KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Friday August 20 Housing and Economic stories

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30,000 line up for housing vouchers, some get rowdy (Atlanta) - (www.ajc.com) Thirty thousand people showed up to receive Section 8 housing applications in East Point Wednesday, suffering through hours in the hot sun, angry flare-ups in the crowd and lots of frustration and confusion for a chance to receive a government-subsidized apartment. The massive event sometimes descended into a chaotic mob scene filled with anger and impatience. Some 62 people needed medical attention and 20 of them were transported to a hospital, authorities said. A baby went into a seizure in the heat and was stabilized at a hospital. People were removed on stretchers and when a throng of people who had been waiting hours in a line were told to move to another line, people started pushing, shoving and cursing, witnesses said. Still, officials of East Point declared the day a success. Nobody was arrested and nobody was seriously injured, they said. It was an assessment roundly challenged by many of the people who had to go through it. Kim Lemish, executive director of the East Point Housing Authority, said the event marked the first time the city has offered Section 8 housing applications since 2002. The waiting list that lasted eight years had depleted, she said, and the agency was beginning a new one. So people braved all the physical difficulties just to get on a waiting list that could keep them waiting for years. Lemish said the agency had expected about 10,000 people but three times as many showed up. Many were just accompanying those looking for an application. Some 13,000 applications were handed out.

The 'Unemployment' Horror Show - (www.nytimes.com) The employment situation in the United States is much worse than even the dismal numbers from last week’s jobless report would indicate. The nation is facing a full-blown employment crisis and policy makers are not responding with anything like the sense of urgency that is needed. The employment data for July, released by the government on Friday, showed that private employers added just 71,000 jobs during the month and that the unemployment rate remained flat at 9.5 percent. But as bad as those numbers were, if you look beyond them you’ll see a horror show. Government workers were walking the plank from coast to coast. About 143,000 temporary Census workers were let go, and another 48,000 government employees at the budget-strapped state and local levels lost their jobs. But the worst news, with the most ominous long-term implications, was that the reason the unemployment rate was not higher was because 181,000 workers left the labor force. With many of them beaten down by the worst jobs situation since the Great Depression, they just stopped looking for work. And given the Alice-in-Wonderland way in which we compile our official jobless statistics, they are no longer counted as unemployed.

Merrill'�s Risk Disclosure Dodges Are Unearthed - (www.nytimes.com) It was named after a faint constellation in the southern sky: Pyxis, the Mariner’s Compass. But it helped to steer the mighty Merrill Lynch toward disaster. Barely visible to any but a few inside Merrill, Pyxis was created at the height of the mortgage mania as a sink for subprime securities. Intended for one purpose and operated off the books, this entity and others like it at Merrill helped the bank obscure the outsize risks it was taking. The Pyxis story is about who knew what and when on Wall Street — and who did not. Publicly, banks vastly underestimated their exposure to the dangerous mortgage investments they were creating. Privately, trading executives often knew far more about the perils than they let on. Only after the housing bubble began to deflate did Merrill and other banks begin to clearly divulge the many billions of dollars of troubled securities that were linked to them, often through opaque vehicles like Pyxis. In the third quarter of 2007, for instance, Merrill reported that its potential exposure to certain subprime investments was $15.2 billion. Three months later, it said that exposure was actually $46 billion. At the time, Merrill said it had initially excluded the difference because it thought it had protected itself with various hedges.

In Stunning Decision, EU Orders Germany To Start Onboarding "Bad Debt" To Sovereign Balance Sheet: RBS, Fannie, Freddie Next? - (www.zerohedge.com) In what could be the most important news of the day, German Die Zeit reports that, in a stunning move, the EU has ordered Germany to count the holdings of WestLB and Hypo Real Estate (the latter of which failed the stress farce from last month which nobody cares about or remembers anymore) as government debt! As Bloomberg notes, "That could raise Germany’s debt to 90 percent of gross domestic product, Die Zeit said." Of course the implications of this decision are massive, as it takes out all the guess work of whether insolvent institutions are or are not on the government's balance sheet. The net result, for Germany alone, is that just the addition of Hypo's debt would push German debt/GDP from 79% to 90%, both of which are well above the Maastricht limit of 60% (not like anyone cares that is - everyone is now aware the EU is a failed experiment). The next question: what happens to nationalized RBS and it $168 billion in debt? Total UK debt is $1.2 trillion meaning a comparable action in the UK would rise UK debt by 15%! And then there is a whole slew of other banks in the pipeline in Europe that are full of trillions in toxic debt: will the sovereign hosts be able to onboard this debt? Most importantly, what happens to our administration's adamant claims that Fannie and Freddie's $6+ trillion in debt should not be counted as part of total Federal debt. America already has its hand full with $13.3 trillion in debt. What will happen when it moves to $20 trillion (140% of GDP) overnight. We are confident that unless this decision by the EU's statistics office is overturned, it will likely set off the next leg in the sovereign debt crisis as suddenly European Debt to GDP ratios will increase by about 15-20%.

More from the WSJ: The bailout of Germany's banking sector may swell the country's public debt rate to 90% of gross domestic product, Die Zeit weekly newspaper reports Wednesday. The weekly based this estimate on a recent decision by Eurostat requiring Germany to include the balance sheets of public-owned bad banks--set up to help financial institutions offload toxic and non-strategic assets--into its overall debt ratio. State-owned WestLB AG bank has already offloaded EUR77 billion into such a rescue bank. Going by the Eurostat decision, EUR54 billion of WestLB's toxic assets transferred to the bad bank must be included in Germany's overall debt level.

HUD Offers Interest-Free Loans to Reduce Foreclosures - (www.businessweek.com) The Obama administration will offer $1 billion in zero-interest loans to help homeowners who’ve lost income avoid foreclosure as part of $3 billion in additional aid targeting economically distressed areas. The Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to make loans of as much as $50,000 for borrowers “in hard hit local areas” to make mortgage, tax and insurance payments for as long as two years, according to a statement released today. The Treasury Department will also provide as much as $2 billion in aid under an existing program for 17 states and the District of Columbia, according to the statement. The initiatives will help “a broad group of struggling borrowers across the country and in doing so further contribute to the administration’s efforts to stabilize housing markets and communities,” Bill Apgar, HUD’s senior adviser for mortgage finance, said in the statement. The new loan program, funded under the Wall Street overhaul President Barack Obama signed into law last month, is part of a broader effort to aid unemployed homeowners in the wake of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The $2 billion in Treasury aid announced today doubles the amount already sent to housing agencies in states with unemployment rates at or above the national average during the past 12 months.