Monday June 2 Housing and Economic stories

Top Stories:

Pension Funds Defend Commodity Investments - (online.wsj.com) – Ken comment: US Politicians are setting a dangerous precedent of trying to blame “speculators” (instead of their own policies) for energy prices and prevent any energy investment trading. By trying to prevent “profiteering”, they are basically challenging the free market. Isn’t the whole premise of a free market to make a profit? If they close the US market to energy futures trading, this trading will move to other futures markets including Dubai, Iran, Venezuela, Europe and other markets that are more investor friendly. Funny how politicians allow bubbles to form in stock market and real estate, but demonize investors for energy price rises.
Kohn Signals Wall Street May Get Permanent Access to Fed Loans - (www.bloomberg.com) ``If you are a bondholder in one of these Wall Street firms, you know you have a big `Sugar Daddy' now called the Federal Reserve that's going to back you up,'' said Jeff Pantages, chief investment officer of Alaska Permanent Capital Management in Anchorage, which oversees $1.8 billion in assets. ``But if you are a stockholder this kind of worries you'' because investment banks ``will be more highly regulated and won't be able to use leverage as much as'' before, he said.
Bad Omens for Banks? - (www.businessweek.com) - News from KeyCorp suggests U.S. banks' loan losses may worsen. Is the credit crisis hitting a second, even scarier phase?
Foreclosure Phil - (www.motherjones.com) - Years before Phil Gramm was a McCain campaign adviser and a lobbyist for a Swiss bank at the center of the housing credit crisis, he pulled a sly maneuver in the Senate that helped create today's subprime meltdown. But only an expert, or a lobbyist, could have followed what Gramm was saying. The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the sec nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc) got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swaps—and would thus "protect financial institutions from overregulation" and "position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century."
Bankruptcy Reform Act Finally Blows Sky High - (Mish at globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com) - “I argued some time ago that the whole point of stated income lending was to make the borrower the fall guy: the lender can make a dumb loan--knowing perfectly well that it is doing so--while shifting responsibility onto the borrower, who is the one "stating" the income and--in theory, at least--therefore liable for the misrepresentation.” And the reason this was carried to such an extreme was the debt slave act of 2005 in conjunction with absurd interest rate policy at the Fed, the Fed's direct sponsorship of ARMs and derivatives, and the "Ownership Society" of the Bush administration. All of which are also blowing sky high right now.
Libor Banks Lied About Interest Rates - (www.bloomberg.com) - Banks routinely misstated borrowing costs to the British Bankers' Association to avoid the perception they faced difficulty raising funds as credit markets seized up, said Tim Bond, a strategist at Barclays Capital. Discrepancies in the rates that banks quote are creating a crisis of confidence in the London interbank offered rate, the benchmark for 6 million U.S. mortgages and more than $350 trillion of derivatives and corporate bonds. In the first four months of 2007, the difference between the highest and lowest rates for three-month Libor didn't exceed 0.02 percentage point, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. In the same period this year, it was as wide as 0.17 percentage point.
First Housing, Now Oil - (www.businessweek.com) - The double whammy of rising oil prices and plunging home prices could turn a mild recession into something more threatening
House prices falling faster than during Great Depression - (www.economist.com) - “A DESTABILISING contraction in nationwide house prices does not seem the most probable outcome...nominal house prices in the aggregate have rarely fallen and certainly not by very much.” Alan Greenspan's soothing, if rather verbose, words on America's housing market in 2005 rank high on history's list of infamous predictions. But to be fair, most American economists shared his view that it was highly unlikely that average nationwide home prices would drop. That was the sort of thing that happened only during a deep depression, like the 1930s.
Ford Gets Sideswiped by Credit Unit – (online.wsj.com) – Title of the story is a bit misleading. Ford was carried by credit unit as it financed all the car purchases for years. It was an accident that any halfway intelligent person could have predicted.
New Overdue Home Loans Swamp Effort to Fix Mortgages in Default - (www.bloomberg.com)
Warning: Credit Default Swaps May Not Work As Advertised - (www.ml-implode.com) - "The CDS contract and the entire Structured Credit Market originally was predicated on hedging of credit risk. Over time the market changed focus – in Mae West’s words: “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.” The ability to short credit, leverage positions and trade credit unrestricted by the size of the underlying debt market have become the dominant drivers of growth in the market for these instruments
The new American investor - (www.ml-implode.com) - Two years ago, Lilia Garcia and her husband, Jesus, bought their dream house in Linden, Calif., for $535,000 and financed it in part by taking out a bigger loan backed by their previous house in nearby Stockton. They decided to hang onto the Stockton house and rent it out, believing that it would more than pay for itself and could be sold years in the future to help pay for college for their two children. This comment tells you about all you need to know about the plight of the Garcias who, like many others a few years back, borrowed against the equity in one house to buy an even bigger and better one thinking that perpetually rising real estate prices would make them wealthy.


Other Stories:

Feldstein Says U.S. Economic Indicators 'Pointing Down' - (www.ml-implode.com) - Check out the video.
The Sham of our Current Unemployment Rate Numbers: Lessons from the Great Depression - (www.ml-implode.com) - ``Unemployment is understated by underemployment and shadow workers (those that have given up looking for work). It also does n...
Being Owned By the Ownership Society in California: How Housing and Credit Came Crashing Down. - (www.ml-implode.com) - ``The problem with this ownership society isn’t necessarily the overall gist or philosophy but how it was approached.''
Ailing: Downey Savings & Loan hit by Class Action suits, Shares drop - (www.ml-implode.com) - We've been watching Downey Savings and Loan slide downhill for some time now. In recent news, a rash of shareholder class action...
Mortgage REIT Insider: Impac Gets Creative in Face of Cash Crunch - (www.ml-implode.com)
Bloomberg's Weird Numbers - (www.ml-implode.com)
KB Homes: U.S. Home Prices Will Drop 10% More - (www.ml-implode.com)

Realtors, Prepare to Lose Your 6 Percent - (www.seekingalpha.com) – Does any industry do less to earn their paycheck???? Not in my opinion.
Second house is tax time bomb - (www.nytimes.com)
S&P Downgrades $34 Billion of Alt-A Securities - (www.bloomberg.com)
U.S. Consumer Spending Rises 0.2%; Prices Excluding Food, Fuel Climb 0.1% - (www.bloomberg.com)
Fed's Fireman Feels Some Heat - (online.wsj.com)
Consumers Expect Higher Prices - (online.wsj.com)
Inflation outlook makes consumers' mood grim - (www.reuters.com)
April insured mortgage defaults rise - (www.reuters.com)
Inflation A Growing Problem For Americans - (www.forbes.com)
Consumers pick home over flying; avoided trips cost economy billions - (www.usatoday.com)
Lessons from the Great Depression - (research.stlouisfed.org)

Inflation - Wary Fed Looks Ahead to Rate Increases - (www.nytimes.com)
Probe of Oil Markets Widens - (online.wsj.com)
Libor Rises Amid Scrutiny - (online.wsj.com)
Gas prices inch closer to $4 while oil gyrates - (www.ap.com)
Liquidity levels hit funds of hedge funds - (www.ft.com)
Sharp Power-Price Rise Hits Texas - (online.wsj.com)
Realty leader expects further price decline - (www.startribune.com)
Libor Fix May Prove Elusive as Banks Offer Solutions - (www.bloomberg.com)
Mounting Costs Slow the Push for Clean Coal - (www.nytimes.com)
Charges of Insider Trading for a Wall Street Luminary - (www.nytimes.com)
The Truth Behind Florida's Housing Numbers - (futurerealestate.blogspot.com)
We're Nowhere Near A Bottom in Housing - (www.huffingtonpost.com)
What About The Other Bubbles? - (www.nuwireinvestor.com)
Dow says country in "true energy crisis"; ups prices - (ap.google.com)
Storms on the Horizon - (www.dallasfed.org)

The Pain Grows at Sears - (online.wsj.com)
GM says a quarter of U.S. hourly workforce will take exit offers - (www.latimes.com)
A giant continues to unravel - (www.chicagotribune.com)
Retailers closing stores - (money.aol.com)
Survey: Americans make 41 million fewer air trips - (www.chicagotribune.com)

European Inflation Accelerates More Than Forecast - (www.bloomberg.com)
High gas prices hit consumers worldwide - (www.ap.com)
ECB's Draghi Says Record Oil Prices `Limit' Monetary Policy - (www.bloomberg.com)
Britons' Confidence Reaches Lowest Level Since Thatcher Quit - (www.bloomberg.com)
Vietnam Inflation Crisis Is Feared - (online.wsj.com)
Inflation Asia's biggest concern: think tank - (news.yahoo.com/s/afp)
Irate Europeans Protest the Soaring Price of Gasoline - (www.nytimes.com)
Data points to grim outlook for Japanese economy - (www.marketwatch.com)
India's GDP Growth Holds at Slowest Pace Since 2005 - (www.bloomberg.com)
Double, double, oil and trouble - (www.economist.com)

Thursday May 29 Housing and Economic stories

Top Stories:

Credit default swaps on Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch debt have risen - (www.telegraph.co.uk) - The debt markets in the US and Europe have begun to flash warning signals yet again, raising fears that the global credit crisis could be entering another turbulent phase. The cost of insuring against default on the bonds of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and other big banks and brokerages has surged over the last two weeks, threatening to reach the stress levels seen before the Bear Stearns debacle. Spreads on inter-bank Libor and Euribor rates in Europe are back near record levels.
S&P Slashes $34 Billion in ALT-A Securities. ALT-A…The Next ‘Crisis’ - [2008-05-28] - The ALT-A crisis may make the subprime crisis look like a bump in the road when all is said and done.This story is really picking up steam lately, but it seems like as with the suprime crisis at the beginning, the mainstream media and definitely Washington is not giving this much attention. In my opinion, the ALT-A space collapsing could cause much larger crisis for the broader economy because ALT-A loans cut across all socio-economic boundaries and were used most heavily in in the nation’s most affluent cities/regions.
Banks yanking away equity lines of credit - (blog.cleveland.com)
KeyCorp plunge sparks fears for smaller lenders - (www.ft.com) - Shares of US regional banks slumped Wednesday after KeyCorp (NYSE:KEY) , the third-largest bank in Ohio, doubled its forecast for loan losses and prompted concerns that small US banks may have underestimated the cost of the housing slump.
Hedge Funds Foment Russia Credit Crunch With 16% Puts - (www.bloomberg.com) - Even with record oil prices pumping the economy, the global credit crunch is penalizing Russian borrowers as the put options leave companies liable for refinancing nearly a third of their 1.5 trillion rubles of bonds at higher rates by yearend, Bloomberg data show. Soaring interest costs may contribute to a slowdown in economic growth to 6.5 percent from 8.1 percent in 2007, said Ivailo Vesselinov, senior economist at Dresdner Kleinwort in London.
Investment banks split over Fed loan facility - (www.ml-implode.com) - A rift is developing among large US investment banks over whether continued access to a special Federal Reserve borrowing facility is worth the expected trade-off in further regulation by the central bank. Investment banks such as Goldman Sachs that have been less affected by the credit crisis are reluctant to accept any significant new limits by the Fed, while those more affected, such as Lehman Brothers, are seen as more eager to maintain access to the Fed facility even if it means new limits on risk-taking.
Rating Agencies Face New Standards; Cannot Recommend Deal Structure - (www.ml-implode.com)
Ambac writes down $228 million in CDOs in April - (www.ml-implode.com) - Bond insurer Ambac Financial Group Inc. said Wednesday it continued to take millions of dollars in charges in April tied to its credit derivative and investment portfolio
Investors Putting Bad Loans Back To Lenders - This Is Only The Beginning. - (www.ml-implode.com) - The auditing of defaulted loans looking for fraud or lender negligence is escalating at a feverish pace. This is being spearheaded in many cases by the mortgage insurer but even Fannie and Freddie are in the game. If any sign of fraud is found on a defaulted loan, in most cases the originating or selling lender/investor is liable. If the originating lender is no longer in business, as is the case with most middle market mortgage bankers and brokers, then the original ‘investor’ or loan purchaser carries the burden. In most cases, these are your big named banks and Wall Street banks."
Moody's Changes Tone Over Probe - (online.wsj.com) – Ah, the great thing about being a corporation. You can find a few fall guys and company takes no blame. Moody's Corp. employees may be fired if the firm finds that errors in calculating credit ratings for certain products were covered up, people familiar with the matter said, marking a turn away from the firm's more-defensive stance for months. Moody's had been saying it did nothing wrong in its rating business during the last few years, despite dramatically lowering many of the ratings on the securities it tracked.
Shuttered Houses, Thriving Wildlife - (www.washingtonpost.com)
Realtor group continue to spew bullshit; press prints it - (blogs.businessweek.com)
Supervisors Covered Up Risky Loans - (www.npr.org)


Other Stories:

Majority of Renters Have No Plans to Purchase a Home: Survey - (www.ml-implode.com) - "Origination volume for new mortgage may take awhile to rebound, if the nation’s renters have any say in the matter. The vast ma...
Alt-A Problems Grow, While Subprime Takes Turn for the Worse - (www.ml-implode.com) - Despite an absolute dearth of ARM resets, the number of severely delinquent Alt-A borrower continues to grow, according to a report released late last week by Clayton Holdings, Inc. The number of troubled Alt-A borrowers in the 2007 vintage rose an eye-popping 26.5 percent from March to April alone, nearly reaching 17 percent of loan volume
BofA gives Countrywide's Sambol the Boot - (www.ml-implode.com) - BofA said Wednesday that David Sambol, the Countrywide operating chief who was to lead the combined company’s mortgage business after they merge this summer, will retire
Will AIG Need Even More Capital? - (www.ml-implode.com) - The $20 billion in capital raised by American International Group may not be enough for both itself and its troubled subsidiaries, an analyst told clients Wednesday. AIG shares were recently faring worst among the Dow industrials, falling 4.7%
ResCap’s Servicer Ratings Cut; “Weak” Financial Condition Cited - (www.ml-implode.com) - Fitch Ratings said Tuesday afternoon that it had cut its residential mortgage servicer ratings on troubled lender Residential Capital LLC, as the ratings agency said questions over the company’s “weakening financial condition” continue to run unanswered
Banks Choking Home Sales– Should Have Done It Earlier - (www.ml-implode.com)
National Realtors Association Opens Multiple Listings to Internet Brokers - (www.ml-implode.com) - In a settlement of an anti-trust lawsuit (one might more accurately call it a capitulation), the National Association of Realtors will open its multiple listing service to Internet brokers

With Bold Steps, Fed Chief Quiets Some Criticism - (www.nytimes.com)
Fed's Fisher: Rate hikes could come sooner vs later - (www.reuters.com)
In Housing, the Strong Turn Weak - (www.nytimes.com)
Making a good living, but still feeling strapped - (money.cnn.com)
Dow: Country in "true energy crisis" - (www.ap.com)
Obama Pitches Housing Plans - (online.wsj.com)
Mortgage applications down 4.6% last week: MBA - (www.marketwatch.com)
Atlanta's tallest buildings face soaring taxes - (www.ajc.com)
Mishkin to Leave Fed in August, Return to Columbia - (www.bloomberg.com)
Bernanke Met With BlackRock's Fink Five Weeks After Bear Stearns Bailout - (www.bloomberg.com)

Lenders Pressed on Bad Loans - (online.wsj.com)
Investors increase bets on US rate rise - (www.ft.com)
Choosing Bankruptcy to Stay Afloat - (www.washingtonpost.com)
Banks launch central clearer for derivatives - (www.ft.com)
Banking regulator promotes more inflated appraisals - (www.reuters.com)
Empty houses now for all to see - (www.smh.com.au)
Give my stimulus check to the rich - (www.latimes.com)

Fear Led to Run on Bear Stearns - (online.wsj.com) ($) (05/28/2008 05:41 AM)
GM to speed up production cuts in Flint, Mich. - (www.chicagotribune.com)
Why Rivals Don't Copy Southwest's Hedging - (online.wsj.com)
Dow Chemical bumps prices up to 20 percent - (www.chron.com)
Bear Bond Traders Odd Men Out in Merger - (www.thestreet.com)
As food prices spiral, farmers, others profit - (www.chicagotribune.com)
Four reasons housing won't recover quickly - (msnbc.msn.com)
Aggressive lending and borrowing caused housing bubble - (news.bbc.co.uk)

French Consumer Confidence Unexpectedly Drops to Record Low on Fuel Prices - (www.bloomberg.com)
German Import Prices Rise More Than Expected as Costs for Oil, Gas Surge - (www.bloomberg.com)
China cries "Inflation!" but plays it cool - (www.reuters.com)
Now an importer, Indonesia pulls out of OPEC - (money.cnn.com)

$4 a gallon means beer costs more - (articles.moneycentral.msn.com)
Smart money betting against Fed's weak dollar - (optionarmageddon.blogspot.com)
Crude Oil Bubble Trouble - (greatdepression2006.blogspot.com)
US house prices tumble a record 14% in 1Q - (biz.yahoo.com)
L.A. house prices down 21.7% in last year - (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
Chicago house prices fall 10% in March - (www.chicagobusiness.com)
Housing even worse than expected - (www.nytimes.com)
Case-Shiller index makes housing bottom look distant - (www.businessweek.com)
Yikes! FL house prices continue freefall - (www.palmbeachpost.com)
FL trails only Vegas in plunging house prices - (www.miamiherald.com)
Realtors Group Settles Anti-Trust Case - (www.bloomberg.com)