Real estate

In a previous report, Headwinds for Housing, I examined structural reasons why the much-anticipated recovery in housing valuations and sales has failed to materialize. In Searching for the Bottom in Home Prices, I addressed the Washington and Federal Reserve policies that have attempted to boost the housing market. In this third series, let’s explore this question: is housing now an attractive investment?  At least some people think so, as investors are accounting for around 25% of recent home sales. Superficially, housing looks potentially attractive as an investment. Mortgage rates are at historic lows, prices have declined about one-third from the bubble top (and even more in some markets), and alternative investments, such as Treasury bonds, are paying such low returns that when inflation is factored in, they're essentially negative. On the “not so fast” side of the ledger, there is a bulge of distressed inventory still working its way through the “hose” of the marketplace, as owners are withholding foreclosed and underwater homes from the market in hopes of higher prices ahead. The uncertainties of the MERS/robosigning Foreclosuregate mortgage issues offer a very real impediment to the market discovering price and risk. And massive Federal intervention to prop up demand with cheap mortgages and low down payments has introduced another uncertainty: What happens to prices if this unprecedented intervention ever declines? Last, the obvious correlation between housing and the economy remains an open question: Is the economy recovering robustly enough to boost demand for housing, or is it still wallowing in a low-growth environment that isn’t particularly positive for housing?

Since nobody else has any interest in downtown NY real estate, Goldman's Bill Dudley, currently incidentally in charge of the New York Fed, has decided to step up. "The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed) today announced that it has acquired the building at 33 Maiden Lane for $207.5 million from Merit US Real Estate Fund III, L.P. and established a new, wholly owned limited liability company called Maiden & Nassau LLC to serve as owner of the building. The acquisition provides a cost-effective, long-term alternative to the current practice of leasing space in this and other buildings and allows for greater control over maintenance, operation and security of the building." As a reminder, the 9th floor of 33 Liberty is where the ever elusive, but always present Plunge Protection Team, pardon the "markets group" at the Federal Reserve is housed (more here). And although in recent days it is no secret that the bulk of Fed open market stock order are routed via that one certain HFT powerhouse out of Chicago, it is always a good idea to keep all the market manipulating facilities under one roof. And so, the Fed now will have full domain over everything that transpires under its own roof. And since the building likely has an extended basement, it provides Dudley, and his muppet Ben Bernanke with a convenient location where to store the soon to be confiscated 107 tons of Greek gold.

Bill Gross' monthly letters are always a fresh source of jovial imagery, although the bond king may have outdone himself in his latest monthly letter which collapses the principles of investing onto the football field: "My point about pigskin offense and defense is the perfect metaphor for the world of investing as well. Offensively minded risk takers in the markets have historically been the ones who have dominated the headlines and won the hearts of that beautiful gal (or handsome guy).... Canton, however, has an approximately equal number of defensive in addition to offensively positioned inductees, so there must be a universally acknowledged role for both sides of the scrimmage line. What fan can forget Mean Joe Greene, Deion Sanders or Mike Ditka? The old, now politically incorrect showtune laments that “you gotta be a football hero, to fall in love with a beautiful girl,” but football and any of life’s heroes can play on either side of the line, it seems." And it only gets better. While at its heart Gross' latest is merely yet another lamentation against the confines of the financially suppressive regime that arises from ZIRP and ends with what many expect is a whimper (when in reality they all forget to factor in the facility of hitting the CTRL+P keys as many times as necessary), the flourish of abandon this time around is palpable. We would not be surprised to soon see Gross hang up his offensive (and defensive) jersey, and sit back and enjoy the coming lunacy from a distance (but hopefully not before he allocates just a little to the Ron Paul SuperPAC).

Could Sweden or Finland be the scene of the next European financial crisis? It is actually far likelier than most people realize. While the world has been laser-focused on the woes of the heavily-indebted PIIGS nations for the last couple of years, property markets in Northern and Western European countries have been bubbling up to dizzying new heights in a repeat performance of the very property bubbles that caused the global financial crisis in the first place. Nordic and Western European countries such as Norway and Switzerland have attracted strong investment inflows due to their perceived economic safe-haven statuses, serving to further inflate these countries’ preexisting property bubbles that had expanded from the mid-1990s until 2008. With their overheated economies and ballooning property bubbles, today’s safe-haven European countries may very well be tomorrow’s Greeces and Italys.

Every time we see oil prices go up we hear that it will cause inflation and/or the economy will go into the tank. The premise is wrong because that has never happened.

Firstly, I prefer the label “realist” as a more apropos label than “gloom and doomer”. Most of us that have remained realists for the past six years or so have a very public track record through public blog posts and public interviews

The real world revolves around cash flow. Families across the land understand this basic concept. Cash flows in from wages, investments and these days from the government. Cash flows out for food, gasoline, utilities, cable, cell phones, real estate taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes, clothing, mortgage payments, car payments, insurance payments, medical bills, auto repairs, home repairs, appliances, electronic gadgets, education, alcohol (necessary in this economy) and a countless other everyday expenses. If the outflow exceeds the inflow a family may be able to fund the deficit with credit cards for awhile, but ultimately running a cash flow deficit will result in debt default and loss of your home and assets. Ask the millions of Americans that have experienced this exact outcome since 2008 if you believe this is only a theoretical exercise. The Federal government, Federal Reserve, Wall Street banks, regulatory agencies and commercial real estate debtors have colluded since 2008 to pretend cash flow doesn’t matter. Their plan has been to “extend and pretend”, praying for an economic recovery that would save them from their greedy and foolish risk taking during the 2003 – 2007 Caligula-like debauchery.

Debt default means huge losses for the Wall Street criminal banks. Of course the banksters will just demand another taxpayer bailout from the puppet politicians. This repeat scenario gives new meaning to the term shop until you drop. Extending and pretending can work for awhile as accounting obfuscation, rolling over bad debts, and praying for a revival of the glory days can put off the day of reckoning for a couple years. Ultimately it comes down to cash flow, whether you’re a household, retailer, developer, bank or government. America is running on empty and extending and pretending is coming to an end.

You hear a lot about Kafkaesque stifling bureaucracy in Greece and other struggling European nations, but America's Status Quo is trying its best to destroy small enterprise with taxes and crushing bureaucracy. I am self-employed, and have been for most of my life. When I did take a paid position, it was in other small enterprises or local non-profit organizations. I mention this because there is an unbridgeable divide in any discussion of small business between those who have no experience in entrepreneural enterprise (i.e. they've worked for the government, NGOs/non-profits or Corporate America their entire careers) and those who have. There are all sorts of similar chasms that cannot be crossed and which quickly reveal a surreal disconnect from actual lived reality: for example, the difference between actually playing football--yes, with pads, a muddy field and guys trying to slam you to the ground--and being an armchair quarterback who's never been hit even once, never caught a pass or ever struggled to bring down a faster, bigger player. (And yes, I did play football in high school as a poor dumb skinny kid who mostly warmed the bench for good reason, but I lettered.) At the extreme of this disconnect, we have armchair generals screaming for war who have no experience of combat or war as it is actually experienced. You get the point: it's very easy for well-paid pundits who have never started a single real enterprise or met a single payroll to pontificate about "opportunity" and small business as the engine of growth, blah blah blah. It's also easy for those with no actual experience to reach all sorts of absurd conclusions about how easy it is to turn a small business into great wealth. (No, Bain Capital or other Wall Street outposts of financialization are not "small business.")

And not because his Rule doesn't have teeth.

And I thought securitization ment they where going to keep the loan docs in a safe place in some bank vault some where...

I find it interesting that my daughter’s refund info suddenly showed up on the ‘Where’s My Refund?’ web site two days after the Treasury sold $35 Billion of Two Year Treasury bonds.

Despite the release of better than expected German IFO survey, stocks in Europe remained on the back foot after the EU Commission slashed forecasts for 2012 Eurozone GDP to -0.3% vs. 0.5% previously, while EU's Rehn added that the Euroarea has entered a mild recession. As a result Bunds advanced back towards 139.00, whereas the spread between the Italian/German 10-year bond yields widened marginally on the back of touted selling by both domestic and foreign accounts ahead of the upcoming supply on Friday. Looking elsewhere, EUR/USD erased barriers at 1.3300 and 1.3325, while today’s strength in GBP/USD can be attributed to a weaker USD, as well as touted EUR/GBP selling by a UK clearer.

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enema.

And here is yet another reason why we will permanently ignore the pathologically lying real estate syndicate known as the NAR (link): December data was just revised from +5% to -0.5% (from 4.61 million to 4.38 million). Since December market expectations were for a +5.2% print, imagine the sheer horror the algos would have been faced with had the real number been reported on time. Needless to say, if this number had been unrevised, the January +4.3% increase would have been a decline. This way the aglos focused only on the immediate moment get two months of beats in a row. Huzzah. Anyone who trades anything based on this borderline criminal self-reporting enterprise needs to have their head checked. In other news, when will the LIBOR investigation finally target the NAR?

While today the association of real estate advertising agents known as the NAR will tell us that the home market is improving - an economic observation which we will completely ignore as any data out of the NAR is now proven to be manipulated and fraudulent, a far better indication of the ongoing implosion in the housing market, and more importantly - the sheer powerlessness of the Fed to do anything about it - came out of the latest weekly Mortgage Brokers Association, which showed that refi applications were down 4.8% W/W, while purchases slid 2.9%, after collapsing 8.4% in the past week. This has taken the Purchase Application index back to the September lows, which just happens to be the lowest print in 16 years. And while this in itself would be ok if not exactly good, it took place at a time when the 30 year mortgage rate was down to all time record lows! In other words, Bernanke's sole prescription to fix the broken housing market diagnosis - low mortgage rates, has now been proven to be a complete disaster, even as Obama does everything in his power to get debt repudiation for deadbeats (at the expense of everyone else of course) and fails. So: what's the next plan?