Real estate

There are those that wait and hope and pray that there will be Divine Intervention. They cling to the belief that Germany, in the end, will back down and retreat and agree to bail everyone out. Germany’s GDP is only $3.2 trillion and this expectation, believed in by more than a few, is not only ridiculous in my opinion but a mathematical impossibility. If you consider the current EFSF program and that $300 billion has already been used for Greece, Ireland and Portugal and that this new assistance program for Spain will take it up to $425 billion you begin to get some sense of the enormity of the problem. The U.S. equivalent then for the total EFSF would be $4.318 trillion or 30.4% of America’s total GDP which would swamp our nation.  This is why when I listen to Frau Merkel say “Nein;” I believe her! It is the twentieth Summit. I predict it will be the twentieth time that almost nothing is accomplished. The beggars want to be the choosers and Germany and the richer nations will hardly allow for that.

GS just did what it does best: pulled the rug from under its most troubled peer: "We are downgrading MS to Neutral and removing shares from the America’s Conviction List. Since being added to the Americas Conviction List on January 29, 2012, MS shares are down 27% vs. flat for the S&P 500. Over the past 12 months, MS shares are down 39% vs. the S&P 500 up 4%. When we added shares to the Conviction List, we noted that MS had addressed a number of legacy issues including (1) the conversion of the MUFG preferred stock to common to bolster common equity capital ratios, (2) elimination of the CIC preferred dividend, (3) removal of the MBIA relationship//hedge overhang, (4) write-down of legacy real estate assets, (5) elimination of non-core asset management businesses, and (6) near-completion of the  integration of Smith Barney and Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. While that all still holds true today and should be beneficial towards long-term “normalized” returns, we believe several capital market overhangs will reduce out-year earnings visibility and cap near-term outperformance. While too soon to tell how counterparties will react to a new capital market ratings distribution post-Moody’s, this cycle has proven that banks with the largest increase in funding spreads have generally lost fixed income trading market share. In addition, with a number of global macro uncertainties likely to weigh on capital markets activity for the foreseeable future, MS has outsized exposure here as well....we are lowering our 12-month price target for MS to $16 (from $20) based on 0.6X TBV (from 0.7x) to reflect challenged near-term earnings power."

Capitalism at its best: kick 'em while they're down.

The long anticipated downgrade of the recently bailed out Spanish banking sector has arrived. Moody's just brought the hammer down on 28 Spanish banks. Also apparently in Spain banks are now more stable than the country: "The ratings of both Banco Santander and Santander Consumer Finance are one notch higher than the sovereign's rating, due to the high degree of geographical diversification of their balance sheet and income sources, and a manageable level of direct exposure to Spanish sovereign debt relative to their Tier 1 capital, including under stress scenarios. All the rest of the affected banks' standalone ratings are now at or below Spain's Baa3 rating." Can Spain borrow from Santander then? They don't need the ECB.

For how much longer can they try to hide it?

"I could go on and on with other examples, but let’s just get to the point: one cannot operate a capitalist system if the state can borrow at a negative cost. Years of irresponsibly loose monetary policy in the US has led to cheap funding for the US (and other) governments, but difficult credit conditions for the  private sector all around the world. As I underlined in How The World Works, negative real rates leads to misallocation of capital which ends in asset deflation, while simultaneously limiting the capacity for recovery by driving out the private sector.... The Fed has been managed by a bunch of Keynesians who care nothing about the role of the dollar as a reserve currency and who probably believed they were managing the central bank of Belorussia or Zimbabwe!"

One week to solve all problems, or else....

Here we come:

• MOODY'S CUTS 4 FIRMS BY 1 NOTCH
• MOODY'S CUTS 10 FIRMS' RATINGS BY 2 NOTCHES
• MOODY'S CUTS 1 FIRM BY 3 NOTCHES
• MORGAN STANLEY L-T SR DEBT CUT TO Baa1 FROM A2 BY MOODY'S
• MOODY'S CUTS MORGAN STANLEY 2 LEVELS, HAD SEEN UP TO 3
• MORGAN STANLEY OUTLOOK NEGATIVE BY MOODY'S
• MORGAN STANLEY S-T RATING CUT TO P-2 FROM P-1 BY MOODY'S
• BANK OF AMERICA L-T SR DEBT CUT TO Baa2 BY MOODY'S;OUTLOOK NEG

So the reason for the delay were last minute negotiations, most certainly involving extensive monetary explanations, by Morgan Stanley's Gorman (potentially with Moody's investor Warren Buffett on the call) to get only a two notch downgrade. And Wall Street wins again.

All you need to read.

Looks like the long-anticipated E-bay auction for Santorini may be closer than expected: in the aftermath of Greece's now absolutely bankrupt status, whereby the comatose patient is kept alive only thanks to a Made in Germany ventilator, it was only a matter of time before the country started with the Blue light special firesales. Sure enough from Bloomberg: "National Bank of Greece SA is preparing to sell an Athenian Riviera resort, visited by world leaders and movie stars for more than half a century, in a test of the country’s ability to sell assets amid concern that it will leave the euro. The 3.3 million-square-foot Astir Palace complex has already drawn investors’ interest, according to Aristotelis Karytinos, general manager of real estate at the lender. The Athens-based bank and Greece’s privatization fund, which owns part of the property, will put out a public tender in coming months, he said." Why is the Astir Palace unique? "Since its opening in 1960, the resort’s guests have included Jackie Onassis, Nelson Mandela, Tony Blair, Jane Fonda and Frank Sinatra, according to the resort’s website. Astir Palace in 1993 and 2009 hosted the Bilderberg conference." Something tells us we know just where the winning bid for the last remaining Greek assets may come from.

The real estate industry announces the housing recovery is finally underway every year. 2012 is no different from previous years: various positive data points are duly cherry-picked (multiple offers are back in West Hollywood, sales are up year-over-year in Las Vegas, inventory is down, etc.) to back up the claim the "bottom is in" and the recovery in sales and prices is rock-solid. We understand the industry's extreme self-interest in attempting to re-inflate housing, but let's begin with the obvious question: what's the housing recovery based on? The standard answer is of course "super-low mortgage rates, courtesy of the Federal Reserve."  But people need a sufficient income to qualify to own a house, regardless of rates, so let's look at income by age, and focus on the key homebuying ages of 25 to 44. The only age group whose incomes continued rising during the past five years is the over 65 cohort--the very group who is "downsizing" or selling their homes to live in assisted living. The key homebuying cohorts have seen their incomes plummet since the housing bubble popped.

The focus of the markets these days is driven by the headlines that are pumped out by the European Union. Hope is promised, the next big summit to fix all issues is touted, Germany is going to come around any day is offered up as Ms. Merkel denies any such thing and “muddling through” holds up prices as the by-word of belief  as the blinders of the great propaganda machine direct everyone’s attention away from what is most important. As one example of this is some firewall, no matter what size, that does not do one thing to address the core issues of Italy and Spain which both have too much debt and too many other liabilities in a time of recession where contingent liabilities become outright liabilities and hidden in a vast variety of ways. These firewalls accomplish nothing except to dissuade investors from being involved and their capitalization weakens the finances of the countries providing the capital, whether counted or not, and ends up weakening the balance sheets of the core countries of Europe as we roll from promises and guarantees to moments when real money must be put up. If you stand far enough back you can visualize what is going on; “look at our firewall and do not pay attention to the countries which are having severe economic declines” and so the head fake continues until it cannot any longer as the bills overcome the ability of a nation to pay them.

Remember "What Is The Upside In Chesapeake?" from 3 weeks ago, where we said, "one thing is certain: the company has lots of good assets, as well as quite a few legacy liabilities, combined with an industry environment that is as bad as it has ever been. And sure enough, in betting that the environment might actually improve for a change, there are quite a few big firms which may be happy to onboard the assets and the liabilities, knowing they wouldn't impair the right side of their balance sheet, while acquiring some good real estate and substantial reserves on the left, at a valuation that is the cheapest in the industry. Because in finance, once central planning is (finally) stripped away, valuation is all that matters." Today we read in the FT: "Sinopec, the Chinese oil and gas group, is considering bidding for billions of dollars worth of assets owned by Chesapeake Energy, the US gas producer. Fu Chengyu, head of Sinopec, was in Oklahoma in the US this week in connection with the company’s due diligence on the Chesapeake assets, according to people familiar with the move."

All you need to read.

“Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population. Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful (though sometimes badly mismanaged) industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy. These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry.” – Charles Ferguson

Once you dig into the details beneath the thin veneer of Bernaysian obfuscation, you realize the corporate mainstream media storyline of middle class decline has a veiled storyline of a powerful, connected 1%, enriched at the expense of the middle class.

Recently, there has been an intense debate in Europe on the TARGET2 system (Trans-European Automated Real-time Gross Settlement Express Transfer System 2), which is the joint gross clearing system of the eurozone the interpretation of this system and its balances has provoked divergent opinions. Some economists, most prominently Hans-Werner Sinn, have argued that TARGET2 amounts to a bailout system. Others have vehemently denied that. Philipp Bagus adresses the question of whether this 'mysterious' system, that we have been so vociferously discussing, simply amounts to an undercover bailout system for unsustainable living standards in the periphery? Concluding by comparing TARGET2, Eurobonds, and the ESM, he notes that all three 'devices' serve as a bailout system and form a tranfer union but governments prefer to hide the losses on taxpayers as long as possible and prefer the ECB to aliment deficits in the meantime.