Housing Market

It is hard to tell why the Federal Reserve moved so quickly into QE3 this past week. Was this move necessary with mortgage rates already in negative territory?

The last straw: invoking Japan to rationalize Fed policies and government deficits

Curious why nearly 4 years ago to the day Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson told Ken Lewis to purchase Merrill Lynch "or else" (but to make sure everyone gets paid their bonuses bright and early with no cuts)? It certainly had to do with the stock price and preserving the wealth of the shareholders. It had little to do with making the company viable in the long run, unfortunately, as the just announced news of a massive tsunami of 16,000 imminent terminations at the company confirms. All BofA did then was to take on dead weight at gunpoint, which it now has to shed. It also shows that despite rumors to the contrary the US economy is not getting better, the US financial system is not getting stronger, faith in capital markets is not returning (based on future staffing needs at banks), US tax revenues by the highest earners will go down, and the closed loop that is a procyclical economic move will just get worse as there are fewer service providers providing financial services, in the process taking out less consumer debt to keep the GDP "growing." What will also happen by January 1, 2013 is that BofA will no longer be America's largest employer, with the total headcount of 260,000 at year end being the lowest since 2008, and smaller than JPM, Citi and Wells.

Since 2007 our analysis has suggested the likelihood of economic outcomes that most have considered unlikely: significant and ongoing monetary inflation, policy-administered currency devaluation, substantial global price inflation, and an eventual change in how the forty year old global monetary system is structured. Most observers have viewed such outlooks as tail events – highly unlikely, unworthy of serious consideration or a long way off. We remain resolute, and believe last week’s movements in Frankfurt and Washington towards perpetual quantitative easing confirmed and accelerated the validity of our outlook. With QBAMCO's view that $15,000 - $19,000 Gold is possible, timing of the catch-up phase is impossible - though they suspect last week's events may be the catalyst that begins to raise public awareness of the link between monetary inflation and price inflation.

Lot of noon / afternoon official chatter on the wires, but eventually nothing highly conclusive.

And oops… I still have the Blues.

• Nothing has changed and things have just gotten worse: Europe Banks Fail to Cut as Draghi Loans Defer Deleverage (Bloomberg)
• Mitt Romney secret video reveals views on Obama voters (BBC)
• Romney Stands by Government-Dependent ‘Victims’ Remark (Bloomberg)
• Video shows Libyans helping rescue U.S. ambassador after attack (Reuters)
• Fannie Mae paid BofA premium to transfer soured loans-regulator (Reuters)
• Northrop to shed nearly 600 jobs (LA Times)
• LOLmarkets: Retail Currency Traders Turn to Algorithms (WSJ)
• U.K. Royal Family Wins French Ruling on Kate Photos (Bloomberg)
• Nevada recluse dies with $200 in bank, $7 million in gold at home (LA Times)
• Gap Between Rich and Poor Grows in Germany (Spiegel)
• Chicago teachers meet Tuesday to decide whether to end strike (Reuters)
• Australia's Fortescue wins debt breather, shares soar (Reuters) ... a deal which ultimately will prime equity and unsecureds by $4.5 billion in secured debt
• Ford car sales fall 29% in Europe (FT)

We will explore how QE and the new Fed plan might work- might work...So far what the Fed is putting in front of us and what Paul Krugman has written about are two wholly differnt things. It makes me wonder if there is any stucture behind QE besdies prayer...

Connecting the dots between my anecdotal observations of suburbia and a critical review of the true non-manipulated data bestows me with a not optimistic outlook for the coming decade. Is what I’m seeing just the view of a pessimist, or are you seeing the same thing? A few powerful men have hijacked our economic, financial and political structure. They aren’t socialists or capitalists. They’re criminals. They created the culture of materialism, greed and debt, sustained by prodigious levels of media propaganda. Our culture has been led to believe that debt financed consumption over morality and justice is the path to success. In reality, we’ve condemned ourselves to a slow painful death spiral of debasement and despair.

“A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” – Chris Hedges

In two weeks the Greek economy will once again suffer the consequences of European indentured servitude when it two main labor unions will grind the system to a halt with a general strike against planned austerity measures on September 26. Spain, however, can't wait, and is already out in the streets (video of today's protest can be found at BBC). From Al Jazeera: "Thousands of Spanish anti-austerity protesters have taken to the streets of Madrid to rally against government cuts aimed at cutting the public deficit. The demonstrators assembled in groups at noon on Saturday along the central streets of the capital city in a protest against spending cuts and tax rises. The developments came as Luis de Guindos, economy minister, said that Spain's borrowing costs still do not reflect the country's economic and fiscal adjustment, despite their recent easing." The key word uttered that makes this whole protest a moot point: "referendum" - silly Europeans don't seem to get quite yet that Democracy has been dead for decades, supplanted by kleptofascist globalization with just enough handouts for the lower and middle classes (usually in terms of welfare promises) to keep everyone happy. Actually make that silly Americans and Asians too.

What is it that makes Keynesians so insanely self destructive?  Is it their mindless blind faith in the power of government?  Their unfortunate ignorance of the mechanics of monetary stimulus?  Their pompous self-righteousness derived from years of intellectual idiocy?  Actually, I suspect all of these factors play a role.  Needless to say, many of them truly believe that the strategy of fiat injection is viable, even though years of application have proven absolutely fruitless.  Anyone with any sense would begin to question what kind of madness it takes to pursue or champion the mindset of the private Federal Reserve bank… Quantitative easing has shown itself to be impotent in the improvement of America’s economic situation.  Despite four years of free reign in central banking, employment remains dismal in the U.S., the housing market continues its freefall, and, our national debt swirls like a vortex at the heart of the Bermuda Triangle.  Despite this abject failure of Keynesian theory, the Federal Reserve is attempting once again to convince you, the happy-go-lucky American citizen, that somehow, this time around, everything will be “different”.

"Everything will collapse" is the consequence Gloom, Boom, & Doom's Marc Faber sees from the Fed's latest 'stimulus' (and the fallacy and misconception of how money-printing can help employment). In a wondrously clarifying interview on Bloomberg TV this morning, Faber explained why he was 'happy', since "the asset values of his holdings will go up" but as a responsible citizen he is worried because "the monetary policies of the US will destroy the world." It truly is class warfare under a veil of 'its good for you' as he notes: "the fallacy of monetary policy in the U.S. is to believe this money will go to the man on the street. It won't. It goes to the Mayfair economy of the well-to-do people and boosts asset prices of Warhols." Congratulations, Mr. Bernanke.

The Fed panicked. It is extraordinary that the Fed would announce an open-ended "we'll print as much as it takes, as long as it takes" policy. Chairman Bernanke is sending a signal to the markets and to government that the economy is bad and getting worse and that the Fed will do its part as everyone expects them to do. This is a clear signal to the markets and the world that the Fed stands for monetary inflation. They don't know what else to do. Here is the fallout.

Back in November 2010, the robosigning scandal hit in which it was made clear that when it comes to keeping track of mortgage titles, nobody really knows what belongs to whom, except maybe for Linda Green. The immediate result of this was a complete collapse in the foreclosure process as banks no longer had leverage to evict those who don't pay their monthly mortgage bills, since the banks couldn't confirm they actually had rights to the underlying mortgage, and the total monthly foreclosure total dropped from a ~330,000 average houses/month to roughly 250,000. Then in February, to much administration fanfare, the banks, and the attorneys general, signed what we dubbed the Robo-settlement: an event which was supposed to be the "resolution" to the robosigning scandal, and which should once again unclog the foreclosure pipeline. This did not happen. Instead, as RealtyTrac has been diligently reporting month after month, the monthly foreclosure total has continued to decline, and in August hit a level of 193,508 total foreclosures. The immediately spin is that this was a 1% improvement from July's 191,925. The reality is that it was a drop of 15.1% from a year earlier. As the chart below shows, ever since the advent of fraudclosure, the average monthly foreclosure total has dropped from a 330K/month average to just 219K. And declining. So why did the robosettlement not undo the robosigning foreclosure crunch? Simple - foreclosure stuffing.

The answer, of course, is yes: they are after all, economists (who somehow, with no real world experience, determine the daily fate of billions of productive and capital-allocation decisions every day). But it is one thing for everyone to discuss the obvious anecdotally by the water cooler. It is something else for this verbal heresy to be printed in a "serious" publication. Such as Reuters, which today asks if "the Federal Reserve has watched the U.S. recession and painfully slow recovery through rose-colored glasses?" And answers: "A look at the U.S. central bank's economic forecasts over the past five years suggest it has." It then explains: "Since October 2007, when the Fed's policy committee began giving quarterly predictions for GDP growth and the jobless rate, the central bank has downgraded its nearer-term forecasts almost two-and-a-half times as often as it upgraded them. The gap between Wall Street's expectations for 2012 growth and the Fed's own current view points to yet another downgrade on Thursday, when policymakers wrap up a two-day meeting that has world financial markets rapt." It concludes: "The trend of back-pedaling shows how poorly the central bank has fared at reading the economic tea leaves, with the Fed's optimism a likely factor in policy decisions through the Great Recession and its fallout, economists say." In summary: the world's most ebullient and permabullish forecasters, who incidentally happen to constantly be wrong in their desperate attempts to affect the only thing that matters: consumer and investor sentiment and confidence via the increasingly irrelevant myth that are asset prices, happen to run the monetary world and "determine" just what the future looks like. Needless to say, if the Fed's presidents were actually employed in the private sector, they would have been fired ages ago. Only in a fiat world do they not only keep their jobs, but keep on running the world.

Europe's chicken or egg problem is about to strike with a vengeance. As a reminder, the biggest paradox of the recently conceived "make it up as you go along" bailout of Europe is that "in order to be saved, Spain (and Italy) must first be destroyed". Sure enough, the markets have long since priced in the "saved" part with the Spanish 10 year sliding to multi-month lows, but in the process everyone forgot about the destruction. Because as has been made quite clear, secondary market bond buying will not be activated without a formal bailout request by a country, in essence admitting its insolvency, and handing over domestic fiscal and sovereign control to the IMF and other international entities. As a further reminder, many, Goldman Sachs especially, had hoped that Spain would request a bailout as soon as Friday. To wit: "With a large (and uncovered) redemption looming at the end of October (and under pressure from other Euro area governments), we expect Spain to move towards seeking support." Alas, as we expected, this is now not going to happen, and the pricing in of the entire "saved" part will have to be unwound as Spain is forced to accept being "destroyed" first. To wit: "I don't know if Spain needs to ask for it," Rajoy told parliament in a debate session, referring to an international rescue for Spain."