Sunday, September 8, 2013

Monday September 9 Housing and Economic stories


Blogger Michael Snyder: 10-Year Treasury Yield Will Signal Next Financial Collapse - (www.moneynews.com) We are truly moving into unprecedented territory, because we have been in a bull market for U.S. Treasurys for the last 30 years," Snyder wrote. "Many investors don't even know that it is possible to lose money on U.S. Treasurys. They have been described as 'risk-free' investments, but that is far from the truth."' He's right. If you are trading Treasuries, or more likely, invested in Treasury funds, they can depreciate like anything else. This doesn't apply if you buy and hold them for income, but that tried-and-true method was basically abandoned for the fast capital gains of transactional investing in Treasuries in the financialized 80s and 90s. Happily for Treasury investors over this period, the market simply kept going up (most likely in large part BECAUSE of the gradual influx of T-fund investors over that period... Ponzi-style). The corollary is: what happens when the 30-year bull market reverses, and Treasuries gradually go down for the long term?

Watershed Event To Change History & The Course Of Markets - (www.kingworldnews.com) Today one of the top economists in the world warned King World News that a “watershed event” is about to change history and the course of key global markets.  Michael Pento, who heads Pento Portfolio Strategies, also warned that this event will shock market participants and send the price of gold, silver, and the mining shares skyrocketing.   “I find it interesting that after years and years of being told that the Japanese and the Chinese had no other alternative other than to continue to pile into our Treasury market, the data just showed that they are net sellers of scores of Treasuries in the last month. That shows me that the Chinese and the Japanese are very aware of what is now unfolding.  They realize that the threatened removal of an $85 billion per month bid in mortgage-backed and Treasury bonds is not an incentive for them to continue buying.  And they will sell to protect their position. That further exacerbates the tremendous amount of record-setting pressure that exists on interest rates, and downward pressure on bond prices.  You have a Fed that has, for decades, manipulated the price of bonds, and they raised that intervention exponentially when the Great Recession started in 2008....

THE CONFIDENTIAL MEMO AT THE HEART OF THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS - (www.vice.com) When a little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn't believe it.  The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears. The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama’s leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world’s central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn’t be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world. The memo is authentic. I had to fly to Geneva to get confirmation and wangle a meeting with the Secretary General of the World Trade Organisation, Pascal Lamy. Lamy, the Generalissimo of Globalisation, told me,
“The WTO was not created as some dark cabal of multinationals secretly cooking plots against the people... We don’t have cigar-smoking, rich, crazy bankers negotiating.”
Then I showed him the memo.

Wells Fargo Said to Eliminate 2,300 Mortgage Jobs - (www.bloomberg.com) Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), the biggest U.S. home lender, will eliminate 2,300 jobs in mortgage production because demand for refinancings has slumped and probably will drop more as interest rates rise. Other smaller cuts were made in the past few weeks around the country, said people with knowledge of the matter, who asked for anonymity because the changes haven’t been publicly disclosed. The reductions would equal about 20 percent of the firm’s 11,406 mortgage loan officers employed as of March 31. Wells Fargo has said mortgage lending will slow for the rest of this year as higher interest rates make refinancing less attractive. Those loans, which made up 70 percent of the mortgage market during the first half, slid to about 50 percent of applications recently and could fall further in coming months, Franklin Codel, head of mortgage production for the San Francisco-based bank, said in a memo to staff yesterday.

French business slump deepens in August, points to contraction: PMI - (www.reuters.com) France's business slump deepened in August for the first time in five months, a business survey showed on Thursday, suggesting the economy may be shrinking after a bigger-than-expected rebound in the second quarter. Data compiler Markit said its flash composite purchasing managers index, which covers both the manufacturing and services sectors, fell to 47.9 from 49.1 in July, after improving every month since April. While the manufacturing sector's index held steady at 49.7, it missed analysts' expectations that it would rise above the 50 point line dividing expansions from contractions.





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