Monday, September 30, 2013

Tuesday October 1 Housing and Economic stories


Prepare For Tough Times If Your Job Has Anything To Do With Real Estate Or Mortgage  - (theeconomiccollapseblog.com) If you have a job that involves building homes, buying homes, selling homes or that is in any way related to the mortgage industry, you might want to start searching for alternate employment.  Seriously.  Interest rates are starting to rise dramatically, and mortgage lenders such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase are all cutting thousands of mortgage-related jobs.  Last week, mortgage refinance activity plunged to the lowest level that we have seen since June 2009 and total mortgage activity dropped to the lowest level since October 2008.  Unfortunately, this is only the beginning.  Mortgage rates closely mirror the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries, the the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries has nearly doubled since early May.  But it is still only sitting at about 3 percent right now.  As I have written about previously, it has a ton of room to go up before it hits "normal" historical levels, and so do mortgage rates.  As I noted the other day, some analysts believe that the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries is going to hit 7 percent eventually. 

'How can you have a recovery when people are getting poorer?' - (www.telegraph.co.uk) Those retailers, including Morrisons, Next, John Lewis and Homebase, will be cursing George Osborne. Earlier this week the Chancellor declared that the British economy had turned a corner and was starting to recover. Such declarations make a 1.6pc fall in like-for-like sales over the past six months rather difficult to explain, and that was the challenge Dalton Philips of Morrisons faced on Thursday. With shops in every corner of Britain, retailers are as good a bellwether for the health of the UK consumer as any business. So the large number of reports published this week offer a useful measure against which to check the accuracy of Osborne’s comments. At first glance, you might think that he has been spending too much time in the sun. Yes, sales of outdoor furniture and plants at Homebase and B&Q have soared thanks to the heatwave but the chief executives on the high street still hold grave concerns about the health of Britain’s economy. “It is not yet filtering through into people’s pockets,” Philips said. “Our customers aren’t any wealthier today than they were a year ago. For most people, at the end of month, there is no money left in their pocket.” Lord Wolfson, Next’s chief executive, was even more blunt. “We believe that talk of a full-blown recovery is premature,” he said.

Portugal’s 10-Year Bonds Decline for Fourth Day as Italy’s Drop - (www.bloomberg.com) Portugal’s 10-year bonds fell for a fourth day before European Union and International Monetary Fund officials begin two reviews next week on how the nation is meeting the terms of its financial aid program. Italy’s 10-year government bonds declined for the first time in three days as euro-area leaders voiced concern that political instability could threaten economic reforms. Italian three-year borrowing costs rose to the most since October at an auction yesterday. German (GDBR10)bonds rose after a report showing U.S. retail sales climbed less than economists forecast boosted demand for safer assets before the Federal Reserve decides whether to slow the pace of bond purchases next week. “Italy and Portugal are the riskiest places in Europe right now,” said Allan von Mehren, chief analyst at Danske Bank A/S (DANSKE) in Copenhagen. “There is also the tapering issue next week and people are probably cutting down on risk ahead of the meeting.”

Factory Rebirth Fizzles in U.S. as Work Shipped Overseas - (www.bloomberg.com) Randy Webb sees scant evidence of a U.S. manufacturing rebound in the Ohio plant where he’s fixed aircraft electronics for 25 years. Honeywell International Inc. (HON) is closing the shop in 2014 as it expands such work overseas. Webb is among 80 employees poised to lose their jobs in Strongsville, Ohio, outside Cleveland, near where General Electric Co. (GE) will shut a lighting factory in favor of production in Hungary. Delphi Automotive Plc (DLPH) is sending parts assembly to Mexico from Flint, Michigan, and Eaton Corp. (ETN) will make extra-large hydraulic cylinders in the Netherlands, not Alabama. “Manufacturing is clearly on the downswing,” said Webb, 49, who was told in April that the Strongsville Service Center would close. “Everybody I know is jumping to the service industry or taking some other kind of job.” The U.S. industrial comeback, an idea embraced by PresidentBarack Obama and some economists as 12 years of factory-job losses gave way to three annual gains, is now sputtering. Even with nonfarm payrolls up 1.1 percent in 2013 to 136.1 million, manufacturing has stagnated at less than 12 million. Factories added more than 500,000 positions after falling in February 2010 to the lowest since 1941.

Social Security overpays $1.3 billion in benefits - (www.cnbc.com)  An upcoming GAO report obtained by NBC News says the federal government may have paid $1.29 billion in Social Securitydisability benefits to 36,000 people who had too much income from work to qualify. At least one recipient collected a potential overpayment of $90,000 without being caught by the Social Security Administration, according to the report, which will be released Sunday, while others collected $57,000 and $74,000. The GAO also said its estimate of "potentially improper" payments, which was based on comparing federal wage data to Disability Insurance rolls between 2010 and 2013, "likely understated" the scope of the problem, but that an exact number could not be determined without case by case investigations.





Sunday, September 29, 2013

Monday September 30 Housing and Economic stories

TOP STORIES:

Clueless Democratic State Rep Wants To Muzzle Your Free Speech & Access To Government - (www.mfi-miami.com)  Michigan State Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton has introduced a bill in the Michigan Legislature that narrowly defines the term "journalist" in FOIA requests for public documents to anyone who works for a "newspaper or FCC-licensed radio or TV station" This would not only bar bloggers or writers for hyper-local sites like Ferndale115.com located in Lipton's district or specialty sites like MFI-Miami from obtaining public documents, it would even bar online wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters from obtaining records. Local media sites like Deadline Detroit, MLive and international sites like the Huffington Post and other recognized news websites would be barred as well.

Lehman Brothers Abyss Had Paulson Seeking Prayer Amid Crisis - (www.bloomberg.com) People weren’t taking Dick Fuld’s calls the weekend before Sept. 15, because Dick had been in denial for a long time. As the chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers, he had asked the New York Fed and the Treasury weeks earlier to put capital into a pool of nonperforming illiquid mortgages that he wanted to put in a subsidiary he called SpinCo and spin off. We had explained that we had no authority to do that. He thought somehow there was something the government could do to help. How could it be that no one would want to buy his company? He just couldn’t believe it. I was one of the few people speaking with him, and I told him what was happening: We couldn’t find a buyer, and without one, the government was powerless to save Lehman. He was devastated.

Indonesian central bank surprises market with rate hike - (www.cnbc.com) Bank Indonesia raised its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points to 7.25 percent on Thursday. The move comes as a surprise to market participants who widely expected the central bank to keep rates on hold after it raised the benchmark rate by 50 basis points in late August in an attempt to prop up the beleaguered rupiah. The bank also raised the overnight deposit facility rate, known as the FASBI, by 25 basis point to 5.5 percent. Thursday's rate hike is the fourth for the Indonesian central bank this year; rates stood at 5.75 percent in January, 150 basis points below their current level. The central bank's hawkish stance is largely aimed at curbing weakness in the rupiah, which has fallen over 16 percent against the U.S. dollar year to date, as well as the country's troubling current account deficit.

[Bloomberg] Italian Yields Rise on Political Instability Concerns - (www.bloomberg.com) Italian borrowing costs rose to the highest in almost a year today at a sale of three, five and 15-year debt as investor concern about the country’s political stability persists. Italy sold 4 billion euros ($5.3 billion) of three-year notes maturing in November 2016 at 2.72 percent, up from 2.33 percent when Italy sold similar maturing debt on July 11. That’s the highest yield since October 2012. Investors bid 1.52 times the amount of the notes sold, up from 1.34 at the previous sale. “Our borrowing costs, instead of decreasing, continue to suffer because of political instability,” Prime Minister Enrico Letta said yesterday at the Senate in Rome. “It’s a significant cost, every year we pay 85 billion euros.” Earlier this week, Italian 10-year bond yields rose above those of Spain for the first time in 18 months on concern that former Premier Silvio Berlusconi will pull his party out of the current coalition government if he’s expelled from the Senate following a tax fraud conviction. A Senate panel is scheduled to resume discussions of the matter today.

HUD Revises the Rules Related to Reverse Mortgages - (mandelman.ml-implode.com) It was last April, right after the release of President Obama’s 2014 budget, when Assistant Housing Secretary Carol Galante was quoted as saying… “The President’s budget projects that FHA may need a $943 million credit from the U.S. Treasury in October to make certain sufficient reserves are on hand today to cover projected losses over the next 30-years.  This is not a certainty and FHA is taking every appropriate action to reduce the likelihood that such assistance is needed.” So, what’s going on here?  Why is the Federal Housing Administration (“FHA”) projected to lose so much money on its insuring of reverse mortgages? The overall answer is simple… it’s just another outcome of the severe decline in U.S. home values, which began during the summer of 2006.  You see, one of the key benefits of HUD’s Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (“HECM”), is that they are “non-recourse” loans. That means that at the end of the reverse mortgage, which occurs either upon the death of the last surviving spouse or the sale of the home, if the balance owed exceeds the home’s value… then the borrower (or borrower’s heirs) can just walk away and owe nothing… with the balance paid by FHA, who is the insurer of these loans. To cover this risk of loss at the end of a reverse mortgage, FHA receives an initial premium and an annual mortgage insurance premium, which borrowers pay at the rate of 1.25 percent of the outstanding loan balance.






Thursday, September 26, 2013

Friday September 27 Housing and Economic stories


Lehman Recovery Seen as Justifying $2 Billion Bankruptcy - (www.bloomberg.com) Harvey Miller, the lawyer guiding Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. through the biggest-ever U.S. bankruptcy, sipped a cappuccino at a tourist-filled cafe near Manhattan’s Central Park and reflected on how his client’s collapse five years ago went from unthinkable to inevitable. Lehman’s demise “ignited a worldwide conflagration that almost brought down the global financial system,” said Miller, who filed the Chapter 11 petition at 2 a.m. on Sept. 15, 2008, in New York after the bank failed to win U.S. government aid or attract a buyer. “The consequences were unknown.” Five years later, Miller takes credit for helping fend off some creditors’ liquidation demands and instead turning the remains of one of the biggest failures of the financial crisis into a going concern. In the process, the Lehman estate has paid more than $2 billion in fees and expenses to professionals like him for that work, dwarfing the previous record of $757 million in Enron Corp.’s bankruptcy.

Investors yank record $20 billion from ETFs - (money.cnn.com) Investors yanked more than $20 billion out of exchange-traded funds in August, according to Morningstar. That's the largest monthly outflow since the first ETF launched 20 years ago. Although stocks have been surging for most of the year, August was the worst month of 2013. Stocks fell as traders worried about the potential impact of the Federal Reserve scaling back its stimulus program sooner rather than later. Fears about a U.S. military strike against Syria didn't help either. Investors pulled more than $15 billion out of U.S. stock ETFs alone. The SPDR S&P 500, the largest and most liquid ETF, was the biggest loser.

What Might Have Been and the Fall of Lehman - (finance.yahoo.com)  Let’s play a game. It is called “What if … .” As we observe the five-year anniversary of the financial crisis — Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy five years ago this coming weekend — the most intriguing hypothetical question about those fateful days is what would have happened had the government bailed out Lehman. It would have changed the course of history, certainly, but maybe not for the better. The collapse of Lehman has long been considered the domino that led to the tumbling of so many others: Merrill Lynch’s hasty sale to Bank of America; the bailout of the American International Group; the breaking of the buck in the money market; the near collapse of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley that led them to become banking holding companies; and the decision by the government to pursue the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program to bail out the entire banking industry. The decision not to rescue Lehman has been called a mistake and worse. Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister at the time, called it “horrendous.” No one suggested Lehman deserved to be saved. But the argument has been made that the crisis might have been less severe if it had been saved, because Lehman’s failure created remarkable uncertainty in the market as investors became confused about the role of the government and whether it was picking winners and losers. The government had bailed out Bear Stearns and then nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but left Lehman for dead only to turn around and save A.I.G.

Mortgage Applications Plunge to Near 5-Year Low - (www.reuters.com) Applications for U.S. home loans plunged as mortgage rates matched their high of the year, with refinancing activity falling to its lowest in nearly five years, data from an industry group showed on Wednesday. The Mortgage Bankers Association said its seasonally adjusted index of mortgage application activity, which includes both refinancing and home purchase demand, sank 13.5 percent in the week ended September 6, after rising 1.3 percent the prior week. That puts the index at its lowest since November 2008 and the depths of the financial crisis. The data come just a week before U.S. Federal Reserve policymakers meet to consider slowing a massive bond-buying program, which includes purchases of mortgage-backed securities.  The Fed's support has been a major factor in boosting home prices in the United States after a slump during the crisis, and many economists worry that a pullback now may set back the housing market's nascent recovery.

Swedes Face Forced Deleveraging as Debt Swells to Record - (www.bloomberg.com) Sweden is looking into the option of forcing households to start amortizing their mortgages in an effort to prevent debt loads rising from a record. “We want to make clear that the next step, should we judge that we have to take it, rather is amortization than something else,” Martin Andersson, director-general at the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, told reporters yesterday after a parliament hearing in Stockholm. “If household debt accelerates, as we’ve seen before, well, then we must do something.” Swedish apartment prices have more than doubled since 2000, sparking concern a housing bubble may be brewing after private debt hit a record last year. A report in March from the Financial Supervisory Authority showed that, at the current pace of amortization, it takes Swedish households 140 years on average to repay their home loans. Only 40 percent of borrowers with mortgages smaller than 75 percent of their property’s value actually pay down their debt, according to the report.






Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Thursday September 26 Housing and Economic stories

TOP STORIES:

Left with nothing - (www.washingtonpost.com)  On the day Bennie Coleman lost his house, the day armed U.S. marshals came to his door and ordered him off the property, he slumped in a folding chair across the street and watched the vestiges of his 76 years hauled to the curb. Movers carted out his easy chair, his clothes, his television. Next came the things that were closest to his heart: his Marine Corps medals and photographs of his dead wife, Martha. The duplex in Northeast Washington that Coleman bought with cash two decades earlier was emptied and shuttered. By sundown, he had nowhere to go. All because he didn’t pay a $134 property tax bill. The retired Marine sergeant lost his house on that summer day two years ago through a tax lien sale — an obscure program run by D.C. government that enlists private investors to help the city recover unpaid taxes. For decades, the District placed liens on properties when homeowners failed to pay their bills, then sold those liens at public auctions to mom-and-pop investors who drew a profit by charging owners interest on top of the tax debt until the money was repaid. But under the watch of local leaders, the program has morphed into a predatory system of debt collection for well-financed, out-of-town companies that turned $500 delinquencies into $5,000 debts — then foreclosed on homes when families couldn’t pay, a Washington Post investigation found.

Find the Loan Behind the Loans - (www.nytimes.com) ONLINE lenders who charge borrowers stratospheric interest rates are coming under pressure from state regulators — and it’s about time. But to get at the root of the problem, the regulators may need to dig much deeper. Last month, for example, the New York attorney general followed other states’ regulators in suing Western Sky Financial and its affiliate Cash Call Inc. The lawsuit contended that rates charged to borrowers by the companies — from 89 to 343 percent, depending on loan size — far exceed the caps determined by the state’s civil and criminal usury laws. A borrower receiving $1,000 could wind up owing almost $5,000 in finance charges, fees and principal over two years, the complaint said. Last Tuesday, Western Sky suspended operations, saying it was a victim of regulatory overreach, though its affiliate, Cash Call, was still functioning. Katya Jestin, a lawyer at Jenner & Block who represents the companies, said that because Western Sky operated on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in Eagle Butte, S.D., New York officials had no jurisdiction over it.

GE to IBM Ending Retiree Health Plans in Historic Shift  - (www.bloomberg.com) America’s biggest employers, from GE to IBM, are increasingly moving retirees to insurance exchanges where they select their own health plans, an historic shift that could push more costs onto U.S. taxpayers. Time Warner Inc. yesterday said it would steer retired workers toward a privately run exchange, days after a similar announcement by International Business Machines Corp. General Electric Co. last year said it, too, would curb benefits in a move that may send some former employees to the public insurance exchanges created under the 2010 Affordable Care Act. While retiree health benefits have been shrinking for years, the newest cutbacks may quickly become the norm. About 44 percent of companies plan to stop administering health plans for their former workers over the next two years, a survey last month by consultant Towers Watson & Co. found. Retirees are concerned their costs may rise, while analysts predict benefits will decline in some cases.

Banks Seen at Risk Five Years After Lehman Collapse - (www.bloomberg.com) Ruth Porat didn’t see it coming. The Morgan Stanley (MS) banker who advised the U.S. Treasury Department on its rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008 and thought she understood the risks to the financial system had just spent a weekend trying to save Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. when she got a message: Would she come back to deal with American International Group Inc. (AIG)? “The call I got was ‘We worked on the wrong thing,’” Porat, 55, said in an interview last month at the New York headquarters of the bank where she’s now chief financial officer. That AIG “could vanish that quickly and the impact that could have throughout the country, and that nobody could see it coming, was just staggering.” Porat’s own bank almost vanished when hedge funds, spooked by difficulties getting money out of bankrupt Lehman Brothers, pulled more than $128 billion in two weeks from Morgan Stanley. To stay afloat it sold a 20 percent stake, became a bank holding company and borrowed $107.3 billion from the Federal Reserve on a single day.

US "Involuntary" Borrowing Drives Debt to New High – (www.cnbc.com) Americans cut back on using their credit cards in July for the second straight month, while taking on more debt to buy cars and attend school. The Federal Reserve says consumers increased their borrowing $10.4 billion in July from June to a record high of $2.85 trillion. That followed an $11.9 billion gain in June. A measure of borrowing that includes credit card debt fell $1.8 billion in July following an even larger $3.7 billion decline in June. A category that includes auto loans and student loans increased $12.3 billion after an even larger $15.6 billion gain in June. The reduction in credit card debt suggests that consumers remain cautious about accumulating high-interest debt. That could hold back consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of economic activity.






Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Wednesday September 25 Housing and Economic stories


Monte Paschi's new capital needs could force nationalization - (www.reuters.com) The prospect of nationalisation looms large for Italy's Monte dei Paschi di Siena (BMPS.MI) now that the beleaguered lender needs to raise more than twice as much capital as originally planned to meet new European Union requirements. Italy's third largest bank said on Monday it would approve a tougher than initially expected restructuring plan on September 24 to comply with European Union demands, confirming investor fears it is struggling to emerge from the euro zone debt crisis. The bank's statement came after the EU told the bank over the weekend to carry out a 2.5 billion euro ($3.3 billion) capital increase if it wants EU approval of a 4.1 billion euro state bailout it received earlier this year. The required cash call is more than twice the 1 billion euros capital increase initially planned by the bank. The latest financial woes compound ongoing legal troubles the 540-year-old lender is facing over its expensive acquisition of rival Antonveneta in 2008 and loss-making derivative trades the Siena-based bank made in the deal's aftermath.

Russians elected to board of Cyprus' biggest bank - (www.miamiherald.com) Shareholders of Cyprus' largest bank on Tuesday elected six Russians to sit on its new, 16-member board of directors, a consequence of the country's bailout agreement with international creditors. The vote puts more foreign nationals on the board of the Bank of Cyprus than ever before. The fact that they are all Russians — one of whom, Vladimir Strzhalkovskiy, was elected by other board members as vice chairman — reflects the large stake they had in Cyprus' banking system. Russians kept billions in Cypriot bank accounts because of benefits such as low taxes and high interest rates, helping to swell the size of the financial sector at its peak to eight times the country's entire economy. Cyprus turned for help to its euro area partners and the International Monetary Fund in June, 2012, to rescue its Greece-exposed banks and to stave off bankruptcy. But Cyprus' creditors sought a fundamental restructuring of the country's financial system which they saw as unsustainable. According to the terms of Cyprus' rescue deal it agreed in March, depositors with over 100,000 euros in the Bank of Cyprus, and the second-largest lender Laiki, were forced to take huge losses on their savings in order for the country to qualify for a 10 billion euro ($13.2 billion) loan.

Europe's carmakers warn of more cuts in weak recovery - (www.reuters.com) European carmakers need to close more factories and cut more jobs, executives at the Frankfurt car show said on Tuesday, warning any recovery in demand was likely to be long and slow as unemployment remained high and bank lending weak. The bosses of automakers including Volkswagen, PSA Peugeot Citroen, and Ford Europe said on the opening day of the biennial event that sales in Europe appeared to be stabilizing after five years of decline. But recovery was not assured and likely to take years with the industry still needing to cut capacity to staunch losses at some manufacturers and ease price pressures on all, they added. Peugeot, which incurred the wrath of French ministers and workers last year by scrapping a major factory and 8,000 jobs, said it would seek more plant cutbacks from unions. Volkswagen (VW) chief Martin Winterkorn said the European industry could do with closing around 10 factories, although he stressed the German carmaker itself did not need to make cuts thanks to strong growth in the United States, China and Russia.

Mortgage Lenders, Home Buyers Feel Rate Squeeze - (online.wsj.com) A rise in interest rates is slamming homeowners' demand for mortgages, prompting large and midsize banks to cut jobs and warn investors of declining profitability in the home-loan business. Wells Fargo  & Co., the nation's largest mortgage company by loan value, on Monday told investors at a conference that it expects mortgage originations to drop nearly 30% in the third quarter to roughly $80 billion, down from $112 billion in the second quarter. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the largest U.S. bank as measured by assets, said during the conference sponsored by Barclays PLC that it expects to lose money on its mortgage-origination business in the second half of the year. On Aug. 29, Bank of America Corp.,  notified about 2,100 employees that they were being let go largely due to a decline in refinancing activity, said a bank spokesman. Mortgage originations include loans for home purchases and refinancings. Rates are rising on investor worries the Federal Reserve soon will take steps toward reducing an $85-billion-a-month bond-buying program designed to help stimulate the economy.

Loan Size to Be Cut for Fannie, Freddie  - (online.wsj.com) Federal officials are preparing to reduce the maximum size of home-mortgage loans eligible for backing by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a move that is likely to face resistance from some lawmakers in Congress and the real estate industry. The proposed move is designed to wean the mortgage market off government support and allow the market for non-government-guaranteed mortgages to take a bigger role. But critics argue that any such move will shrink the pool of eligible home buyers, stunting the nation's housing recovery. "It would be counterproductive to make changes to the loan limits before private capital is fully engaged," said Gary Thomas, president of the National Association of Realtors. Currently, Fannie and Freddie Mac can back mortgages that have balances as high as $417,000 in most parts of the country and up to $625,500 in expensive housing markets, including parts of California and New York, and as much as $721,050 in Hawaii. Mortgages within the limits are called "conforming" loans; mortgages that exceed them are called "jumbo" mortgages.