Thursday, February 27, 2014

Friday February 28 Housing and Economic stories


Chart: What’s the real unemployment rate? - (www.cnbc.com) The U.S. Labor Department said Friday that the unemployment rate fell to 6.6 percent in January—but does that rate tell the real story? A number of economists look past the "main" unemployment rate to a different figure the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls "U-6," which it defines as "total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of all civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers." In other words, the unemployed, the underemployed and the discouraged — a rate that still remains high.

Robber gangs terrorize Colorado pot shops  - (www.cnbc.com) One thief, posing as a delivery man, pulled a can of bear mace on employees and ransacked their marijuana shop, fleeing in a defensive cloud of "ultra-pepper" spray. Another opened the wall of a dispensary with an ax and attacked the store's safe with a circular saw. Still another stuck to the basics. He kicked in the front door and pointed his gun at the counterman. An accomplice kicked in the back door and filled a duffel bag with more than $10,000 worth of high-quality cannabis. For weeks now, the Mile High state has allowed the sale of recreational pot to adults, and so far the Rockies still stand. But crimes like the ones above, all of which occurred in Colorado in the last six months, have produced an acid-drip of anxiety in the industry, highlighting the dangers faced by those hoping to drag America's most popular illegal drug into the light. Because marijuana remains banned by Congress, banks and security firms deny services to most dispensaries. That leaves them cash-based and vulnerable, a magnet for criminals who like the idea of unguarded counting rooms and shelves lined with lucrative horticulture. "Everyone in the industry is having nightmares," says Michael Elliot, executive director of the Marijuana Industry Group, a powerful young lobby in Colorado. "You hit a 7-Eleven, you'll get 20 bucks. You hit a dispensary, you'll get $300,000 on a good day," adds Mitch Morrissey, District Attorney for Denver. "It's only a matter of time before someone gets shot."

"F**k The EU" - US State Department Leaked Recording on EU Unrest Fuels Accusations of Meddling - (www.zerohedge.com)  A leaked recording of a telephone conversation allegedly between US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland and the US envoy to the Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt discussing who should be in Ukraine's next government has, according to The FT, threatened to fuel east-west tensions over the troubled nation's future. In apparent frustration with the EU – which has failed to join the US in threatening sanctions against Ukraine’s leaders if they violently crush the protests – the voice resembling Ms Nuland at one point exclaims "Fuck the EU". As the two US diplomats decide whether "Klitsch" or "Yats" should be 'in' or 'out', listeners will be reminded (uncomfortably) that the governments of Ukraine and Russia previously alleged that the protests are being funded and orchestrated by the US. The authenticity of the recording has not been confirmed (though comparisons to Nuland's recent media appearances provide some confidence) - the FT reported that the US embassy in Kiev declined to comment, which is a tacit admission: if the clip was a fake, the US would immediately make it clear. 

Writeoffs for Mortgage Debtors, Then the Tax Bill - (www.cnbc.com) Come tax time, JPMorgan Chase will be able to write off the $1.5 billion in debt relief it must give homeowners to satisfy the terms of a recent settlement. But the homeowners who receive the help will have to treat it as taxable income, resulting in whopping tax bills for many families who have just lost their homes or only narrowly managed to keep them. They are not alone. A tax exemption for mortgage debt forgiveness, put in place when the economy began to falter in 2007, was allowed to expire on Dec. 31, leaving hundreds of thousands of struggling homeowners in financial limbo even as the Obama administration has tried to encourage such debt write-downs. Congress routinely allows tax breaks to expire and then reinstates them, usually retroactively, as it did last year. But the stakes are high for families dealing with large declines in their home values, and reinstatement of the tax breaks is more uncertain because of a movement in Congress to broadly overhaul the tax code, which, despite its long-shot prospects in an election year, could end up eclipsing smaller tax issues.

The housing recovery is a bank-promoted pump-and-dump scheme - (www.ochousingnews.com) Lenders engage in a pump-and-dump scheme to recover more on their bad loans and REO. Future buyers must pay bubble-era peak prices and endure a much higher cost of ownership, and they risk submerging beneath their mortgages if prices turn south again. Lenders manipulate market supply to create market excitement and momentum so they can resolve bad loans and sell REO at higher prices in a massive pump-and-dump scheme. Pump-and-dump schemes usually involve thinly traded penny stocks, but the same principal applies to any asset class where the holder of an asset manipulates the market to later sell at a higher price. When its done with penny stocks, the Securities and Exchange Commission cracks down on scammers, but when its done by the too-big-to-fail banks with housing, lenders are aided by government officials and the federal reserve, the SEC looks the other way, existing homeowners don’t complain, and new buyers get screwed with higher prices and the risk of another downturn.




Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Thursday February 27 Housing and Economic stories


Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail - Matt Taibbi - (www.rollingstones.com)  - That nobody from the bank went to jail or paid a dollar in individual fines is nothing new in this era of financial crisis. What is different about this settlement is that the Justice Department, for the first time, admitted why it decided to go soft on this particular kind of criminal. It was worried that anything more than a wrist slap for HSBC might undermine the world economy. "Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, "HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.

Six reasons the White House's Obamacare defense stinks - (www.washingtonpost.com) Obamacare was sold as a means of promoting job mobility, delinking insurance from work. Now the White House says it is delinking workers from work... All this leads me to believe that the White House, as it has done with each rotten bit of news and instance of Obamacare's unworkability, is saying whatever it needs just to get through a few news cycles. Because it will not admit any design flaws in the fundamental structure of the bill, it must resort to silly and self-contradictory talking points -- or simply misrepresent facts, as the president did when he first claimed you could keep your insurance plan and later denied he said you could keep your insurance plan.

Emerging markets risk repeating eurozone blunder of synchronised tightening - (www.telegraph.co.uk)  Where have seen this screenplay before? A string of countries tighten policy at the same time – some drastically – in order to prevent capital flight and show investors how tough they can be. Turkey, South Africa, and India all raised rates last week. Brazil and Indonesia did so before. Chile, Peru, Hungary, and others need to loosen but dare not do so. Russia is spending $2bn a week in FX reserves propping up the rouble, automatically tightening its internal credit conditions in the process. The tougher they are, the more praise they win from emerging market analysts. This from Bartosz Pawlowski from BNP Paribas: Much of the media (and not only on the financial pages) seems to be vying to produce the most bearish story on emerging markets. Arguments against owning anything in emerging markets are being thrown around carelessly and hardly anyone is reporting the other side of the story." We think that policy responses in countries such as Turkey, South Africa, India and even Brazil should be sufficient to show that central banks ‘mean business’ and that if there is a need to do more, they will deliver.

Puerto Rico eyes new vehicle to help sell bonds -sources - (www.reuters.com) Puerto Rico is teeing up sizeable debt deals that may include securities from an untested borrowing agency, financial industry sources said, a move that could take on new urgency after Standard & Poor's cut the island's credit rating to junk. The deals, which may total as much as an estimated $2 billion, are seen by analysts and many investors as vital to ensuring the big borrower has adequate financial liquidity to pay its bills and debts. Government officials, courting potential investors wary of possible financial engineering, aim to position the newly created Municipal Financing Corp as a distinct entity among the commonwealth's stable of municipal bond issuers, even though it will tap sales-tax revenues as does the island's mainstay, COFINA.

GPIF’s $709 Billion Bonds a Lost Opportunity, Utsumi Says - (www.bloomberg.com)  Japan’s government pension fund is in “extreme danger” from investing mostly in local bonds with yields depressed by central-bank buying, said Makoto Utsumi, who helped shape the world’s largest retirement savings pool. Yields are abnormally low due to the Bank of Japan’s asset purchase program, said Utsumi, a member of an advisory panel on the 2006 establishment of the Government Pension Investment Fund who is now president of debt-rating firm Japan Credit Rating Agency Ltd. GPIF, which held 58 percent of its 124 trillion yen ($1.2 trillion) portfolio in domestic bonds as of Sept. 30, will lose out on the chance for better returns by keeping them until redemption, he said.





Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Wednesday February 26 Housing and Economic stories


Contagion Rejected as Biggest Bond Buyers Double Down on Junk - (www.bloomberg.com) Michael Buchanan knew exactly what to do as markets were rocked in recent weeks on concern turmoil in developing nations from Argentina to China andTurkey would cause the global economic recovery to derail: buy junk bonds. “A real dramatic freefall is unlikely in our opinion,” Buchanan, who oversees $127 billion of credit investments at Western Asset Management Co. in Pasadena,California, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “We were buyers on days of weakness over the past couple weeks.” Money managers from Western Asset to AllianceBernstein Holding LP say they are uncowed by the selloff in emerging markets and stocks, betting that the global economy is strong enough to withstand such shocks as central banks keep filling the world with cheap cash. Their bullishness contrasts with individual investors who during the past two weeks pulled almost $2 billion from exchange-traded funds that focus on speculative-grade bonds, including the biggest one-day withdrawal ever for BlackRock Inc.’s junk fund.

Marc Faber: I want stocks to fall 40% - (www.cnbc.com) With Audio… Marc Faber predicts that stocks will drop by 20 percent to 30 percent in the near future. But he personally hopes that they will fall even further. "I think the market is way overdue for a 20 to 30 percent correction," said Faber, the editor and publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report. But that is "nothing that worries me," he said. "In fact, I'm hoping for the market to drop 40 percent so stocks will again become—from a value point of view—attractive." Faber added with a chuckle: "But that is not the view of someone who is fully invested—obviously not."

Europe exposed: Over $3 trillion in emerging market loans - (www.ft.com)  The Fragile Five, BRICS and MINT are acronyms for countries like Turkey, Mexico, Indonesia, and China that are at the focus of the emerging crisis. But Europe may be the most vulnerable, as banks have more than $3.4 trillion in loans in shaky markets. European companies have a bigger exposure to emerging markets than US or Japanese firms, according to research by Morgan Stanley Capital International. Europe’s most vulnerable banks- the ones with the most risk in emerging markets - are BBVA, Erste Bank, HSBC, Santander, Standard Chartered, and UniCredit, according to analysts, Reuters reported. Deutsche Bank analysts estimate the six most exposed European banks have more than $1.7 trillion tied up in developing markets. Spain’s Santander is deeply intertwined in Latin America with bank earnings sourced from Brazil (23 percent) and 132 billion euro in loans across the region at the end of 2013.

Young Bankers Seek ‘Good Yield’ With Their Own Nonprofits - (www.bloomberg.com) Without deserting careers, a new wave of young bankers is starting nonprofits to help orphans, immigrants, veterans and students. They say they’re moved to mend the world using capitalism’s wisdom, not because of its shortcomings, preaching the power of dividends, due diligence, leverage and efficient allocation of resources. Some see themselves setting a new mold for post-crisis Wall Street philanthropy by not waiting to give away their money or leaving for full-time charity work. “Among this generation -- our generation -- is a deep passion and interest in learning, earning and returning simultaneously,” said Andrew Klaber, 32, an analyst at hedge fund Paulson & Co. whose nonprofit Even Ground provides education and care to African children affected by AIDS. “You just see an unmet need in your research, and research is what we do on Wall Street.”

Market's 19th Breakdown Sees Bulls Unmoved as Trillions Lost - (www.bloomberg.com) Eighteen times Michael Shaoul has watched the U.S. stock market lose 5 percent or more since 2009. Eighteen times he’s been rewarded for holding on. The bulls are being tested anew by a retreat that started in emerging markets and has since spread to developed countries, erasing $3 trillion from global equity values. Again, Shaoul’s Marketfield Asset Management LLC isn’t selling. “This is a real bull market,” Shaoul, whose assets under management have risen to $21 billion from $400 million in 2008, said in a phone interview. “What happens in real bull markets is they do fine, and then they are occasionally interrupted by an exogenous shock.”

​EU bank reforms reveal hypocrisy, even from left-wing European govts - (www.rt.com) Bankers have never been less popular and it’s difficult to justify rating them above ‘junk’ status. There are many merits to finance and financial markets - indeed new products such as Social Impact Bonds can hugely help cash-strapped governments provide better social services but bankers per se have failed to demonstrate a useful niche in society. The political classes are keen to deprecate bankers, although their resolve for reparation has been found wanting given how few bankers have actually been prosecuted for their outrageous behavior during the last boom. Most shockingly, many bankers remain in situ, comfortably enjoying greater bonuses in the C-suite despite their egregious incompetence during the crisis. Taxpayers are understandably frustrated at the outrageous partnership between governments (regardless of political tinge) and the bankers. A huge swathe of the finance industry - the banking segment - appears somewhat rotten to its core. This remains a most dispiriting sign given that society cannot prosper without a strong investment and lending sector. Recently bankers have proven incapable of achieving such simple mercantile aims.




Monday, February 24, 2014

Tuesday February 25 Housing and Economic stories

TOP STORIES:

A Rash of Deaths and a Missing Reporter – With Ties to Wall Street Investigations - (www.wallstreetonparade.com) In a span of four days last week, two current executives and one recently retired top ranking executive of major financial firms were found dead. Both media and police have been quick to label the deaths as likely suicides. Missing from the reports is the salient fact that all three of the financial firms the executives worked for are under investigation for potentially serious financial fraud. The deaths began on Sunday, January 26. London police reported that William Broeksmit, a top executive at Deutsche Bank who had retired in 2013, had been found hanged in his home in the South Kensington section of London. The day after Broeksmit was pronounced dead, Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk analyst turned whistleblower at Deutsche Bank, was scheduled to speak at Auburn University in Alabama on his allegations that Deutsche had hid $12 billion in losses during the financial crisis with the knowledge of senior executives. Two other whistleblowers have brought similar charges against Deutsche Bank.

Detroit turns bankruptcy into Wall St. vs. Main St. NYT  - (www.cnbc.com) Detroit's bankruptcy is rapidly shaping up as a battle of Wall Street vs. Main Street, at least as far as the city's creditors are concerned. Amy Laskey, a managing director at Fitch Ratings, said in a recent report that she sensed an "us versus them" orientation toward debt repayment. And in the view of bondholders, bond insurers and other financial institutions, it only grew worse last week after the city circulated its plan to emerge from bankruptcy and filed a lawsuit on Friday. The suit, brought by the city's emergency manager, Kevyn D. Orr, seeks to invalidate complex transactions that helped finance Detroit's pension system in 2005. In a not-so-veiled criticism, the city said the deal was done "at the prompting of investment banks that would profit handsomely from the transaction." The banks that led the deal were Bank of America and UBS. They helped Detroit borrow $1.4 billion for its shaky pension system and also signed long-term financial contracts with the city, known as interest-rate swaps, to hedge the debt. 

Venezuela Siphoning U.S. Oil Exports to China Sinks Bonds - (www.bloomberg.com) Venezuela’s plummeting oil sales to the U.S., its biggest export market, are exacerbating a collapse in the nation’s debt securities. Bonds issued by Venezuela sank 3 percent on Jan. 31, a day after data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed that 2013 energy sales to the country are headed for a 28-year low. The selloff pushed losses this year to 12.4 percent, more than three times the average 3.93 percent drop among notes from the least-creditworthy developing nations, according to data by Bloomberg. The tumble in oil exports, Venezuela’s biggest source of dollars, comes as President Nicolas Maduro faces a shortage of U.S. currency that’s caused consumer prices to soar 56 percent and foreign reserves to plunge to a decade-low of $21 billion.

As Citigroup Spun Toward Insolvency in ’07- ’08, Its Regulator Was Dining and Schmoozing With Citi Execs - (www.wallstreetonparade.com) Before Timothy Geithner became the 75th Secretary of the U.S. Treasury in 2009, he served as the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for five years. The New York Fed is one of Wall Street’s primary regulators. But after leaving his post at the New York Fed, Geithner testified before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Financial Services on March 26, 2009 that he was notregulating Wall Street as he earned his $400,000 a year with car, driver and private dining room. At the 2009 hearing, in response to a question from Congressman Ron Paul, Geithner said: “That was a very thoughtful set of questions. I just want to correct one thing. I have never been a regulator, for better or worse. And I think you are right to say that we have to be very skeptical that regulation can solve all these problems. We have parts of the system which are overwhelmed by regulation…It wasn’t the absence of regulation that was a problem. It was, despite the presence of regulation, you got huge risks built up.”

Govt nearly triples job hours lost to Obamacare  - (www.cnbc.com) President Barack Obama's signature health-care law will contribute to this phenomenon, the CBO said, citing new estimates that the Affordable Care Act will cause a larger-than-expected reduction in working hours—eliminating the equivalent of about 2.3 million workers in 2021. In 2011, the CBO estimated the law would cause a reduction of about 800,000 full-time equivalent workers. "CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 to 2 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor—given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive," said the report. "The reduction in CBO's projections of hours worked represents a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024," it added.




Sunday, February 23, 2014

Monday February 24 Housing and Economic stories


The 10 worst states for taxes in 2014 - (www.cnbc.com) California blows away Illinois, NY, NJ, and all other ones listed. California: Top State Income Tax Rate: 13.3 percent. Sales tax: 7.5 percent. Property tax per capita: $1,450. California has one of the highest income taxes in the country and imposes an alternative minimum tax on both individuals and corporations. The Golden State relies heavily on the income tax revenue generated by its richest residents. This year such revenues are expected to comprise two thirds of California’s general-fund reserves. Its 7.5 percent sales tax rate includes a mandatory statewide local tax of 1 percent.

US severely exposed if rates rise: Erskine Bowles - (www.cnbc.com) The United States spends about $230 billion a year in finance payments to creditors—a level that could more than double if interest rates returned to more normal levels, anti-debt crusader Erskine Bowles warned on Monday. To put $230 billion a year in perspective, Bowles said on CNBC's "Squawk Box," it's more than the U.S. spends at the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Interior, Justice, State and the court system combined. "If interest rates were to return to a median level they were in the 1990s, we'd be spending not $230 billion a year but $650 billion a year," the former co-chair of the president's debt commission said. "When you think about it, that's $650 billion that will be spent, principally in those countries we're borrowing money from, to educate their kids, to improve their infrastructure, to do the high value-added research on their college campuses, so the next new thing is created over there," Bowles said. "That's crazy."

An Economic 'Perfect Storm' Is Brewing - (www.businessinsider.com) Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, economist Nouriel Roubini told BI's Joe Weisenthal that it seemed markets had sailed into a "mini-perfect storm," resulting in lots of volatility. "...Between Chinese PMI of 50, Argentina letting its currency go, noises coming politically from Ukraine, Turkey, and Thailand … [the] contagion is not just within emerging markets but also affects advanced economies' equity markets." On Sunday, the economists at Société Générale issued a similar warning using the same vivid imagery. In a note to clients titled "Perfect Storm Brewing As Policy Turns," they write: Following a week of extreme volatility in emerging markets, many wonder if we are now heading for a perfect storm, with China increasingly sucked in and Europe's already low inflation falling further towards deflation. The current developments also mark a shift in markets' focus on where the need for policy change is the greatest - away from Europe where bond spreads remain resilient. We remain unconvinced, however, that the reforms to date in Europe are enough to raise growth sufficiently and put public debt trajectories on a sustainable path.

Currency crisis at Chinese banks 'could trigger global meltdown’ - (www.telegraph.co.uk)  The growing problems in the Chinese banking system could spill over into a wider financial crisis, one of the most respected analysts of China’s lenders has warned. Charlene Chu, a former senior analyst at Fitch in Beijing and now the head of Asian research at Autonomous Research, said the rapid expansion of foreign-currency borrowing meant a crisis in China’s financial system was becoming a bigger risk for international banks. “One of the reasons why the situation in China has been so stable up to this point is that, unlike many emerging markets, there is very, very little reliance on foreign funding. As that changes, it obviously increases their vulnerability to swings in foreign investor appetite,” said Ms Chu in an interview with The Telegraph. Ms Chu has been warning since 2009 about the growth of a shadow banking system in China that has helped fuel the credit expansion seen in the country in the wake of the Western financial crisis.

Fed draws criticism from abroad as emerging markets still reeling - (www.reuters.com)  The Federal Reserve's decision to keep trimming its economic stimulus drew fire on Friday as India's central bank chief said Americans should be more attuned to the global impact of their policies, and the IMF called for vigilance given strains in financial markets. The push-back came on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's last day on the job and two days after the U.S. central bank reduced the pace of its huge asset purchase program. The Fed made the move on Wednesday despite a bruising selloff in emerging markets that was prompted in part by the prospect of less U.S. monetary support. With the turmoil in currencies and stocks spreading into more emerging markets on Friday, Fed officials, addressing the rout for the first time, offered no hint the sell-off would influence their policy stance unless the U.S. economy were threatened. But in Mumbai, Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan said the United States "should worry about the effects of its policies on the rest of the world."