-be) building in China, the Shanghai Tower, is the living proof that China plans on making itself into a byword for superlatives it’s ‘–est’ everything these days.

Just three weeks ago we noted Apollo Group's Leon Black's comment that his firm was "selling everything not nailed down," and that he sees "the market is pricey... in our view, priced for perfection." It seems he is not alone in the 'buy-low-sell-high' crowd. If wonderful times are ahead for U.S. financial markets, then why is so much of the smart money heading for the exits?  Does it make sense for insiders to be getting out of stocks and real estate if prices are just going to continue to go up?

Does it really make any sense at all that Bernanke would leave gold to trade in an open and transparent market? Hardly. Consider. The Fed has conjured multiple trillions of digital dollars out thin air in the last five years. These efforts have propped up the Treasury market, the domestic TBTF banks, the foreign TBTF banks, the ECB, the BOE, every European sovereign bond market, the RMBS market, the CMBS market, the equity market, the housing market and the entire industrial and soft commodity complexes, to name a few. Since the price of gold we see on our Bloomberg screens is set via derivatives and overwhelmingly settled in USD, the ability for central banks and bullion banks to manipulate the price of gold is way too easy. All the bullion banks have to do is coordinate (as in LIBOR), sell in size and punish anyone in their way. Take losses? No problem, more fiat can be conjured post-haste. So long as no one is taking physical delivery, the band(k) plays on. (Actually, physical demand delivery IS becoming a major new problem for the banks but this is a topic for a different note.) A quickly rising gold price upsets this fiat-engineered, centrally planned, non-market based recovery. Gold left to its’ own devices would signal the unwinding the rehypothecated world of shadow banking where latent monetary inflation goes to summer (think of it as the monetary Hamptons where only the Wall Street elite get to play). Most importantly, it would signal a huge lack of faith in the US dollar. A currency backed by nothing more than faith in central banking.

Those who recall about the implicit housing subsidy we discussed when we coined the term "foreclosure stuffing" which is merely the well-planned systemic bottleneck to clearing foreclosed properties already in the system, and thus artificially reduce housing supply will be happy to learn that according to RealtyTrac the average time for a foreclosed property to sell just hit a record at nearly 400 days across the entire nation.

• Japan’s Stocks Correction Raises Stakes for Abe’s Growth Plan (BBG)
• China Failure to Grow With $1 Trillion Is Warning to Li (BBG)
• Blankfein Leads Bank CEO Pay With $26 Million Deemed Overpaid (BBG)
• IMF says ‘no evidence yet’ of Abenomics hurting other economies (FT)
• Europe Seeks CFTC Delay in Imposing Swaps Rules on Banks (BBG)
• Fed's Rosengren: 'Modest' QE3 cut may make sense in a few months (Reuters)
• Who’s who of Obama lobbyists pushes Keystone pipeline (FT)
• China to Study Joining U.S.-Led Trade Accord After Japan Added (BBG)

Today, another one of the original "big boys" has called it curtains on the landlord business: "We just don’t see the returns there that are adequate to incentivize us to continue to invest", according to the CEO Bruce Rose of Carrington, one of the first investors to use deep institutional pockets (in this case a $450 million investment from OakTree) and BTFHousingD. Rose's assessment of the market? "There’s a lot of -- bluntly -- stupid money that jumped into the trade without any infrastructure, without any real capabilities and a kind of build-it-as-you-go mentality that we think is somewhat irresponsible.... We’ll sit back in the weeds for a while and wait for a couple of blowups,” he said. “There’ll be a point in time when we’ll be happy to get back into the market at levels that make more sense.”

The good old days are back, those of the last housing bubble when money grew on trees.

Those following day to day flow (buys and sells) data of Treasurys and MBS by the Fed, are aware that in the past few months Ben Bernanke's net purchases of MBS have declined modestly. Naturally this is not due to a stated policy of tapering one or more purchasing programs (at least not yet), but due to what appears to have been a drop off in origination, as confirmed by recent plunging mortgage applications data (and which today literally crashed out of bed). So is this net change in Fed flow, in a world in which Fed flow is all that matters (sorry "Stock" purists: 2009 called, they want their discredited ideas back) an indication of stealth Fed tapering? Read on for Cashin's explanation.

In the 'old normal' a spike in interest rates would have sparked an avalanche of 'rational' home-buyers and refinancers to apply for mortgages for 'fear' of the 'never-to-be-seen-again' rates disappearing. It seems, however, courtesy of a Bernanke-trained market, that this surge in rates has pushed many to the sidelines (mortgage applications slipped 8.8% WoW and -23% in the last 3 weeks), we presume waiting for the omnipotent-one to save the day yet again. The year-to-date shift in mortgage applications is now the worst since 2009 and the divergence between home sales and application for a mortgage is growing wider every week (reminding us of another euphoria and exuberance-driven unreality divergence).

This morning market participants turn on their trading terminals to see an unfamiliar shade of green: red.

Following yesterday's blow out in US bond yields, which have continued to leak wider and are now at 2.20% after touching 2.23%,  the overnight Japanese trading session was relatively tame, with the 10Y JGB closing just modestly wider at 0.93%, following the market stabilization due to a substantial JPY1 trillion JOMO operation which also meant barely any change to the NKY225, while the USDJPY slipped in overnight trading below the 102 support line and was trading in the mid 101s as of this moment, pulling all risk classes lower with it. There was no immediate catalyst for the sharp slide around 3am Eastern, although there was the usual plethora of weak economic data.

We must have discovered a new bug in excel, because when we took median new home prices (which a week ago hit an all time high) which we then divided by the average American's purchasing power expressed through real disposable income per capita, we got this chart...

What is the only thing better than Foreclosure Stuffing to provide an artificial supply-side subsidy to the housing market? How about completely clogging the foreclosure pipeline, by halting all foreclosure sales, which is just what the three TBTF megabanks: Wells Fargo, JPMorgan and Citi have done in recent weeks. Under the guise of 'ensuring late-stage foreclosure procedures were in accordance with guidelines', the LA Times reports that these three banks paused sales on May 6th and all but halted foreclosures. Perfectly organic housing recovery - as we noted earlier... and guess what states the greatest number of 'halts' are in from these banks - California, Nevada, Arizona - exactly where the surges in price have occurred.

Inflation, housing, unemployment figures, personal spending and utility bills are all improving across the US.

The data coming out on home prices is rather clear. Home prices are moving up steadily in the last year now increasing at a rate last seen in 2006. Of course, little of this is coming from wage growth but more from easy access to debt, investor demand, and historically low supply. One thing that people fail to remember is that during the last housing bubble, people were supplementing a lack of income growth with easy access to debt to add fuel to the housing market. This time, the easy money is being supplied to banks and hedge funds that are simply chasing higher yields. Anyone that has a hand in the housing business, especially in the grind it out rental business understands that it is no hands off endeavor. This is why it is surprising to see how much money is now being funneled into the market by brand new small time investors, especially in places like California. You know things are getting frothy when new money is willing to chase the rental business.