The Fed’s “temporary” liquidity injections are starting to look rather permanent…
Anyone who expected that the easing of the quarter-end funding squeeze in the repo market would mean the Fed would gradually fade its interventions in the repo market, was disappointed on Friday afternoon when the NY Fed announced it would extend the duration of overnight repo operations (with a total size of $75BN) for at least another month, while also offering no less than eight 2-week term repo operations until November 4, 2019, which confirms that the funding unlocked via term repo is no longer merely a part of the quarter-end arsenal but an integral part of the Fed’s overall “temporary” open market operations… which are starting to look quite permanent.
In accordance with the most recent Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) directive, the Open Market Trading Desk (the Desk) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will conduct a series of overnight and term repurchase agreement (repo) operations to help maintain the federal funds rate within the target range.
Effective the week of October 7, the Desk will offer term repos through the end of October as indicated in the schedule below. The Desk will continue to offer daily overnight repos for an aggregate amount of at least $75 billion each through Monday, November 4, 2019.
Securities eligible as collateral include Treasury, agency debt, and agency mortgage-backed securities. Awarded amounts may be less than the amount offered, depending on the total quantity of eligible propositions submitted. Additional details about the operations will be released each afternoon for the following day’s operation(s) on the Repurchase Agreement Operational Details web page. The operation schedule and parameters are subject to change if market conditions warrant or should the FOMC alter its guidance to the Desk.
What this means is that until such time as the Fed launches Permanent Open Market Operations – either at the November or December FOMC meeting, which according to JPMorgan will be roughly $37BN per month, or approximately the same size as QE1…
… the NY Fed will continue to inject liquidity via the now standard TOMOs: overnight and term repos. At that point, watch as the Fed’s balance sheet, which rose by $185BN in the past month, continues rising indefinitely as QE4 is quietly launched to no fanfare.
As the exodus gathers momentum, all the reasons people clung so rabidly to urban meccas decay.
The lifestyle you ordered is not just out of stock, the supplier closed down.
(Charles Huge Smith) If there is any trend that’s viewed as permanent, it’s the enduring attraction of coastal urban meccas: despite the insane rents and housing costs, that’s where the jobs, the opportunities and the desirable urban culture are.
Nice, but like many other things the status quo considers permanent, this could reverse very quickly, and all those pricey urban meccas could become crime-ridden ghost towns. How could such a reversal occur?
1. Those in the top 10% who can leave reach an inflection point and decide to leave. The top 1% who live in enclaves filled with politicians, celebrities and the uber-wealthy see no reason to leave, as the police make sure no human feces land on their doorstep.
It’s everyone who lives outside these protected enclaves, in neighborhoods exposed to exasperating (and increasingly dangerous) decay who will reach a point where the “urban lifestyle” is no longer worth the sacrifices and costs.
It might be needles and human feces on the sidewalk, it might be petty crime such as your mail being stolen for the umpteenth time, it might be soul-crushing commutes that finally do crush your soul, or in Berkeley, California, it might be getting a $300 ticket for not bringing your bicycle to a complete stop at every empty intersection on a city bikeway. (I’ve personally witnessed motorcycle officers nailing dozens of bicyclists with these $300 tickets.)
It might be something that shreds the flimsy facade of safety and security complacent urban dwellers have taken for granted, something that acts as the last grain of sand on the growing pile of reasons to get the heck out that triggers the decision.
Not everyone can move, but many in the top tier can, and will. Living in a decaying situation is not a necessity for these lucky few, it’s an option.
2. Those who have to leave when they lose their job. A funny thing happens in all economies, even those with central banks: credit-cycle / business-cycle recessions are inevitable, regardless of how many times financial pundits say, “the Fed has our back” and “don’t fight the Fed.”
As I’ve noted here numerous times, a great many small businesses in these pricey urban meccas are one tiny step from closing: one more rent increase, one more bad month, one more regulatory burden, one more health issue and they’re gone. They will move to greener pastures for the same reason as everyone else–they can’t afford to live in urban meccas.
Once enough of the top 10% leave (by choice or because they can no longer afford it), the food/beverage service industry implodes. Wait staff and bartending have been a major source of jobs in these urban meccas, and when hundreds of struggling establishments fold due to a 10% decline in their sales, thousands of these employees will lose their jobs and the prospects of getting hired elsewhere decline with every new closure.
The vast majority of these service employees are renters, paying sky-high rents that unemployment can’t cover. They will hang on for a few months and then cash in their chips and move to more affordable climes.
3. Once the stock market returns to historic norms, the gargantuan capital gains that supported local tax revenues and spending dry up. WeWork is the canary in the coal mine; from a $50 billion IPO to insolvency in six weeks.
Once tax revenues plummet (no more IPOs, hundreds of restaurants closing, etc.), cities and counties will have to trim their work forces to maintain their ballooning pension payments for retirees. This will leave fewer police and social workers available to deal with everyone with little motivation (or option) to leave: thieves, those getting public services and the homeless.
4. Housing prices and rents are sticky: sellers and landlords won’t believe the good times have ended, and so they will keep home prices and rents at nosebleed valuations even as vacancies soar and the market is flooded with listings.
Neighborhoods that had fewer than 100 homes for sale will suddenly have 500 and then 1,000, as sellers realize the boom has ended and they want out–but only at top-of-the-bubble prices.
Ironically, this stubborn attachment to boom-era prices for homes and rents accelerates the exodus. As incomes decline, costs remain sky-high, so the only option left is to move away, the sooner the better.
By the time sellers grudgingly reduce prices, it’s too late: the market has soured. The Kubler-Ross dynamic is in full display, as sellers go through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance: they grudgingly drop the price of the $1.2 million bungalow or flat to $1.15 million, then after much anger and anguish, to $1.1 million, but the market has imploded while they processed a reversal they didn’t think possible: now sales have dried up, and prices are sub-$800,000 while they ponder dropping their asking price to $995,000.
Vacant apartments pile up, as the number of laid-off and downsized employees who can still afford high rents collapses. (Recall that tens of thousands of recent arrivals in urban meccas rely heavily on tips for their income, and as service and gig-economy business dries up, so do their tips.)
5. As the exodus gathers momentum, all the reasons people clung so rabidly to urban meccas decay: venues and cafes close, street life fades, job opportunities dry up, and yet prices for everything remain high: transport, rent, taxes, employees, etc.
Friends move away, favorite places close suddenly, streets that were safe now seem foreboding, and all the friction, crime, grime and dysfunction that was once tolerable becomes intolerable.
6. In response to deteriorating city and county finances, local government jacks up fees, tickets, permits and taxes, accelerating the exodus. How many $300 tickets, fees and penalties does it take to break the resolve to stick it out?
7. Those on the cusp cave in and abandon the mecca. Once those who had the option to leave have left, and those who can no longer afford to stay leave, the decay causes those on the cusp of bailing out to abandon ship.
Renters move out in the middle of the night, homeowners who have watched their equity vanish as prices went into free fall jingle-mail the keys to the house to the lender and small businesses that had clung on, hoping for a turn-around close their doors.
8. Each of these dynamics reinforce the others. Soaring taxes, decaying services, declining business, rising insecurity and stubbornly high costs all feed on each other.
And that’s how pricey urban meccas turn into ghost towns inhabited by those who can’t leave and those living on public services, i.e. those too poor to support the enormously costly infrastructure of public spending in the urban mecca.
Not only do nearly half of America’s homeless people live in California, but four of the five American cities with the greatest incidences of un-sheltered homelessness are in the Golden State.
As California becomes a mecca for socialism, their quality of life diminishes along with it in a characteristic dystopian decline.
San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Rosa, and San Jose are four of the five cities with the highest amount of homelessness. Seattle joins the California municipalities in the top five.According to Market Watch,the rates of homelessness are the highest in Washington D.C. The District of Columbia’s homeless rate is at 5.8 times the United States rate. New York is next, followed by Hawaii, Oregon, and California. These five states together comprise 20% of the overall U.S. population but 45% of the country’s homeless population.
All of these states are incredibly liberal with several already having instituted tight socialist policies.
A White House report teased out certain trends in homelessness across the country. Communities along both coasts have much larger homeless populations than those in the middle of the country. One driver of this trend is likely the more notable rise in housing prices along the coasts than in much of the Midwest.
The White House report identified local laws and policing practices as a potential differentiator. “Some [states] more than others engage in more stringent enforcement of quality of life issues like restrictions on the use of tents and encampments, loitering, and other related activities,” the report noted. –Market Watch
The Trump administration has floated plans to fix the homeless crisis in liberal areas by deregulation. Many states and municipalities have zoning rules regarding the construction of both single-family and multi-family homes. These laws have impeded the builders’ ability to meet the demand for housing resulting in scarcity which has driven up prices. Experts and politicians across the political spectrum have suggested that relaxing such regulations could provide a boost to building activity.
Chinese police searched the house of Zhang Qi, 57, the former mayor of Danzhou, and found a large amount of cash, as well as 13.5 tons of gold in ingots in a secret basement of his home, according tolocal media.
In addition to the mayoral post, Qi held others including Secretary of the Communist Party.
According to unofficial reports, in addition to the $625 million worth of gold, cash worth 268 billion yuan ($37 billion) was discovered[ZH: seems highs to us].
The video prompted some witty social media responses…
Luxurious real estate with a total area of several thousand square meters, which the former city manager had been reportedly hiding, was the icing on the cake in this massive haul for the Chinese Anti-Corruption Committee.
Qi was investigated by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the party’s internal disciplinary body, and the National Supervisory Commission, the highest anti-corruption agency of China, in September 2019.
According to China’s anti-corruption laws, Qi will be executed.
After new- and existing-home-sales rebounded notably in August, expectations were that pending sales would complete the trifecta and sure enough it did (rising 1.3% MoM, better than the 1.0% expected jump)
Source: Bloomberg
Pending home sales rose 2.48% YoY – the biggest annual jump since April 2016…
Source: Bloomberg
All regions saw an increase in sales in August:
Northeast up 1.4%; July fell 1.6%
Midwest up 0.6%; July fell 2.4%
South up 1.4%; July fell 2.4%
West up 3.1%; July fell 3.4%
But we note that The Northeast (-1.1%) and Midwest (-1.6%) both fell year-over-year.
The question is – what happens next? As mortgage rates have rebounded higher and mortgage applications have already tumbled since this sales data…
The Fed is scheduled to pump ‘at least’ $75B in Emergency Capital Injections every day, between today and October 10th, to presumably keep the entire banking system from locking up.
This means at a minimum, the Fed is prepared to inject nearly three times more money into the system in two weeks than during the entire TARP program between 2008-2012.
Just like That: Roughly 600,000 travelers are stranded around the world after the British travel provider Thomas Cook declares bankruptcy…
StudioPortoSabbia/Shutterstock
Thomas Cook, a 178-year-old British travel company and airline, declared bankruptcy early Monday morning, suspending operations and leaving hundreds of thousands of tourists stranded around the world.
The travel company operates its own airline, with a fleet of nearly 50 medium- and long-range jets, and owns several smaller airlines and subsidiaries, including the German carrier Condor. Thomas Cook still had several flights in the air as of Sunday night but was expected to cease operations once they landed at their destinations.
Condor posted a message to its site late Sunday night saying that it was still operating but that it was unclear whether that would change. Condor’s scheduled Monday-morning flights appeared to be operating normally.
About 600,000 Thomas Cook customers were traveling at the time of the collapse, of whom 150,000 were British, the company toldCNN.
The British Department for Transport and Civil Aviation Authority prepared plans, under the code name “Operation Matterhorn,” to repatriate stranded British passengers. According to the British aviation authority, those rescue flights would take place until October 6, leading to the possibility that travelers could be delayed for up to two weeks.
Initial rescue flights seemed poised to begin immediately, with stranded passengers posting on Twitter that they were being delayed only a few hours as they awaited chartered flights.
The scale of the task has reports calling it the largest peacetime repatriation effort in British history, including the operation the government carried out whenMonarch Airlines collapsedin 2017.
Costs of the flights were expected to be covered by theATOL, or Air Travel Organiser’s License, protection plan, a fund that provides for repatriation of British travelers if an airline ceases operations.
Airplanes from British Airways and EasyJet would be among those transporting stranded passengers home, according toThe Guardian, as well as chartered planes from leasing companies and other airlines. Thomas Cook Airlines’ destinations included parts of mainland Europe, Africa, the US, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Airplanes were being flown to those destinations on Sunday night, according to theBBC.
We are living in an age of records in the financial world. The stock market is in its longest bull market in history and near all-time highs. The world has more debt than ever before while interest rates are near record lows, and some are negative in many countries for the first time ever. Nick Barisheff, CEO of Bullion Management Group (BMG), is seeing a dark ending for the era of financial records. Barisheff explains,
“I have been in the business for 40 years, and this is the first time we have had a simultaneous triple bubble, a bubble in real estate, stocks and bonds all at the same time. In 1999, it was a stock bubble. In 2007, it was a real estate bubble. This time, we’ve got a triple simultaneous bubble. So, when we have the correction, it’s going to be massive. Value calculations on equities say it’s worse than 1999, and in some cases worse than 1929. The big problem is this triple bubble is sitting on a mountain of debt like never before.”
What is going to be the reaction to this record bubble in everything crashing? Barisheff says, “I think you are going to be getting riots in the streets. It’s already happening in California. CalPERS is the pension fund administrator for a lot of the pension funds in California. So, already retired teachers, firefighters and policemen that are sitting in retirement getting their pension checks all got letters saying sorry, your pension checks from now on are going to be reduced by 60%. How do you get by then?”
What happens if the meltdown picks up speed and casualties? Barisheff says,
“I think the only option will be for the government is to print more money and postpone the problem yet a little bit longer, but that leads to massive inflation and eventually hyperinflation. Every fiat currency that has ever existed has always ended in hyperinflation, every single one. Since 1800, there have been 56 hyper inflations. Hyperinflation is defined as 50% inflation per month. That’s where we are going and what other choice is there?”
So, what do you do? Barisheff says,
“In the U.S. dollar since 2000, gold is up an average of 9.4% per year. In some countries, it’s up 14% and so on. If you take the overall average of all the countries, the average increase is 10% a year. Every time Warren Buffett is on CNBC, he seems to go out of his way to disparage gold, but if you look at a chart of Berkshire Hathaway and gold, gold has outperformed Berkshire Hathaway. . . Everybody worships Warren Buffett as the best investor in the world, and gold has outperformed his fund in U.S. dollars. I would not disparage gold if I were him. I’d keep quiet about it.”
There is a first for Barisheff, too, in this financial environment. He says for the first time ever, he’s “100% invested in gold” as a percentage of his portfolio. He says the bottom “is in for gold,” and “the bottom is in for silver, too.”
Barisheff contends that with the record bubbles and the record debt, both gold and silver will be setting new all-time high records as well in the not-so-distant future.
Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One with Nick Barisheff, CEO of BMG and the author of the popular book“$10,000 Gold.”
It’s now official: central banks’ stated policy is to take interest rates and the value of the US dollar to zero. …But not until they’ve managed to tie up the world’s real estate and other hard assets, leaving the vast majority of people in poverty.
Wayne Jett, constitutional attorney, who has argued cases up to and including the US Supreme Court, author of “The Fruits of Graft, Great Depressions Then and Now,” and founder of ClassicalCapital.com, returns to Reluctant Peppers to expound on his latest article “MONETARY POLICY END GAME – Central Banks To Fight Fake ‘Deflation’.”
If you’re not outraged by the end of this interview, you’re not paying attention. You’ll want to share this widely!
Are you a rich guy who wants to bang debt-laden college girls with all your extra money?
Are you a struggling college girl facing decades of six-figure debt so you can follow your unsinkable dreams?
Great news; thanks to the internet, your bases are covered! As we’ve previously reported (hereandhere), ‘soft prostitution’ may have been going on for a long time – but its normalization is relatively new – and undoubtedly linked to the $1.5 trillion+ student debt problem.
As an example, according to ‘sugar daddy / sugar baby’ website SeekingArrangement, there are 1,304 students at Georgia State Universitysigned up to be Sugar Babiesright now – up from just 306 in 2018.
Given that there are15,277 female studentsat Georgia State, –nearly one in ten girls at Georgia State are willing to whore themselves out to make ends meet.
Of this list, several universities are considered top-tier – such as UCLA, University of Southern California, Columbia and New York University.
According to Seeking.com, “Sugar Babiesdo not want to be in monotonous, traditional relationships prescribed by society — that no longer works today. Rather, she is seeking a modern relationship — one that is different and matches her ambition and drive — with a romantic partner who can play the traditional role of provider or gentleman, without placing unreasonable limitations on personal growth,” according to the website.
Overall, there are 2.7 million US students signed up and 4.7 million worldwide.
According to the website, “Students registered on SeekingArrangement get help paying for tuition and even more benefits.Finding the right Sugar Daddy can help students gain access to the right network and opportunities. College Sugar Babies can also get help paying for other college-related costs, such as books and housing.”
And while the site claims 4.5 million students across the globe, SeekingArrangement says it has 20 million members worldwide – of which students are most common.
What do they Sugar Babies do with the money they earn with their vaginas? 30% is spent on tuition and other school related expenses, while 25% goes towards living expenses.
Meanwhile, the average Sugar Daddy is 41-years-old and has an annual income of $250,000. Most common professions are Tech Entrepreneur and CEO are their two top occupations, followed by Developer, Financier, Lawyer and Physician.
As for cities – New York tops the list, followed by London, Toronto and Los Angeles.
Are we about to see the stock market crash this year? That is what Goldman Sachs seems to think, and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that great financial chaos has been unleashed during the month of October. When the stock market crashed in October 1929, it started the worst economic depression that we have ever witnessed. In October 1987, the largest single day percentage decline in U.S. stock market history rocked the entire planet. And the nightmarish events of October 2008 set the stage for a “Great Recession” that we still haven’t fully recovered from. So could it be possible that something similar may happen in October 2019?
The storm clouds are looming and disaster could strike at any time. This is one of the most critical times in the history of our nation, and most Americans are completely unprepared for what is going to happen next.
(ZeroHedge) In a stunning rebuke, echoing very closely our own concerns, Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren has – without naming-names – called out the WeWork business model as being a systemic risk to the US economy.
Two weeks ago we asked (rhetorically)…
What happens to the US CRE market when We files for bankruptcy
While the collapse and/or bankruptcy of WeWork would hardly lead to a personal finance disaster – SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son is already Japan’s richest man and with a net worth of over $20 billion can easily stomach losing billions on WeWork (and Uber) – it would send shockwaves across US commercial real estate, as the company is already the single biggest tenant in New York City, as well as Chicago, Denver and central London.
In fact, with over $47 billion in lease liabilities, WeWork is already one of the world’s largest lessees, trailing only oil exploration giants Petrobras and Sinpec, an astonishing feat for the flexible office space provider “which was founded less than a decade ago, bleeds cash, and doesn’t plan to become profitable any time soon.”
As Bloomberg recently noted, “anyone weighing whether to buy shares in WeWork’s IPO cannot ignore the fact that the company will have to find $47 billion from somewhere in coming years to meet its contractual obligations – including about $10 billion in just the next five years. Right now, its own very negative cash flows won’t cut it.”
Mr. Rosengren noted the risks posed by commercial real estate, which have long been a concern of his, as a possible vector to amplify trouble.
Without naming any firms, Mr. Rosengren noted the particular concerns posed by co-working companies. He made this comment as the parent of office-sharing firm WeWork postponed its initial public offering amid investor doubts about its valuation and concerns about its corporate governance.
Office-sharing firms are particularly exposed to risks should the economy run into trouble, and could wound landlords in the process, Mr. Rosengren said.
“In a downturn the co-working company would be exposed to the loss of tenant income, which puts both them and the property owner at risk if they cannot make lease payments to the owner of the building,” he said.
“I am concerned that commercial real estate losses will be larger in the next downturn because of this growing feature of the real estate market, which could ultimately make runs and vacancies more likely due to this new leasing model,” Mr. Rosengren said.
“The fact that the shared office model relies on small-company tenants with short-term leases, combined with the potential lack of recourse for the property owner, is potentially problematic in a recession. This also raises the issue of whether bank loans to property owners in cities with major penetration by co-working models could experience a higher incidence of default and greater loss-given-defaults than we have seen historically.”
Of course, he is right.As we concluded more explicitly,in a bankruptcy, all those obligations would be frozen and squeezed among all the other pre-petition claims, which of course means that the commercial real estate market of cities where WeWork is especially active – like New York and London (and Rosengren’s Boston) – would suddenly find itself paralyzed, as a deflationary tsunami is unleashed among one of the strongest performing markets since the financial crisis.
Doubleline Capital CEO and founder Jeffrey Gundlach joins ‘Fast Money Halftime Report’ to discuss the Fed rate decision, if there is a recession risk and his market call.
With nearly40% of young adultsin California living with their parents and a$1.6 trillion student debtcrisis taking more than just a little bite out of disposable income (and any hope of saving for many), economist Gary Kimbrough of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro hasthrown togethera ton of interesting data to answer the question: “What are the economic realities for young adults, and how have they changed from prior decades?“
While much of Kimbrough’s analysis was done in February, he’s revisited his work ahead of a January presentation on the topic of young adults living at home.
Living at home
Household formation is way down for 20-34 year olds.
In 1960 and 1970, over 70% of men and women age 20-34 (excluding those in group quarters) were heads of household/householders or spouses of householders.
What’s more, when broken down by categories “living with parents, household head or spouse of household head, living in group quarters (mostly prisons for these ages), and other arrangements like cohabiting and living with roommates,” it’s startling to watch how young adults have been living at home vs. starting their own families over time.
Another suggestion, from @DParrish: maps of the state-level rates of living with parents for 20-34 year olds, by gender. pic.twitter.com/nN5HuFx0A9
When it comes to “job hopping” – young adults are largely staying put – and “aren’t even switching jobs at anything close to the levels of those in their age groups before 2001” according to Kimbrough.
Let's be clear: millennials are not "job hopping." Young adults aren't even switching jobs at anything close to the levels of those in their age groups before 2001. pic.twitter.com/YyteHquu6K
“In 1992, middle-aged men were significantly more likely to have a bachelor’s degree than women or younger men. Now members of every group age 25-34 are more likely to have degrees than those men were,” writes Kimbrough, adding “Women’s college degree rates have shot up significantly more than men’s.”
In 1992, middle-aged men were significantly more likely to have a bachelor's degree than women or younger men. Now members of every group age 25-34 are more likely to have degrees than those men were. Women's college degree rates have shot up significantly more than men's. pic.twitter.com/WpcDaAxcPi
Since the Great Recession, Kimbrough noticed that “the propensity to work part time is about the same for women as pre-recession, but is up quite a bit for men under 35. Men 25-29 are still more likely to work PT than any time pre-2009.”
While examining economic realities for young adults since the Great Recession, I noticed: the propensity to work part time is about the same for women as pre-recession, but is up quite a bit for men under 35. Men 25-29 are still more likely to work PT than any time pre-2009. pic.twitter.com/VDD56DkF21
As more women have chosen careers over homemaking, Kimbrough provides an illustration of prime-age employment as a percentage of population, by gender. What’s more, young adult marriages have declined markedly over the last decade, continuing a trend which began mid-century.
With decennial Census and ACS data, I can examine marriage rates by age and gender over an even longer period. Young adult marriage rates have declined over the last decade, but they've been declining since mid-century. https://t.co/OZF2u3smnn
While not an “economic reality” per-se, it’s interesting to note that young men have been swapping TV-watching time for gaming.
Just looking at time spent watching TV/movies/streaming video, young adults are watching less while older adults are watching considerably more. https://t.co/v9sD2N9M9x
Of note, and unsurprisingly – young men living at home constitute the bulk of gamers watching less TV.
This is particularly interesting because, circling back to that increase in gaming time, for young adult men the increase in gaming is concentrated among those living with parents. pic.twitter.com/4mUwfAvSEH
Also unsurprising, with lower marriage rates and higher female employment, women in their 20s are “significantly less likely to have a child than a decade ago,” while those over the age of 32 are slightly more likely to have a kid.
Given the economic realities young adults have faced and the delays in marriage and homeownership we've seen, it should come as little surprise that women in their 20s are significantly less likely to have children in recent years than a decade or so ago. https://t.co/EQyKsBlxjx
Looking at five decades of prime age adults in the CPS ASEC:
1) Rates of women working increased until about 20 years ago, then stagnated 2) Men's working rates declined until about a decade ago, then stagnated 3) Parents (of children under 18) became older and less common pic.twitter.com/vRbTYPKOUg
Bidding wars for homes in Seattle, San Jose, and San Francisco have crashed in the past year, reflecting an alarming national trend,according to a new report from Redfin.
The report found that the national bidding-war rate in August was 10.4%, down from 42% a year earlier. The rate printed at the lowest level since 2011.
At the start of 2018, the national bidding-war rate was 59%, then plunged as home buyers became uncomfortable with sky-high housing prices, increasing mortgage rates, and economic uncertainty surrounding the trade war. The housing market started to cool in late 2018, as the competition among home buyers collapsed by 4Q18, this is an ominous sign for the national housing market that could soon face a steep correction in price.
Even with eight months of declining mortgage rates in 2019, bidding-wars among home buyers continue to drop. This is somewhat troubling because the government’s narrative has been declining rates will boom housing, but as of Wednesday, mortgage applications continue to fall. Home buyers aren’t coming off the sidelines, and there’s too much uncertainty surrounding the economy with recession risks at the highest levels in more than a decade.
“Despite remaining near three-year lows, mortgage rates have failed to bring enough buyers to the market to rev up competition for homes this summer,” said Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather. Recession fears have been enough to spook some would-be buyers from making the big financial commitment of a home purchase. But assuming a recession doesn’t arrive this fall or winter, consumers will likely adjust to the new ‘normal’ of continued volatility in the stock and global markets, and the people who need and want to make a move will take advantage of low mortgage rates.”
As for one of the hottest real estate markets in the country, that being San Francisco, the bidding-war rate was 31% in August, down from 73.5% a year earlier. The lack of demand has certainly cooled housing prices, now expected to fall 1% YoY.
The rate in San Jose was 10.3% in August, down from 77% a year earlier, and in Seattle, another hot city for real estate, it saw its rate at 9.4%, down from 37.8% last August.
“Competition in the Seattle area has certainly slowed down since the second half of 2018. Last year, five out of five offers I submitted faced competition; now, it’s one in five,” said local Redfin agent Michelle Santos.
“Now, for desirable homes, competition is still fierce, and the winning offer is one that’s above the list price and waives contingencies. At the same time, average homes sit on the market for quite some time before they get any offers.”
With the rapid decline of competition among home buyers and a flood of inventory entering the market, real home prices are starting to correct in major cities. Real price change over the last 12 months is falling in Seattle, San Francisco, and New York, according to new CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index data.
With competition among home buyers evaporating in a very short period of time, this could mean a downturn in the real estate market is imminent.
(City Journal) America’s big cities are, without exception, politically blue cities, with a new class of progressive politicians doing real damage to public order. When it comes to urban development, however, the blue monolith breaks down: socialists, city planners, cyclists, environmentalists, pragmatists, and social-justice activists are often at odds with one another. They might all support more housing, more density, and more public transportation, but they disagree sharply on the means for getting there.
In recent years, a new faction has emerged in city politics: what one might call the new Left urbanists. These activists believe that local governments must rebuild the urban environment—housing, transit, roads, and tolls—to produce a new era of city flourishing, characterized by social and racial justice and a net-zero carbon footprint. The urbanists rally around provocative slogans like “ban all cars,” “raze the suburbs,” and “single-family housing is white supremacy”—ironically, since they’re generally white, affluent, and educated themselves. They’re often employed in public or semipublic roles in urban planning, housing development, and social advocacy. They treat public housing, mass transit, and bicycle lanes as a kind of holy trinity—and they want to impose their religion on you.
Housing is the central political battleground for these progressive activists. As David Madden and Peter Marcuse write in their book, In Defense of Housing: “The residential is political—which is to say that the shape of the housing system is always the outcome of struggles between different groups and classes.” Their goal is not simply to get new housing built but to build new housing owned, operated, and controlled by the state. If they can dictate how cities construct new housing, their logic goes, they can dictate how people live—and set right society’s economic, social, and moral deficiencies.
The urbanists laid out their plans in a widely circulated report from the People’s Policy Project, a crowd-funded organization founded in 2017 that seeks to “fill the holes left by the current think tank landscape with a special focus on socialist and social democratic economic ideas.” They envision the construction of 10 million “municipal homes” over the next ten years. Under this proposal, government would become the nation’s largest landlord and residential construction firm, building more housing units than the entire private construction industry. The abysmal record of public housing in the United States, from the Cabrini-Green Homes in Chicago to the Foote Homes in Memphis, where crime and blight prevailed, makes no difference to these urbanists. They have simply rebranded “housing projects” to “municipal homes,” arguing that public housing has been “unjustly stigmatized” and that these new units will somehow avoid the fate of American public-housing ventures over the past half-century. They believe that the new “municipal homes” will resemble neighborhoods in Stockholm, Vienna, or Helsinki rather than in Detroit, Newark, or Oakland.
The question for the activists is not just how much new housing gets built but who builds it and who will live in it. That is, new developments must also tick off the boxes of identity politics. In cities like San Francisco, some activists have taken the hardline position of opposing all private housing construction, regardless of how it might reduce the cost of housing for middle-class residents. In an essay in the San Francisco Examiner, public-housing activists Andrew Szeto and Toshio Meronek called advocates for more private-market housing part of a “libertarian, anti-poor campaign to turn longtime sites of progressive organizing into rich-people-only zones” and compared them with alt-right white nationalists.
One might dismiss this as radical posturing in a local alt-weekly, but public-housing advocates have seized real power in city hall. They have learned how to use the zoning and permitting bureaucracy to achieve their goals of no new private development. In San Francisco’s Mission District, activists forced Laundromat owner Bob Tillman to spend $1.4 million and nearly five years to gain permission to convert his business into an apartment building. Activists and their enablers in city hall claimed that Tillman’s project would cause gentrification and displace minority residents, and forced him through a gauntlet of Kafkaesque legal proceedings. At one point, the planning commission even hired a “shadow consultant” to offer an expert opinion on whether the shadows cast by the proposed building would create social and racial inequities. To the new Left urbanists, housing isn’t just housing; it must be evaluated on social-justice standards. If it fails to measure up, it must go.
In New York City, progressive urbanists have seized on public transportation as a primary instrument of “social, environmental, immigrant, and economic justice.” New York’s subway system was designed in the early twentieth century to serve the practical needs of city residents, but today’s activists have come to see its tunnels and trains as grand mechanisms for cosmic justice. In its annual “Transportation and Equity” report, for example, the Straphangers Campaign argues that “the most vulnerable New Yorkers suffer disproportionately from high fares, long commutes, polluted air, and dangerous streets,” and therefore, “equity demands that state leaders prioritize transit in the public budget and policymaking process.”
The Straphangers estimate that an additional $30 billion in tax revenues would be needed to complete its desired overhaul of the mass-transit system, with a ten-year goal of upgrading 11 subway lines, building 130 new accessible subway stations, and purchasing 3,000 new subway cars and 5,000 new buses. While state and local leaders haven’t signed up for such an ambitious plan, they do support some of the Straphangers’ funding proposals to expand the transit system—including congestion pricing, a “millionaire’s tax,” marijuana tax, stock-transfer tax, and even a $3-per-package tax on Amazon deliveries.
Most New Yorkers would agree that investment in mass transit is a necessity, and there is a reasonable argument for congestion pricing in traffic-glutted Manhattan—but the activists don’t formulate their arguments on these practical grounds. A close reading of their reports reveals that the long-term vision involves elimination of the automobile, which remains a staple for middle-class residents in New York’s outer boroughs. In the Straphangers’ plan, activists want to restrict curbside space for cars dramatically by building “protected bike lanes on all major arterial streets across the five boroughs,” “giving developers incentives to contribute toward sustainable transportation over private vehicle usage,” and eliminating parking requirements for new housing projects. Activists deploy euphemisms like “transportation alternatives” and “transportation choices”; but at heart, their vision for mass transportation is not about choice but control. They want to remake the urban infrastructure in their own image: green, moral, healthy, just, and in solidarity with the masses—at least as those masses exist in their imagination.
The new Left urbanists’ fatal mistake is their failure to absorb the reality that cities are not just buildings, roads, tunnels, and bike lanes, but living entities. The urbanists can demolish and rebuild the physical environment, but they cannot pave over the people who make up our cities. Life in a metropolis is simply too complex, too variable, and too ephemeral—it will evade even the most careful planning. If we want better, more beautiful, cities, we must bring neighbors, developers, employers, and governments into the conversation. Our cities must be built through cooperation, not compulsion.
(Volfefe begins today) One day before the ECB is expected to cut rates further into negative territory and restart sovereign debt QE, moments ago president Trump resumed his feud with the Fed piling more pressure on Powell to cut rates “to ZERO or less” because the US apparently has “no inflation”, while also crashing the conversation over whether the US should issue ultra-long maturity debt (50, 100 years), saying the US “should then start to refinance our debt. INTEREST COST COULD BE BROUGHT WAY DOWN, while at the same time substantially lengthening the term.”
At least we now know who is urging Mnuchin to launch 50 and 100 year Treasuries. What we don’t know is just what school of monetary thought Trump belongs to – aside from Erdoganism of course – because while on one hand Trump claims that “we have the great currency, power, and balance sheet” on the other the US president also claims that “the USA should always be paying the lowest rate.” In a normal world, the strongest economy tends to pay the highest interest rate, but in this upside down world, who knows anymore, so maybe the Fed has just itself to blame.
Trump’s conclusion: “It is only the naïveté of Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve that doesn’t allow us to do what other countries are already doing. A once in a lifetime opportunity that we are missing because of “Boneheads.”
….The USA should always be paying the the lowest rate. No Inflation! It is only the naïveté of Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve that doesn’t allow us to do what other countries are already doing. A once in a lifetime opportunity that we are missing because of “Boneheads.”
Expect even more badgering of the Fed once the ECB cuts rates tomorrow.
One parting thought: if Bolton was fired for disagreeing with Trump over the Taliban, we wonder just how stable Powell’s job will be once the market actually does drop.
Foodbank South Australia has been approached by banks wanting to refer their clients to the charity, in the hope it will prevent people from defaulting on mortgage payments.
Foodbank South Australia is now working on a new agreement which would enable clients to access its food services directly, with a voucher funded by the major bank.
However, Foodbank South Australia chief executive Greg Pattinson told ABC Radio Adelaide it was still exploring how the program would work.
“That’s what we are exploring with some of the banks at the moment … it hasn’t started yet because we are still working through the process.
“We’ve never been approached by financial institutions in the past and the banks, to their credit, are doing the right thing in trying to find a way of keeping people in their houses.”
He said traditionally, Foodbank worked through charities and the welfare sector but it had seen an increase in the number of people who require food assistance that are working.
“Increasingly we are being approached now by organisations other than traditional charities, so schools for example, where the schools have identified the children of parents who are doing it tough,” he said.
“Each year we’ve seen an increase in South Australia of anywhere up to 20 per cent in the number of people seeking food assistance.”
‘Cost of living’ is causing a shift
Mr Pattinson said the stereotype of a person or family that required food assistance was diminishing.
He said more people must be suffering from mortgage stress because more of those needing help were from working families.
“We certainly do provide services to the unemployed and to people who are homeless,” he said.
“But we are seeing an increase in the numbers of working families and working Australians who are needing to seek food assistance because of cost of living increases.
“We see an increase in demand, for example every three months, when people get their electricity bills.
“It’s a case of those weeks where people are saying, ‘we’ll make sure the kids are fed, the roof is over our head but mum and dad don’t eat this week’.”
Trying to help clients ‘balance their budget’
Mr Pattinson said the fact it had been approached by the banks had shown a significant shift and Foodbank was working on a project to support those in need.
“We’re getting inquiries from schools, pastoral care workers, from principals at various schools around the state,” he said.
“And increasingly, we are now seeing inquiries from banks and financial institutions who are looking to try and find a way of helping their clients balance their budget.”
He said the program was still in its early stages, but he hoped Foodbank would have a concrete program in place within the next two to three months.
“It may even be as simple as the banks referring their clients to the Foodbank food hubs,” he said.
“But there would obviously be conditions to that which would have to be assessed by the bank to make sure those people … are genuinely in need of those services.
“We don’t want to shift the food away from people who are genuinely needing it.”
Recently, one big name money manager after another is on record telling people to buy hard assets. Why? Financial writer and precious metals expert Bill Holter says they all know what is coming. Holter contends,
“They understand that this is going to be the biggest monetary debasement in the history of history. They understand it’s hyperinflation that is on its way. They are late to the game, and they do manage billions and billions of dollars, and I don’t see how people talking about buying gold and buying silver are going to be able to get actual physical silver and physical gold in their hands or in their vaults.”
Holter is warning of a failure to deliver metal because demand is out-running supply. Holter says, “So far, this year . . . for gold, they have already EFP (Exchange for Physical) 4,200 tons just for the first eight months. . . . They don’t have the inventories to deliver. . . . The point being that is 4,200 tons in eight months. The world only produces 3,300 tons (of gold a year) and if you take out Russia and China, which do not export (gold), the whole total for the year is 2,800 tons. So, it looks like we are going to end up with 6,000 tons of gold EFP demand for delivery in a world that is only producing 2,800 tons. In silver, it’s worse. In silver in the first eight months, there has been 1.6 billion ounces EFP. That number is going to end up to about 2.4 billion of silver ounces (EFP) and the world produces less than 800 million ounces a year. The bottom line to what all this means is there is going to be a failure to deliver. Once there is a failure to deliver, only the Lord knows what kind of prices we are going to be looking at for gold and silver.”
Holter says a failure to deliver is not a maybe but a sure thing. Holter says, “Whether it is this year or the first few months of next year, it doesn’t matter. It is going to happen. . . . I can basically guarantee there is going to be a failure to deliver, and that failure to deliver is going to unmask and scare the crap out of the entire fractional reserve banking system and the fractional reserve commodity system. The whole thing is going to come down in a panic because somebody gets a failure to deliver. . . . If you listen to what Trump is saying, he wants a lower dollar. How much of a lower dollar does he want? He’s talking about debasing the currency to make the debt payable. . . . That is the most palatable way for any government to pay debt and that is to debase the currency and pay it off in monkey money.”
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with precious metals expert Bill Holter
Max and Stacy discuss the synchronized markets causing pension fund managers to lose money in every single asset class. As trillions and trillions of freshly minted fiat money sloshes around the financial system looking for any return, Japan’s pension fund manager warns this time is different. Max continues his interview with Craig Hemke ofTFMetalsReport.comabout gold markets and how negative interest rates, hyperinflating at a rate of $1 trillion per week, will impact fiat currencies.
Having destroyed discipline, central banks have no way out of the corner they’ve painted us into.
It was such a wonderful fantasy: just give a handful of bankers, financiers and corporations trillions of dollars at near-zero rates of interest, and this flood of credit and cash into the apex of the wealth-power pyramid would magically generate a new round of investments in productivity-improving infrastructure and equipment, which would trickle down to the masses in the form of higher wages, enabling the masses to borrow and spend more on consumption, powering the Nirvana of modern economics: a self-sustaining, self-reinforcing expansion of growth.
But alas, there is no self-sustaining, self-reinforcing expansion of growth; there are only massive, increasingly fragile asset bubbles, stagnant wages and a New Gilded Age as the handful of bankers, financiers and corporations that were handed unlimited nearly free money enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else.
When credit is nearly free to borrow in unlimited quantities, there’s no need for discipline, and so a year of university costs $50,000 instead of $10,000, houses that should cost $200,000 now cost $1 million and a bridge that should have cost $100 million costs $500 million. Nobody can afford anything any more because the answer in the era of central bank “growth” is: just borrow more, it won’t cost you much because interest rates are so low.
And with capital (i.e. saved earnings) getting essentially zero yield thanks to central bank ZIRP and NIRP (zero or negative interest rate policies), then all the credit has poured into speculative assets, inflating unprecedented asset bubbles that will destroy much of the financial system when they finally pop, as all asset bubbles eventually do.
Nobody knows what the price of anything is in the funny-money era of central banks. And since capital earns next to nothing, the only way to earn a return is join the mad frenzy chasing risk assets ever higher, with the plan being to sell at the top to a greater fool, a strategy few manage as it requires selling into a rally that seems destined to climb to the stars.
Having destroyed discipline–why scrimp and save when you can always borrow to buy or invest?– central banks have no way out of the corner they’ve painted us into. If they “normalize” interest rates to historical averages (3% above real-world inflation), then all the zombie companies and households that are surviving only because rates are near-zero will go bankrupt, wiping out the “wealth” of all the loans that can no longer be paid.
“Normalized” rates would also bring down the global housing bubble, an implosion that would trigger trillions in losses, reversing the vaunted wealth effect into a realization that we’re all getting poorer, not richer, and collapsing the risky mountain of mortgage debt that’s been piled on absurdly overvalued properties globally.
In effect, central banks added a zero to “money” and anticipated that this trickery would generate ten times more of everything: ten times more productive investments, ten times more consumption, ten times more people borrowing ten times more money, and so on.
But the trickery failed, and all we have is $200,000 houses that cost $1 million, a year in college that costs $50,000 instead of $10,000, and so on.Having destroyed discipline and price discovery, central banks attempted to replace reality with fantasy, and now the absurd fantasy is imploding. The financial system and the real-world economy have both been destabilized by this fantasy, and now both are fragile in ways few understand.
The only “policies” central banks have is to issue more credit at negative interest rates, i.e. doing more of what’s failed spectacularly, until the entire rickety travesty of a mockery of a sham collapses.
That collapse is currently underway in slow motion, but given the increasing instability of asset bubbles, it could accelerate at any time.
The Federal Reserve Resistance: A recent official urges the central bank to help defeat Donald Trump.
Perhaps you’ve seen former Chairs of the Federal Reserve defending the central bank’s independence and fore swearing all political intentions. Fair enough. But then what are we to make of former Fed monetary Vice Chair William Dudley ’s marker that the Fed should help defeat President Trump in 2020? That’s the extraordinary message from the former, and perhaps future, Fed grandee in Bloomberg.
“Officials could state explicitly that the central bank won’t bail out an administration that keeps making bad choices on trade policy, making it abundantly clear that Trump will own the consequences of his actions,” Mr. Dudley asserts. We also think monetary policy should focus on prices rather than trade. But Mr. Dudley seems to be saying the Fed should do nothing to assist the economy even if it heads into recession. Then he goes further and essentially says the Fed should join The Resistance.
“There’s even an argument that the election itself falls within the Fed’s purview,” Mr. Dudley writes. “After all, Trump’s reelection arguably presents a threat to the U.S. and global economy, to the Fed’s independence and its ability to achieve its employment and inflation objectives. If the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, then Fed officials should consider how their decisions will affect the political outcome in 2020.”
Wow. Talk about stripping the veil. These columns wondered if Mr. Dudley was politically motivated while he was at the Fed, favoring bond buying to finance Barack Obama ’s deficit spending, urging the Fed to intervene in markets to boost housing, and keeping interest rates low for as long as possible. And now here Mr. Dudley is confirming that he views the Fed as an agent of the Democratic Party.
A key lesson of the Trump era is that every single allegedly neutral, nonpartisan, super-professional institution has turned out to be, in fact, a bunch of partisan hacks shilling for the permanent political party. Voters can be forgiven for adopting a “burn it all down” attitude in response.
The main problem with the US economy is that globalism has been deconstructing it. The offshoring of US jobs has reduced US manufacturing and industrial capability and associated innovation, research, development, supply chains, consumer purchasing power, and tax base of state and local governments. Corporations have increased short-term profits at the expense of these long-term costs. In effect, the US economy is being moved out of the First World into the Third World.
Tariffs are not a solution. The Trump administration says that the tariffs are paid by China, but unless Apple, Nike, Levi, and all of the offshoring companies got an exemption from the tariffs, the tariffs fall on the off shored production of US firms that are sold to US consumers. The tariffs will either reduce the profits of the US firms or be paid by US purchasers of the products in higher prices. The tariffs will hurt China only by reducing Chinese employment in the production of US goods for US markets.
The financial media is full of dire predictions of the consequences of a US/China “trade war.” There is no trade war. A trade war is when countries try to protect their industries by placing tariff barriers on the import of cheaper products from foreign countries. But half or more of the imports from China are imports from US companies. Trump’s tariffs, or a large part of them, fall on US corporations or US consumers.
One has to wonder that there is not a single economist anywhere in the Trump administration, the Federal Reserve, or anywhere else in Washington capable of comprehending the situation and conveying an understanding to President Trump.
One consequence of Washington’s universal economic ignorance is that the financial media has concocted the story that “Trump’s tariffs” are not only driving Americans into recession but also the entire world. Somehow tariffs on Apple computers and iPhones, Nike footwear, and Levi jeans are sending the world into recession or worse. This is an extraordinary economic conclusion, but the capacity for thought has pretty much disappeared in the United States.
In the financial media the question is: Will the Trump tariffs cause a US/world recession that costs Trump his reelection? This is a very stupid question. The US has been in a recession for two or more decades as its manufacturing/industrial/engineering capability has been transferred abroad. The US recession has been very good for the Asian part of the world. Indeed, China owes its faster than expected rise as a world power to the transfer of American jobs, capital, technology, and business know-how to China simply in order that US shareholders could receive capital gains and US executives could receive bonus pay for producing them by lowering labor costs.
Apparently, neoliberal economists, an oxymoron, cannot comprehend that if US corporations produce the goods and services that they market to Americans offshore, it is the offshore locations that benefit from the economic activity.
Offshore production started in earnest with the Soviet collapse as India and China opened their economies to the West. Globalism means that US corporations can make more money by abandoning their American work force. But what is true for the individual company is not true for the aggregate. Why? The answer is that when many corporations move their production for US markets offshore, Americans, unemployed or employed in lower paying jobs, lose the power to purchase the off shored goods.
I have reported for years that US jobs are no longer middle class jobs. The jobs have been declining for years in terms of value-added and pay. With this decline, aggregate demand declines. We have proof of this in the fact that for years US corporations have been using their profits not for investment in new plant and equipment, but to buy back their own shares. Any economist worthy of the name should instantly recognize that when corporations repurchase their shares rather than invest, they see no demand for increased output. Therefore, they loot their corporations for bonuses, decapitalizing the companies in the process. There is perfect knowledge that this is what is going on, and it is totally inconsistent with a growing economy.
As is the labor force participation rate. Normally, economic growth results in a rising labor force participation rate as people enter the work force to take advantage of the jobs. But throughout the alleged economic boom, the participation rate has been falling, because there are no jobs to be had.
In the 21st century the US has been decapitalized and living standards have declined. For a while the process was kept going by the expansion of debt, but consumer income has not kept pace and consumer debt expansion has reached its limits.
The Fed/Treasury “plunge protection team” can keep the stock market up by purchasing S&P futures. The Fed can pump out more money to drive up financial asset prices. But the money doesn’t drive up production, because the jobs and the economic activity that jobs represent have been sent abroad. What globalism did was to transfer the US economy to China.
Real statistical analysis, as contrasted with the official propaganda, shows that the happy picture of a booming economy is an illusion created by statistical deception. Inflation is under measured, so when nominal GDP is deflated, the result is to count higher prices as an increase in real output, that is, inflation becomes real economic growth. Unemployment is not counted. If you have not searched for a job in the past 4 weeks, you are officially not a part of the work force and your unemployment is not counted. The way the government counts unemployment is so extraordinary that I am surprised the US does not have a zero rate of unemployment.
How does a country recover when it has given its economy away to a foreign country that it now demonizes as an enemy? What better example is there of a ruling class that is totally incompetent than one that gives its economy bound and gagged to an enemy so that its corporate friends can pocket short-term riches?
We can’t blame this on Trump. He inherited the problem, and he has no advisers who can help him understand the problem and find a solution. No such advisers exist among neoliberal economists. I can only think of four economists who could help Trump, and one of them is a Russian.
Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist, sits down with hedge fund giant Kyle Bass to discuss America’s current geopolitical landscape regarding China. Bannon and Bass take a deep dive into Chinese infiltration in U.S. institutions, China’s aggressiveness in the South China sea, and the potential for global conflict in the next few years. Filmed on October 5, 2018 at an undisclosed location, remains absolutely relevant today.
California Statist Supremacist and authoritarian governor, Gavin Newsom, recently blamed the state of Texas for California’s homeless crisis; rather than taking blame for long established policies California has instituted that stifle free enterprise with excessive regulation and taxation on those working hard to create private wealth.
Former California assemblyman turned Texas resident Chuck DeVore reacted to Newsom pushing the blame onto others. The vice president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Chuck DeVore, said Wednesday thatGavin Newsomis “responsible for the policies that have createdCalifornia’shomeless crisis,” in the wake of the governor blaming Texas for San Francisco’s homeless crisis. “What you’re seeing here are the words of a desperate man that we should almost feel sorry for,” DeVore, who served as a California assemblyman for six years, told “Fox & Friends.”
“Governor Gavin Newsom has been in office now for 22 straight years, starting at the San Francisco board of supervisors,” DeVore added. Homelessness has been rampant across the state of California in the past few years and merchants and homeowners have become increasingly vocal and incredibly irate at how things are going in the socialist dystopia.
Though San Francisco has more billionaires per capita than anywhere else in the world, its homeless problem hasrivaledthird-world nations, according toFox News. So much for all that “wealth inequality” the socialists are constantly pushing down the throats of the ignorant. Government policies are the most to blame for San Francisco’s wealth inequality.
“There’s more freedom in places like Texas, more opportunity to do what you want to do,” he said.
The sad truth is that socialism doesn’t work and it never has in all the times it’s been tried. Humans are not meant to be slaves and eventually, they figure out that no one has a higher claim over their lives than they do.
(Brandon Smith) One thing that is important to understand about the mainstream media is that they do tell the truth on occasion. However, the truths they admit to are almost always wrapped in lies or told to the public far too late to make the information useful. Dissecting mainstream media information and sifting out the truth from the propaganda is really the bulk of what the alternative media does (or should be doing). In the past couple of weeks I have received a rush of emails asking about the sudden flood of recession and economic crash talk in the media. Does this abrupt 180 degree turn by the MSM (and global banks) on the economy warrant concern? Yes, it does.
The first inclination of a portion of the liberty movement will be to assume that mainstream reports of imminent economic crisis are merely an attempt to tarnish the image of the Trump Administration, and that the talk of recession is “overblown”. This is partially true; Trump is meant to act as scapegoat, but this is not the big picture. The fact is, the pattern the media is following today matches almost exactly with the pattern they followed leading up to the credit crash of 2008. Make no mistake, a financial crash is indeed happening RIGHT NOW, just as it did after media warnings in 2007/2008, and the reasons why the MSM is admitting to it today are calculated.
Before we get to that, we should examine how the media reacted during the lead up to the crash of 2008.
Multiple mainstream outlets ignored all the crash signals in 2005 and 2006 despite ample warnings from alternative economists. In fact, they mostly laughed at the prospect of the biggest bull market in the history of stocks and housing (at that time) actually collapsing. Then abruptly the media and the globalist institutions that dictate how the news is disseminated shifted position and started talking about “recession” and “crash potential”. From the New York Times to The Telegraph to Reuters and others, as well as the IMF, BIS and Federal Reserve officials – Everyone suddenly started agreeing with alternative economists without actually deferring to them or giving them any credit for making the correct financial calls.
In 2007/2008, the discussion revolved around derivatives, a subject just complicated enough to confuse the majority of people and cause them to be disinterested in the root trigger for the economic crisis, which was central bankers creating and deflating bubbles through policy engineering. Instead, the public just wanted to know how the crash was going to be fixed. Yes, some blame went to the banking system, but almost no one at the top was punished (only one banker in the US actually faced fraud charges). Ultimately, the crisis was pinned on a “perfect storm” of coincidences, and the central banks were applauded for their “swift action” in using stimulus and QE to save us all from a depression level event. The bankers were being referred to as “heroes”.
Of course, central bank culpability was later explored, and Alan Greenspan even admitted partial responsibility, saying the Fed knew there was a bubble, but was “not aware” of how dangerous it really was. This was a lie. According to Fed minutes from 2004, Greenspan sought to silence any dissent on the housing bubble issue, saying that it would stir up debate on a process that “only the Fed understood”. Meaning, there was indeed discussion on housing and credit warning signs, but Greenspan snuffed it out to prevent the public from hearing about it.
Today we have a very similar dynamic. Use of the “R word” in the mainstream media and among central banks has been strictly contained for the past several years. In the October 2012 Fed minutes, Jerome Powell specifically warned of what would happen if the Federal Reserve tightened liquidity and raised interest rates into economic weakness. He warned that this would have negative effects on the stimulus addicted investment environment that the central bank had fostered. This discussion was held back from the public until only a year-and-a-half ago. As soon as Powell became chairman, he implemented those exact actions.
Only in the past year has talk of recession begun to break out, and only in the past couple of weeks have outlets become aggressive in pushing the notion that a financial crash is just around the corner. The reality is that if one removes the illusory support of central bank stimulus, our economy never left the “Great Recession” of 2008. Signals of renewed sharp declines in economic fundamentals have been visible since before the 2016 elections. Alarms have been blaring on housing, auto markets, manufacturing, freight and shipping, historic debt levels, the yield curve, etc. since at least winter of last year, just as the Fed raised rates to their neutral rate of inflation and increased asset cuts from the balance sheet to between $30 billion to $50 billion or more per month.
The media should have been reporting on economic crisis dangers for the past 2-3 years. But, they didn’t give these problems much credence until recently. So, what changed?
I can only theorize on why the media and the banking elites choose the timing they do to admit to the public what is about to happen. First, it is clear from their efforts to stifle free discussion that they do not want to let the populace know too far ahead of time that a crash is coming. According to the evidence, which I have outlined in-depth in previous articles, central banks and international banks sometimes engineer crash events in order to consolidate wealth and centralize their political power even further. Is it a conspiracy? Yes, it is, and it’s a provable one.
When they do finally release the facts, or allow their puppet media outlets to report on the facts, it seems that they allow for around 6-8 months of warning time before economic shock events occur. In the case of the current crash in fundamentals (and eventually stocks), the time may be shorter. Why? Because this time the banks and the media have a scapegoat in the form of Donald Trump, and by extension, they have a scapegoat in the form of conservatives, populists, and sovereignty activists.
The vast majority of articles flowing through mainstream news feeds on economic recession refer directly to Trump, his supporters and the trade war as the primary villains behind the downturn. The warnings from the Fed, the BIS and the IMF insinuate the same accusation.
Anyone who has read my work for the past few years knows I have been warning about Trump as a false prophet for the liberty movement and conservatives in general. And everyone knows my primary concern has been that the globalists will crash the Everything Bubble on Trump’s watch, and then blame all conservatives for the consequences.
To be clear, Trump is not the cause of the Everything Bubble, nor is he the cause of its current implosion. No president has the power to trigger a collapse of this magnitude, only central banks have that power. When Trump argues that the Fed is causing a downturn, he is telling the truth, but when he claims that recession fears are exaggerated, or “inappropriate”, he is lying. What he is not telling the public is that his job is to HELP the Fed in this process of controlled economic demolition.
Admissions of crisis in the media are coinciding directly with Trump’s policy actions. In other words, Trump is providing perfect cover for the central banks to crash the economy without receiving any of the blame. Trump’s insistence on taking full credit for the bubble in stock markets as well as fraudulent GDP and employment numbers, after specifically warning about all of these things during his election campaign, has now tied the economy like a noose around the necks of conservatives. The tone of warning in the media indicates to me that the banking elites are about to tighten that noose.
Another factor on our timeline beyond Trump’s helpful geopolitical distractions is the possibility of a ‘No-Deal’ Brexit in October. I continue to believe this outcome (or something very similar) has been pushed into inevitability by former Prime Minister Theresa May and EU globalists, and that it will be used as yet another scapegoat for the now accelerating crash in the EU. With Germany on the verge of admitting recession, Deutsche Bank on the edge of insolvency, Italy nearing political and financial crisis, etc., it is only a matter of months before Europe sees its own “Lehman moment”. The Brexit is, in my view, a marker for a timeline on when the crash will hit its stride.
To summarize, the mainstream media and global banking institutions have two goals in informing the public about recession right now – They are seeking to cover their own asses when the next shoe drops so they can say they “tried to warn us”, and, they are conditioning a majority of the public to automatically blame conservatives and sovereignty proponents when the consequences hit them without mercy.
As the truth of a recession smacks the public in the face, the media will likely pull back slightly, just as they did in 2008, and suggest that the downturn is “temporary”. They will claim it’s “not a repeat of the credit crisis”, or that it will “subside after Trump is out of office”. These will all be lies designed to keep the public complacent even as the house of cards collapses around them. The fact is, the hard data shows that economic conditions in the US and in most of the world are far more unstable than they were in 2008. We are not looking at the crash of a credit bubble, we are looking at the crash of the ‘Everything Bubble’.
The pace of the narrative is quickening, and I would suggest that a collapse of the bubble will move rather quickly, perhaps in the next four to six months. If it does, then it is likely that Trump is not slated for a second term as president in 2020. Trump’s highly divisive support for “Red Flag” gun laws, a move that will lose him considerable support among pro-gun conservatives, also indicates to me that it is likely he is not meant to be president in 2020. This is another sign that a massive downturn is closing in.
As events are unfolding right now, it appears that Trump has served his purpose for the globalists and is slated to be replaced next year; probably by an extreme far-left Democrat. There are only a couple of scenarios I can imagine in which Trump remains in office, one of them being a major war which might require him to retain the presidency so the globalists can finish out a regime change agenda in nations like Iran or Venezuela. This could, however, be pursued under a Democrat president almost as easily as long as Trump and his elitist cabinet lay the groundwork beforehand.
As in 2007/2008, it is unlikely that the mainstream would admit to a downturn that is not coming soon. Using the behavior of the media and of banking institutions as a guide, we can predict with some measure of certainty a crisis within the economy in the near term. Clearly, a major breakdown is slated to take place before the election of 2020, if not much sooner.
Earlier this weekZeroHedge wrotethat after decades of waiting, for Albert Edwards vindication was finally here – if only outside the US for now – because as per BofA calculations, average non-USD sovereign yields on $19 trillion in global debt had, as of Monday, turned negative for the first time ever at -3bps.
So now that virtually every rates strategist is rushing to out-“Ice Age” the SocGen strategist (who called the current move in rates years if not decades ago) by forecasting even lower yields (forgetting conveniently that just a year ago consensus called for the 10Y to rise well above 3% by… well, some time now), what does the man who correctly called the unprecedented move in global yields – which has sent $17 trillion in sovereign debt negative – think?
In a word: “There is a lot more to come.“
Although the tsunami of negative yields sweeping the eurozone has attracted most attention, yields have also plunged in the US with 30y yields falling to an all-time low just below 2%. For many this represents a bubble of epic proportions, driven by QE and ripe for bursting.
Here Edwards makes it clear that he disagrees , and cautions “that there is a lot more to come.”
What does he mean?
As Albert explains, “when you see the creeping advance of negative bond yields throughout the investment universe, you really start to doubt your sanity. For me it is not so much that 10Y+ government bond yields are increasingly negative, but when European junk bonds go negative I really start to scratch my head.” And as we wrote in “Redefining “High” Yield: There Are Now 14 Junk Bonds With Negative Yields“, there certainly is a lot of scratching to do.
One thing Edwards isn’t scratching his head over is whether this is a bond bubble: as he explains, his “own view is that this government bond rally is not a bubble but an appropriate reaction to the market discounting the next recession hitting the global economy from all over leveraged corners of the world (including China), with close to zero core inflation and precious few working tools left at policymakers’ disposal.”
This means that “the bubbles are not in the government bond market in my view. They are in corporate equities and corporate bonds.“
If Edwards is correct about the focus of the next mega-bubble, it is very bad news for risk assets as the “global deflationary bust will wreak havoc with financial markets”, prompting Edwards to ask a rhetorical question:
Does anyone seriously believe that in the next global recession equity markets will not collapse? Do market participants really believe fiscal stimulus and helicopter money will save us from a gut wrenching global bust that will make 2008 look like a picnic? Has the longest US economic cycle in history beguiled investors into soporific complacency? I hope not.
He may hope not, but that’s precisely what has happened in a world where for over a decade, even a modest market correction has lead to central banks immediately jawboning stocks higher and/or cutting rates and launching QE.
So to validate his point that the rates market is not a bubble, Edwards goes on to show that “US and even euro zone government bond yields are not in fact overextended – certainly not on a technical level – but also that fundamentals should carry government bond yields still lower.”
In his note, Edwards launches into an extended analysis of the declining workweek for both manufacturing and total workers, and explains why sharply higher recession odds (which werecently discussed here), are far higher than consensus expected.
But what we found most notable was his technical analysis of the ongoing collapse in 10Y Bund yields. As Edwards writes, “looking at the chart for German 10Y yields (monthly plot) their decline to close to minus 0.7% does not seem so extraordinary – merely the continuation of a downtrend within very clearly defined upper and lower bounds (see chart below).”
As Edwards explains referring to the chart above, “the bund yield has remained in the lower half of that band since 2011, but there is good reason for that as the ECB has struggled with a moribund euro zone economy and core inflation consistently undershooting its 2% target.”
Still, even Edwards admits that the pace of the recent decline in bund 10Y yields is indeed unusually rapid (with a 14-month RSI of 26, middle panel).
And although this suggests a pause in the decline in yields is technically warranted, the MACD (bottom panel) doesn’t look at all stretched. After a pause (data allowing), 10Y bunds could easily fall to the bottom of the lower trend line (ie below -1.5%) without any great technical excess being incurred.
His conclusion: “This market certainly doesn’t look like a bubble to me.”
Shifting attention from Germany to the US, Edwards writes that unlike the 10Y German bund yield, “the US 10Y has mostly occupied the top half of its wide downtrend band since 2013.”
That is fairly unsurprising given the stronger US economy together with Fed rate hikes. Technically the RSI is much less extended to the downside than the bund, but like Germany the MACD could still have a long way to fall. The bottom of the lower downtrend is around minus 0.5% by the end of 2020.
It is Edwards’ opinion that “we are on autopilot until we get” to 0.5%.
But wait, there’s more, because in referring to the charting of Pictet’s Julien Bittle (shown below), Edwards points out the right-hand panel which demonstrates how far US 10Y yields might fall over various time periods after hitting a cyclical peak. “He shows that on average we should expect a decline of 1-1½ pp from the trend line, which takes us pretty much to zero (see slide).” Personally, Edwards says, he is even “more bullish than that!”
Edwards then points us to the work of Gaurav Saroliya, Director of Macro Strategy at Oxford Economics who “certainly doesn’t think that QE is depressing bond yields.” In this particular case, Saroliya uses a simple model which fits US 10Y bond yields with trend growth and inflation reasonably accurately (see left hand chart below). As Edwards notes, “given the demographic situation, inflation is likely to remain subdued.”
In conclusion Edwards presents one final and classic Ice Age chart to finish off.
As the bearish – or is that bullish… for bonds – strategist notes, “the last few cycles have seen a sequence of lower lows and highs for nominal quantities (along with bond yield and Fed Funds). I have used a 4-year moving average and have added where I think we may be heading in the next downturn and rebound – and more importantly where I think the market is now thinking where we are heading.”
Referring to the implied upcoming plunge in nominal GDP, Edwards explains that “that is why this is not a bond bubble. It is the next phase of The Ice Age. And it is here.”
One last note: is it possible that Edwards’ apocalyptic view is wrong? As he admits, “of course” he could be wrong: “And given my dystopian vision for the global economy, equity and corporate bond investors, I sincerely hope I am.”
With all eyes focused squarely on Germany’s dismal PMI prints, which have been in contraction for over half a year, the investing public forgot that the US economy is similarly slowing down. And moments ago it got a jarring reminder when Markit reported that the US manufacturing PMI unexpectedly tumbled into contraction territory, down from 50.4 last month, and badly missing expectations of a 50.5 rebound. This was the first print below the 50.0 expansion threshold for the first time since September 2009.
But wait, there’s more, because whereas until now the US services segment appeared immune to the slowdown in US manufacturing, in August the service PMI tumbled to 50.9, down from 53.0 in July, matching the lowest print in at least 3 years,and well below the 52.8 consensus expectation. According to Markit, subdued demand conditions continued to act as a brake on growth, with the latest rise in new work the slowest since March 2016. This contributed to a decline in backlogs of work for the first time in 2019 to date.
Meanwhile, business expectations among service providers for the next 12 months eased in August and were the lowest since this index began nearly a decade ago.
As the report further notes, the decline in the headline PMI mainly reflected a much weaker contribution from new orders, which offset a stabilization in employment and fractionally faster output growth.
This however was offset by new business received by manufacturing companies, which fell for the second time in the past four months during August. Although only marginal, the latest downturn in order books was the sharpest for exactly 10 years. The data also signaled the fastest reduction in export sales since August 2009.
Survey respondents indicated that a drop in sales often cited a soft patch across the automotive sector, alongside a headwind to manufacturing exports from weaker global economic conditions. Meanwhile, manufacturing companies continued to trim their inventory levels in August, which was mainly linked to concerns about the demand outlook. Pre-production inventories fell for the fourth month running, while stocks of finished goods decreased to the greatest extent since June 2014 fastest reduction in export sales since August 2009.
Survey respondents indicated that a drop in sales often cited a soft patch across the automotive sector, alongside a headwind to manufacturing exports from weaker global economic conditions.
Commenting on the flash PMI data, Tim Moore, Economics Associate Director at IHS Markit said:
“August’s survey data provides a clear signal that economic growth has continued to soften in the third quarter. The PMIs for manufacturing and services remain much weaker than at the beginning of 2019 and collectively point to annualized GDP growth of around 1.5%.
“The most concerning aspect of the latest data is a slowdown in new business growth to its weakest in a decade, driven by a sharp loss of momentum across the service sector. Survey respondents commented on a headwind from subdued corporate spending as softer growth expectations at home and internationally encouraged tighter budget setting.
“Manufacturing companies continued to feel the impact of slowing global economic conditions, with new export sales falling at the fastest pace since August 2009.
“Business expectations for the year ahead became more gloomy in August and remain the lowest since comparable data were first available in 2012. The continued slide in corporate growth projections suggests that firms may exert greater caution in relation to spending, investment and staff hiring during the coming months.”
An interesting nuance as noted by Viraj Patel of Arkera, is that while German economic sentiment may be troughing (granting in very contractionary territory), it is now America’s turn to slump into recession:
Interesting PMI day so far. Eurozone (Germany) beats… and US disappoints. Is relative tide changing? Lot of pessimism over Eurozone economy versus US Trump tax cut 'sugar high' + tariff war slowdown still very much in process with more room to go. $EURUSD cyclically higher now? pic.twitter.com/RsRZDZQuYS
A few days ago ZeroHedge reported that theeasiest way for Trump to get the Fed to launch QE was to i) start a global economic war or ii) send the US economy into recession. Based on today’s data, Trump is making great progress on the latter, and we are confident the former can’t be far behind.
(Nathanael Johnson) California is facing yet another real estate-related crisis, but we’re not talking about its sky-high home prices. According to newly released data, it’s simply become too risky to insure houses in big swaths of the wildfire-prone state.
Last winter whenwe wrote about home insurance rates possibly going upin the wake of California’s massive, deadly fires, the insurance industry representatives we interviewed were skeptical. They noted that the stories circulating in the media about people in forested areas losing their homeowners’ insurance was based on anecdotes, not data. But now, the data is in and it’s really happening: Insurance companies aren’t renewing policies areas climate scientists say are likely to burn in giant wildfires in coming years.
If governments don’t step in, that kills mortgages, so what comes next? Only all cash buys? Seller financing? And if property values in these areas decline, as they ought to, bye bye local government budgets.
In some ways, this news is not surprising. According to a recent survey of insurance actuaries (the people who calculate insurance risks and premiums based on available data), the industry ranked climate change as the top risk for 2019, beating out concerns over cyber damages, financial instability, and terrorism. While having insurance companies on board with climate science is a good thing for, say, requiring cities to invest in more sustainable infrastructure, it’s bad news for homeowners who can’t simply pick up their lodgings and move elsewhere.
“We are seeing an increasing trend across California where people at risk of wildfires are being non-renewed by their insurer,” said California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara in a statement. “This data should be a wake-up call for state and local policymakers that without action to reduce the risk from extreme wildfires and preserve the insurance market we could see communities unraveling.”
A similar dynamic is likely unfolding across many other Western states, according toreportingfrom the New York Times.
To understand the data coming out of California we can use my own family as an example: A few months after Grist publisheda story about how my parent’s neighborhoodis trying to fortify itself against future forest fires, my mom’s insurer informed her and my stepfather that they’d need to get home insurance elsewhere. For two months they called one insurer after another, but no company would take their premiums. So they turned to thestate program as the insurer of last resort— which costs about three times more than they’d been spending under their previous, private insurer.
My folks have spent a lot of money clearing trees and brush from around their house. They’ve covered the walls in hard-to-burn cement panels, and the roof with metal. But insurance risk maps don’t adjust for these improvements. Instead, insurance companies seem to have made the call that the changing climate, along with years of fire suppression, have made houses in the midst of California’s dry forests a bad bet, and therefore uninsurable.
“For us, because we’ve done good financial planning and our house is paid off, it’s just an extra expense,” said my mom, Gail Johnson Vaughan. “But we have friends who have no choice but to leave.”
Until now, the general public was only aware of the remarkable ability of Tesla cars to spontaneously combust, that is at least when they are not smashing into random things while on autopilot. It now appears that Tesla’s solar panels (some may be unaware that several years ago, Elon Musk tried to unsuccessfully pivot Tesla into a solar power company as well as that’s where a few billion in government subsidies were to be found) are just as combustible.
On Tuesday, Walmart sued Tesla, after its solar panels atop seven of the retailer’s stores allegedly caught fire, alleging breach of contract, gross negligence and failure to live up to industry standards. Walmart is asking Tesla to remove solar panels from more than 240 Walmart locations where they have been installed, and to pay damages related to all the fires Walmart says that Tesla caused.
Walmart said it had leased or licensed roof space on top of more than 240 stores to Tesla’s energy operations unit, formerly known as SolarCity (which was basically a bailout by Elon Musk for Elon Musk who was also the largest SolarCity shareholder), for the installation and operation of solar systems. But as of November, fires had broken out at no fewer than seven of the stores, forcing the disconnection of all the solar panel systems for the safety of the public.
The breach-of-contract suit by Walmart, which was filed in the state of New York, alleges that: “As of November 2018, no fewer than seven Walmart stores had experienced fires due to Tesla’s solar systems-including the four fires described above and three others that had occurred earlier.” The fires resulted in evacuations, damaged property and inventory.
Walmart’s inspectors additionally found that Tesla “had engaged in widespread, systemic negligence and had failed to abide by prudent industry practices in installing, operating and maintaining its solar systems.’
Walmart also claimed that “Tesla routinely deployed individuals to inspect the solar systems who lacked basic solar training and knowledge“and also alleged that Tesla failed to ground its solar and electrical systems properly, and that Tesla-installed solar panels on-site at Walmart stores contained a high number of defects that were visible to the naked eye, including loose and hanging wires at several locations, and which Tesla should have found and repaired before they led to fires.
It gets better: according to the suit, Tesla’s own inspection reports revealed “improper wire management, including abraded and hanging wires,” as well as “poor grounding” and “solar panel modules that were broken or contained dangerous hot spots.”
“To state the obvious, properly designed, installed, inspected and maintained solar systems do not spontaneously combust, and the occurrence of multiple fires involving Tesla’s solar systems is but one unmistakable sign of negligence by Tesla,” Walmart said in the suit. “To this day, Tesla has not provided Walmart with the complete set of final ‘root cause’ analyses needed to identify the precise defects in its systems that caused all of the fires described above.”
Walmart said the first fire broke out at a store in Beavercreek, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton, in March 2018, and two more fires occurred at stores in California and Maryland in May of that year. While Tesla disconnected the panels at Walmart’s request that same month, it wasn’t enough to stop fires from occurring, and another blaze broke out in November at a store in Yuba City, California.
Ironically, the lawsuit comes at a time when Tesla has been trying to salvage its collapsing solar business; on Sunday, Elon Musk announced in a string of tweets which reeked of desperation that customers in some states can now rent Tesla’s residential, solar rooftop systems without a contract. The offer is available in six states, and will cost customers at least $50 a month (or $65 a month in California). And although Musk touted the ease of cancelling a rented roof at anytime,CNBC notedthat the fine print on Tesla’s website mentions a $1,500 fee to take out the solar panels and restore the customer’s roof.
There is a reason why Tesla is basically giving the spontaneously combustible solar panels away: In the second quarter, Tesla installed a mere 29 megawatts of solar, a record low for the company in a single quarter. In its heyday, Tesla’s solar division (formerly SolarCity) installed over 200 megawatts in a single quarter.
But wait there is more.
As if allegations of shoddy quality control, dismal workmanship and overall blatant lack of professionalism weren’t enough, Walmart also “went there” and in the “explosive”, pun not intended 114-page lawsuit, piled onto a long-running controversy according to which Tesla bailed out a failing SolarCity in 2016 when it purchased the company for $2.6 billion (Elon Musk was also the biggest shareholder of SolarCity at the time, while Tesla’s Elon Musk bought out SolarCity in a gross conflict of interest), with WalMart highlighting the familial ties between Tesla and SolarCity as the underpinnings of a flawed merger that allegedly produced shoddy craftsmanship and led to fires at seven Walmart stores.
“On information and belief, when Tesla purchased SolarCity to bail out the flailing company (whose executives included two of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s first cousins), Tesla failed to correct SolarCity’s chaotic installation practices or to adopt adequate maintenance protocols, which would have been particularly important in light of the improper installation practices,” Walmart claimed in a suit that is sure to draw regulators attention to the 2016 deal that should never have been allowed. As shown in the diagram above, SolarCity co-founders Lyndon Rive and Peter Rive are Musk’s cousins, while Musk was the largest shareholder of both companies.
So already facing a slumping stock price from dozens of lawsuits and investigations, store closings, delayed loan repayments and the departure of key executives, CNBC notes that the Walmart suit lands at a particularly difficult time for Tesla and Musk. Specifically in regards to SolarCity, Musk was slated to be deposed earlier this month in a complaint brought by shareholders over the deal.
The name “SolarCity” shows up 46 times in the lawsuit, which alleges the company had a failed business model, stemming from a goal to speed up revenue growth at all costs.
“Walmart’s experience bears out Tesla, Inc.’s and Tesla’s inability to turn around and bail out the solar panel operations acquired from SolarCity,” the suit says.
* * *
Walmart is asking a judge to declare Tesla in breach of contract, order the company to remove the solar panels from all of its stores and award damages equal to its costs and consulting fees in connection with the fires.
Tesla shares fell as much as 1.7% to $222.70 as of 6:45 p.m. in after hours trading. The stock is down 32% this year.
The case is Walmart Inc. v. Tesla Energy Operations, New York State Supreme Court, New York County; Index No. 654765/2019.
Inflation? Deflation? Stagflation? Consecutively? Concurrently?… or from a great height.
We’ve reached a pivotal moment where all of the narratives of what is actually happening have come together. And it feels confusing. But it really isn’t.
How can we stuff fake money onto more fake balance sheets to maintain the illusion of price stability?
The consequences of this coordinated policy to save the banking system from itself has resulted in massive populist uprisings around the world thanks to a hollowing out of the middle class to pay for it all.
The central banks’ only move here is to inflate to the high heavens, because the civil unrest from a massive deflation would sweep them from power quicker.
For all of their faults leaders like Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini and even Boris Johnson understand that to regain the confidence of the people they will have to wrest control of their governments from the central banks and the technocratic institutions that back them.
That fear will keep the central banks from deflating the global money supply because politicians like Trump and Salvini understand that their central banks are enemies of the people. As populists this would feed their domestic reform agendas.
So, the central banks will do what they’ve always done — protect the banks and that means inflation, bailouts and the rest.
At the same time the powers that be, whom I like to call The Davos Crowd, are dead set on completing their journey to the Dark Side and create their transnational superstructure of treaties and corporate informational hegemony which they ironically call The Open Society.
This means continuing to use whatever powers are at their disposal to marginalize, silence and outright kill anyone who gets in their way, c.f. Jeffrey Epstein.
But all of this is a consequence of the faulty foundation of the global financial system built on fraud, Ponzi schemes and debt leverage… but I repeat myself.
And once the Ponzi scheme reaches its terminal state, once there are no more containers to stuff more fake money into the virtual mattresses nominally known as banks, confidence in the entire system collapses.
It’s staring us in the face every day. The markets keep telling us this. Oil can’t rally on war threats. Equity markets tread water violently as currencies break down technically. Gold is in a bull market. Billions flow through Bitcoin to avoid insane capital controls.
Any existential threat to the current order is to be squashed. It’s reflexive behavior at this point. But, as the Epstein murder spotlights so brilliantly, this reflexive behavior is now a Hobson’s Choice.
They either kill Epstein or he cuts a deal or stands trial and hundreds of very powerful people are exposed along with the honeypot programs that are the source of so much of the bad policy we all live with every day.
These operations are the lifeblood of the power structure, without it glitches in the Matrix occur. People get elected to power who can’t be easily controlled.
The central banks are faced with the same problem. To deflate is worse than inflating therefore there is no real choice. So, inflation it is. Inflation extends their control another day, another week.
Whenever I analyze situations like this I think of a man falling out of a building. In that state he will do anything to find a solution to his problem, grasp onto any hope and use that as a means to prolong his life and avoid hitting the ground for as long as possible.
Desperate people do desperate and stupid things. So as the mother of all Battles of the ‘Flations unfolds over the next two years, remember it’s not your job to take sides because they will take you with them.
This is not a battle you win, but rather survive. Like Godzilla and Mothra destroying the city. If Epstein’s murder tells you anything, there’s a war going on for control of what’s left of the crumbling power structure.
And since inflation is the only choice that choice will undermine what little faith there is in the current crop of institutions we’ve charged with maintaining societal order.
As those crumble that feeds the inflation to be unleashed.
For the smart investor, the best choice is not to play. Wealth preservation is the key to survival. That means holding assets whose value may fluctuate but which cannot be taken from you during a crisis.
It means having productive assets and being efficient with your time.
It means minimizing your counter-party risk. Getting out of debt. Buying gold and cryptos on program or on pullbacks. Most importantly, it means keeping your skills up to date and your value to your employer(s) high.
And if you’re really smart, diversifying your income streams to keep your options open.
Deflation and inflation are two sides of the same coin (or the same side of two coins). Both are just as destructive.
Global real estate consultancy firmKnight Frank LLPhas warned that the global synchronized decline in growth coupled with an escalating trade war has heavily weighed on luxury home prices in London, New York, and Hong Kong.
According to Knight Frank’s quarterly index of luxury homes across 46 major cities, prices expanded at an anemic 1.4% in 2Q19 YoY, could see further stagnation through 2H19.
Wealthy buyers pulled back on home buying in the quarter thanks to a global slowdown, trade war anxieties, higher taxes by governments, and restrictions on foreign purchases.
Mansion Globalsaid Vancouver was the hottest real estate market on Knight Frank’s list when luxury home prices surged 30% in 2016, has since crashed to the bottom of the list amid increased taxes on foreign buyers. Vancouver luxury home prices plunged 13.6% in 2Q19 YoY.
Financial hubs like Manhattan and London fell last quarter to the bottom of the list as luxury home prices slid 3.7% and 4.9%, respectively.
Hong Kong recorded zero growth in the quarter thanks to a manufacturing slowdown in China, an escalating trade war, and protests across the city since late March.
However, European cities bucked the trend, recorded solid price growth in 2Q19 YoY, though the growth was muted when compared to 2017-18.
Berlin and Frankfurt were the only two cities out of the 46 to record double-digit price growth for luxury homes. Both cities benefited from a so-called catch-up trade because prices are lower compared to other European cities. Moscow is No. 3 on the list, saw luxury home prices jump 9.5% in 2Q19 YoY.
The downturn in luxury real estate worldwide comes as central banks are frantically dropping interest rates. The Federal Reserve cut rates 25bps for the first time since 2008 last month, along with Central banks in New Zealand, India and Thailand have all recently reduced rates.
The main takeaway from central banks easing points to a global downturn in growth, and resorting to sharp monetary policy action is the attempt to thwart a global recession that would ultimately correct luxury home prices.
“Sluggish economic growth explains the wave of interest rate cuts evident in the last three months as policymakers try to stimulate growth,” wrote Knight Frank in the report.
* * *
As for a composite of all global house prices, Refinitiv Datastream shows price trends started to weaken in 2018, and in some cases, completely reversed like in Australia.
House price growth for OECD countries shows the slowdown started in 2016, a similar move to the 2005 decline.
If it’s luxury real estate or less expensive homes, the trend in price has peaked and could reverse hard into the early 2020s.
Central banks are desperately lowering interest rates as the global economy turns down. Likely, the top is in, prepare for a bust cycle.
Ah, to be a mortgage banker doing refinancings as the global economy grinds to a halt.
According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, refinancing applications rose 37% week-over-week (WoW).
Refi applications have soared to their highest level since mid-2016 as mortgage rates plunge.
Mortgage purchase applications have not been the same since lenders tightened their lending standards and banks increased capital ratios. Not to mention the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
As the NY Fed. pointed out, housing debt is almost back to its prior housing bubble peak of $10 trillion.
Phoenix AZ leads the nation in QoQ mortgage debt growth. Why? A rebound effect in the lower tier of Phoenix home prices.
Through a new rule announced Wednesday, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is making it easier for aspiring entry level housing buyers and condo owners to get reverse mortgages with FHA insured financing.
The FHA published a final regulation and policy implementation guidance this week establishing a new process for condominium approvals which will expand FHA financing for qualified first time home buyers as well as seniors looking to age in place, the Department of Housing and Urban Development said in a press memo.
In a stated Trump Administration effort to “reduce regulatory barriers restricting affordable home ownership,” the new rule introduces a new single-unit approval procedure that eases the ability for individual condominium units to become eligible for FHA-insured financing. It also extends the recertification requirement for approved condominium projects from two years to three.
The rule will also allow more mixed-use projects to be eligible for FHA insurance, the department said in a press release. HUD Secretary Ben Carson touted the rule’s ability to assist both first-time home buyers, as well as seniors aiming to age in place.
“Condominiums have increasingly become a source of affordable, sustainable home ownership for many families and it’s critical that FHA be there to help them,” said Carson in a press release announcing the new rule. “Today, we take an important step to open more doors to home ownership for younger, first-time American buyers as well as seniors hoping to age-in-place.”
Acting HUD Deputy Secretary and FHA Commissioner Brian D. Montgomery added that this rule is being implemented partially in response to the demands of the housing market.
“Today we are making certain FHA responds to what the market is telling us. Montgomery said in the release. “This new rule allows FHA to meet its core mission to support eligible borrowers who are ready for home ownership and are most likely to enter the market with the purchase of a condominium.”
The last notable action taken by FHA in terms of condominium approvals took place in the fall of 2016, when the agency proposed new rules that would allow individual condo units to become eligible for FHA financing, including Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECMs).
FHA estimated this new policy will notably increase the amount of condominium projects that can now gain FHA approval. 84 percent of FHA-insured condominium buyers have never owned a home before, according to agency data. Only 6.5 percent of the more than 150,000 condominium projects in the United States are approved to participate in FHA’s mortgage insurance programs.
“As a result of FHA’s new policy, it is estimated that 20,000 to 60,000 condominium units could become eligible for FHA-insured financing annually,” the press release said.
Unlike the unfounded narrative that cryptocurrency enables crime, big banks are more than happy to serve unsavory clients if it is lucrative enough for them. The latest example of this is a report that Jeffrey Epstein was apparently using his bank accounts to fund sex trafficking and possibly other crimes.
Follow the Money
The reported death of the Wall Street financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Saturday morning in a Manhattan prison cell has left a lot of questions. Among these is how exactly he funded his criminal activities, which included sex trafficking of minors to be used by the rich and powerful. One matter that is not a mystery is how Epstein funded his perversions: he used the traditional fiat banking system, with all its extensive KYC and AML regulations.
The alleged suicide of Epstein shouldn’t stop the “Legions of lawyers, bankers and accountants” that have been digging into his financial affairs in recent weeks claims the New York Times. These include officials conducting internal reviews at the two big banks that worked with him for years, JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. The employees at both of these financial institutions have reportedly been going over their books in a long overdue attempt to understand how they got into business with the convicted criminal and what exactly he was using their banking services for. A person who was briefed on Deutsche Bank’s internal review reportedly said “it appeared that Mr. Epstein was using his accounts for sex trafficking and possibly other illegal activity.”
Deutsche Bank headquarters on Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, New York
Further, according to the report, compliance officers and other employees at both JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank had strongly advised their higher-ups to stop doing business with Epstein years before his accounts were finally closed. This was suggested not due to the unpalatable nature of his businesses, but due to the risks associated with him such as hurting the bank’s brand and upsetting regulators. However, former employees at both banks said that “managers and executives rejected that advice and kept doing business with the lucrative client.”
Deutsche Bank Only Recently Closed Epstein’s Accounts
Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty and was convicted in court of law of both soliciting a prostitute and of procuring a minor for prostitution back in 2008. He served 13 months in custody with work release, as part of a plea deal, where federal prosecutes had identified 36 girls as young as 14 years old who had been victimized. His case was very hard to miss due to the fact that his name was tied to some of the most famous and powerful people in the world such as Donald Trump, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the U.K.’s Prince Andrew, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and disgraced Hollywood star Kevin Spacey.
Despite all of this, it isn’t too hard to see why the higher-ups at the big banks didn’t want to let go of his business. While not much is known about the source of his money, Epstein definitely had a lot of it moving around. Among his confirmed assets is a private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a Manhattan mansion worth over $77 million, a Palm Beach estate worth over $12 million, additional real-estate properties in New Mexico and Paris, a private jet airplane and no less than 15 cars. Considering this, it isn’t that surprising that Deutsche Bank only cut its ties to Epstein when prosecutors were set to charge him again with operating a sex-trafficking ring of underage girls in June of this year.
A Chase Bank branch in Manhattan, New York
JP Morgan Chase worked with Epstein from the late 1990s until 2013 and Deutsche Bank served him from 2013 until June 2019. The latter bank has reportedly already started giving his complete transaction history to investigators while the former awaits receiving similar demands for his financial data from U.S. authorities.
In astatementon Saturday after the alleged suicide, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman expressed his commitment to the victims to keep the investigation ongoing, despite the demise of the defendant. This means that the public will hopefully get a detailed examination into the criminal banking activities of Epstein in due course.
Big Banks Have a Long History of Enabling Crime
Governments, central banks and international financial institutions have all been pushing a largely unfounded narrative in recent years that cryptocurrencies enable illicit activity. Parroted by the mainstream media, it was used as justification to crack down on exchanges and other crypto service providers with demands for less user privacy or outright bans. In contrast, the established banking system has a long and proven track record of enabling all sorts of crimes, despite its burdensome compliance requirements, and yet erring institutions receive nothing more than a fine equal to a slap on the wrist.
The recent seizure of a cargo ship owned by JP Morgan, which was loaded with 20 tons of cocaine, highlight theinvolvement of the big banks, albeit unwittingly in this instance, in such activities. Money laundering for drug cartels as well as moving funds for terrorists, arms dealers and dictatorial regimes are among the many misdeeds the banks have been caught red-handed abetting over the years.
What do you think about the big banks that reportedly enabled Jeffrey Epstein to fund his sex trafficking crimes? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
To put the -0.5% rate in simple terms: If you bought a house for $1 million and paid off your mortgage in full in 10 years, you would pay the bank back only $995,000.
It should be noted that even with a negative interest rate, banks often charge fees linked to the borrowing, which means homeowners could still pay back more.
“It’s another chapter in the history of the mortgage,” the Jyske Bank housing economist Mikkel Høegh told Danish TV,according to the news website Copenhagen Post. “A few months ago, we would have said that this would not be possible, but we have been surprised time and time again, and this opens up a new opportunity for homeowners.”
Jyske Bank’s negative rate is the latest in a series of extremely low interest offers from banks to Danish homeowners.
According to The Local,Nordea Bank, Scandinavia’s biggest lender, said it would offer a 20-year fixed-rate mortgage with 0% interest.Bloomberg reportedthat some Danish lenders were offering 30-year mortgages at a 0.5% rate.
It should also be noted that negative rates have been available on short-term mortgage bonds in Denmark since May,according to Bloomberg; they have only just been made directly available to consumers.
“It’s never been cheaper to borrow,” Lise Nytoft Bergmann, the chief analyst at Nordea’s home finance unit in Denmark, told Bloomberg.
It may seem counterintuitive for banks to lend out their money at such low rates — but there is a rationale behind it.
Financial markets are in a volatile, uncertain spot right now. Factors includethe US-China trade war, Brexit, and a generalized economic slowdown across the world — and particularly in Europe.
Many investors fear a substantial crash in the near future. As such, some banks are willing to lend money at negative rates, accepting a small loss rather than risking a bigger loss by lending money at higher rates that customers cannot meet.
“It’s an uncomfortable thought that there are investors who are willing to lend money for 30 years and get just 0.5% in return,” Bergmann said.
“It shows how scared investors are of the current situation in the financial markets, and that they expect it to take a very long time before things improve.”
This doesn’t mean borrowers are being paid to take mortgages.
Jyske Bank appears to describe in the attached press release that they add a 1% “variable contribution rate” + fees to a -0.5 negative “bond rate”, resulting in borrowers qualifying to pay a positive amortized rate over a maximum 10 year period, plus taxes and insurance, to 80% loan to value at closing.
Most home buyers are unable to qualify for a ten year mortgage with 20% down. This means the program is being targeted to existing equity rich homeowners interested in cash out mortgages.
A senior official atChina’s central bank announcedat the China Finance 40 Group meeting today that the country will soon roll out its central bank digital currency (CBDC.)
Mu Changchun, Deputy Chief in the Payment and Settlement Division of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC,) stated that the CBDC prototype exists and the PBOC’s Digital Money Research Group has already fully adopted the blockchain architecture for the currency. China’s CBDC will not rely entirely on a pure blockchain architecture, as this would not allow the currency to achieve the throughput required for retail usage.
According to Changchun, the currency has been in the research and development phase since 2014. At the meeting on Saturday, he said, “People’s Bank digital currency can now be said to be ready.”
The CBDC will employ a two-tier operational structure, per Changchun:
The People’s Bank of China is the upper level and the commercial banks are the second level. This dual delivery system is suitable for our national conditions. It can use existing resources to mobilize the enthusiasm of commercial banks and smoothly improve the acceptance of digital currency.
A two-tier system is preferable due to China’s complex economy, vast territory and large population. “From the perspective of improving accessibility and increasing public willingness to use, a two-tier operational framework should be adopted to deal with this difficulty,” Changchun said. He also welcomed the resources, talent and innovation capabilities of commercial businesses who will partner with the PBOC to roll out the currency. Finally, this system will help avoid concentration of risk and financial disintermediation.
At the same meeting, China UnionPay ChairmanShaofu Jun saidthat the goals of China’s CBDC would be difficult to achieve. While a CBDC could solve issues related to cross-border transactions, long lag times and legacy inefficiencies, the lack of clear operational processes and a detailed regulatory framework across countries will be challenging to overcome.
In a shocking move, Chase Bank announced on Thursday that it was going to be forgiving all outstanding credit card debt from its Canadian customers, according toYahoo Finance. The bank closed all of its credit card accounts in Canada back in March of 2018.
When the accounts were initially closed, customers were told to continue paying down their debt. Now, they’re being told by the company that their debt is cancelled. CBC talked to some customers who got letters from the bank this week.
Douglas Turner of Coe Hill, Ontario, who still owed about $4,500, said:
“I was sort of over the moon all last night, with a smile on my face. I couldn’t believe it. It’s crazy. This stuff doesn’t happen with credit cards. Credit cards are horror stories.”
Paul Adamson of Dundalk, Ontario said he called his bank after seeing his account was closed because he was concerned about missing a payment. Adamson said:
“I’m honestly still so … flabbergasted about it. It’s surprise fees, extra complications – things like that, definitely, but not loan forgiveness.”
The bank had previously offered rewards cards for both Amazon and Marriott in Canada. Maria Martinez, vice-president of communications for Chase Card Services, said that the bank could have sold the debt, but that forgiving it “was a better decision for all parties, including and most importantly our customers.”
It’ll be interesting to see if the news is as well received by diligent Chase customers in Canada who paid off their cards, as well as American customers who have undoubedtly racked up massive sums of debt with the bank.
A 24 year old university student, Christine Langlois of Montreal, said she hadn’t paid the card in 5 years.
“It’s kind of like I’m being rewarded for my irresponsibility,” she said.
After years of being kept in the doldrums by orchestrated short selling described on this website by Roberts and Kranzler, gold has lately moved up sharply, reaching over $1,500 this week.The gold price has continued to rise despite the continuing practice of dumping large volumes of naked contracts in the futures market.The gold price is driven down but quickly recovers and moves on up.I haven’t an explanation at this time for the new force that is more powerful than the short-selling that has been used to control the price of gold.
Various central banks have been converting their dollar reserves into gold, which reduces the demand for dollars and increases the demand for gold.Existing stocks of gold available to fill orders are being drawn down, and new mining output is not keeping pace with the rise in demand.Perhaps this is the explanation for the rise in the price of gold.
During the many years of Quantitative Easing the exchange value of the dollar was protected by the Japanese, British, and EU central banks also printing money to insure that their currencies did not rise in value relative to the dollar. The Federal Reserve needs to protect the dollar’s exchange value so that it continues in its role as the world’s reserve currency in which international transactions are conducted.If the dollar loses this role, the US will lose the ability to pay its bills by printing dollars.A dollar declining in value relative to other countries would cause flight from the dollar to the rising currencies.Catastrophe quickly occurs from increasing the supply of a currency that central banks are unwilling to hold.
One problem remained. The dollar was depreciating relative to gold.Rigging the currency market was necessary but not sufficient to stabilize the dollar’s value. The gold market also had to be rigged. To stop the dollar’s depreciation, naked short selling has been used to artificially increase the supply of paper gold in order to suppress the price.Unlike equities, gold shorts don’t have to be covered. This turns the price-setting gold futures market into a paper market where contracts are settled primarily in cash and not by taking delivery of gold.Therefore, participants can increase the supply of the paper gold traded in the futures market by printing new contracts. When large numbers of contracts are suddenly dumped in the market, the sudden increase in paper gold supply drives down the price. This has worked until now.
If flight from the dollar is beginning, it will make it difficult for the Federal Reserve to accommodate the growing US budget deficit and continue its policy of lowering interest rates. With central banks moving their reserves from dollars (US Treasury bonds and bills) to gold, the demand for US government debt is not keeping up with supply.The supply will be increasing due to the $1.5 trillion US budget deficit.The Federal Reserve will have to take up the gap between the amount of new debt that has to be issued and the amount that can be sold by purchasing the difference.In other words, the Fed will print more money with which to purchase the unsold portion of the new debt.
The creation of more dollars when the dollar is experiencing pressure puts more downward pressure on the dollar.To protect the dollar, that is, to make it again attractive to investors and central banks, the Federal Reserve would have to raise interest rates substantially.If the US economy is in recession or moving toward recession, the cost of rising interest rates would be high in terms of unemployment.
With a rising price of gold, who would want to hold debt denominated in a rapidly depreciating currency when interest rates are low, zero, or negative?
The Federal Reserve might have no awareness of the pending crisis that it has set up for itself.On the other hand, the Federal Reserve is responsive to the elite who want to rid themselves of Trump.Collapsing the economy on Trump’s head is one way to prevent his reelection.
President Trump on Tuesday morninghintedat what appears to be yet another farm bailout (the third one must be the charm), as farmbankruptciessoar and agricultural debt loads become unbearable.
As they have learned in the last two years, our great American Farmers know that China will not be able to hurt them in that their President has stood with them and done what no other president would do – And I’ll do it again next year if necessary!
A farm crisis on par to what was observed in the early 1980s could be coming, especially since the US Senate passed a bill late last week that makes it more accessible for farmers with larger debt loads to file for bankruptcy protection,reported Reuters.
The bipartisan bill, designated as the Family Farmer Relief Act of 2019, increases the total debt load of how much a farmer can have to meet the qualifications to file Chapter 12 bankruptcy, to $10 million from the prior $4 million ceiling.
According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) data, operating a farm today involves much higher costs than it did three decades ago. Experts say without a complete reform of the law, mom-and-pop farmers would be subjected to Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which is expensive and chaotic.
The bill was passed last Thursday and earlier by the US House of Representatives, is headed for President Trump’s desk to sign. Judging by the president’s comments on Tuesday morning about the potential of a third farm bailout, it seems that this bill will most likely get passed.
Republicans and the Trump administration are preparing forFarmageddonwith new interventionist measures that will hopefully cushion farmers from retaliatory tariffs by China.
The new bill once signed, will support President Trump’s farm base that has been walloped by retaliatory tariffs by China on agriculture products.
The bill’s intended purpose is to help farmers avoid “mass liquidations and further consolidation in the largest sectors of the industry,” said US Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa where soybean, pork, corn, feeds and fodder, and processed grain products are the top exports of the state.
Bankruptcy lawyers and agriculture trade groups have been quickly pushing for the change due to farm incomes collapsing in the last several years, which have unleashed a tidal wave of bankruptcies not seen since the 1980s farm crisis.
“With farm bankruptcies at a record high in some regions of the country, Senate passage of the Family Farmer Relief Act sends an important signal to family farmers and ranchers that our elected officials are willing to act in these challenging times. The bill gives more farmers an opportunity to qualify for financial restructuring so they can keep their land and livelihoods. We are eager for the President’s signing of this bill and appreciate the leadership of Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and all the cosponsors for their support of America’s farmers and ranchers,” said American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall.
Reuters notes that not everyone is excited about the change. The American Bankers Association told lawmakers to oppose the bill and warned “credit terms would tighten considerably for many family farms, with a disproportionate impact on the most distressed farms most in need of credit,” according to a memo sent to House lawmakers on July 25.
A Reuters investigation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation showed that major Wall Street banks are now winding down risky lending to farmers as farm incomes decline and delinquency rates soar.
Government is preparing for a farm crisis; this time, it could be worse than the 1980s.
Gold and silver prices continue to push higher. They’re starting to get some attention from the mainstream, too. A new uptrend in gold is clearly underway, but silver’s performance has so far trailed gold’s. Let’s take a look at the price behavior over the past six-plus years of both metals to see if we can gain any insights about silver.
New data suggests that the U.S. is doing everything possible to repeat the 2008 financial crisis.
America’s middle class is sinking further into debt simply to maintain its middle class lifestyle, according to a new report from theWSJ, and its enabler has been none other than the Federal Reserve Bank, which has continued to make borrowing extremely easy thanks to artificially low interest rates that are once again sliding lower.
Meanwhile, as incomes have remained stagnant for nearly two decades, the price of cars, colleges, houses and healthcare have all risen. In order to fill the gap, the middle class is turning to more debt.
Consumer debt ex-mortgages – which comprises of credit card debt, as well as auto and student loans – is now at an astonishing $4 trillion, its highest level ever adjusted for inflation, while mortgage debt is rebounding after its post-financial crisis slide. More notably, student debt now totals about $1.5 trillion, exceeding credit card and all other types of debt except for mortgages.
Adjusting for inflation, auto debt is up about 40% to $1.3 trillion and the average loan for new cars is up an inflation-adjusted 11% in a decade, to $32,187. Due to peer to peer lending and tech based banks, unsecured personal loans are also popular yet again.
Amusingly the WSJ describes the rising debt levels as a “vote of confidence in the future”, instead of what it is – a desperate scramble to keep up appearances “for the Joneses” and to be perceived as well off, even if it means having a soaring credit card balance to show for it:
In one sense, the growing consumer debt is a vote of confidence in the future. People borrowing money today expect to have the income tomorrow to pay it back. Consumer debt tends to rise when borrowers feel secure in their jobs.
Of course, if job losses start to occur, the debt load could easily become unsustainable for many borrowers, which would then result in missed payments, delinquent loans and lenders writing off balances.
Some perspective: the median U.S. household income was $61,372 at the end of 2017, which is barely above the 1999 level when adjusted for inflation. Not adjusted for inflation, this number rose 135% over the last three decades – but over the same period, average tuition was up 549% over the same period of time. Healthcare expenditures were up about 276% between 1990 to 2017. Average housing prices were up 188% over those same three decades.
Adam Levitin, a Georgetown Law professor who studies bankruptcy, financial regulation and consumer finance said: “The costs of staying in the middle class are going up.”
U.S. households with credit card debt owed $8,390 in Q1 2019, which is up 9% from 2015 adjusted for inflation.
And while borrowing to fund a degree or a house, which could both provide an eventual return on investment, can sometimes be smart decisions, borrowing for everyday consumption or for assets that depreciate (like cars) makes its harder to save and invest.
Despite the U.S. economy nearly doubling in size from 1989 to 2016, the gains in assets owned were “heavily skewed” toward the highest earners, according to the report.
The median net worth of households in the middle 20% of income rose 4% in inflation-adjusted terms to $81,900 between 1989 and 2016, the latest available data. For households in the top 20%, median net worth more than doubled to $811,860. And for the top 1%, the increase was 178% to $11,206,000.
Put differently, the value of assets for all U.S. households increased from 1989 through 2016 by an inflation-adjusted $58 trillion. A third of the gain—$19 trillion—went to the wealthiest 1%, according to a Journal analysis of Fed data.
Cris DeRitis, deputy chief economist at Moody’s Analytics said: “On the surface things look pretty good, but if you dig a little deeper you see different sub-populations are not performing as well.”
And while consumers still aren’t as burdened by debt as they were in Q4 of 2017, they’re heading in the wrong direction. In Q4 2017 households devoted 13.2% of their disposable income to debt service – that number is about 9.9% now, mostly due to lower interest rates. Other debt, including auto and student loans, consumed about 5.7% of disposable income in Q1 versus 4.9% at the end of 2012.
Of course, while rates can always go even lower, the overarching problem is that instead of deleveraging, US consumers are instead adding on more and more debt in the hopes that rates never go up. Come to think of it, that precisely what corporations and sovereign nations are doing as well.
Finally, for for those that have an problem visualizing the inequality gap, those who don’t realize that the quarterly net worth exercise is meaningless and the result of averaging data when in reality only the top 10% benefit, and those that argue that the US society, not just its financial elites, is far better off than 2008, here’s the one chart that will set you straight:
(Alex Deluce) There may be readers who weren’t even born when the U.S. still had a gold-backed dollar. Since the gold standard was abolished in 1971, the value of the dollar has decreased annually by 3.96 percent. You would need over $600 today to purchase the same goods you purchased for $100 in 1973. Still, a dollar is a dollar, right? No, it is not. It is just a piece of paper.
Is there a chance the U.S. could return to the gold standard and provide real value to the U.S. currency? Judy Shelton and Christopher Waller are President Trump’s pick for Federal Reserve governors. As it happens, Ms. Shelton is a believer in the gold standard and a critic of current Federal Reserve policies. She believes that the Fed has become unnecessarily involved in trade policies instead of adhering to its function of regulating the monetary system. Returning to the gold standard is not a popular idea these days when economists support the limitless printing for currency, high debt, and inflation.
Ms. Shelton would have been considered mainstream 35 years ago. Today, she is thought of as unorthodox. In 2018, she wrote in an article published by the conservative thinktank, Cato Institute,
“If the appeal of cryptocurrencies is their capacity to provide a common currency, and to maintain a uniform value for every issued unit, we need only consult historical experience to ascertain that these same qualities were achieved through the classical international gold standard.”
She also authored a book, Fixing the Dollar Now. In it, she advocates for linking the dollar to a benchmark of value, preferably gold. More than four decades ago, the currency of all major countries, such a Britain, Japan, France, Russia, and others were linked to gold. In 1933, the dollar was linked to $35 worth of gold. In 2019, the value of the dollar is less than one-thirtieth of that.
The gold standard helped the U.S. prosper for 180 years. The signers of the U.S. Constitution included this requirement in Article 10.
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
Almost two hundred years later, such a concept is deemed unorthodox. Ideologies change, and not always for the better.
The reason the Founding Fathers included a monetary policy in the Constitution is that they wanted money to be as far away as possible from any human intervention. This was achieved by linking the dollar to gold. Gold is a stable commodity, and thus ensures a stable U.S. currency.
Countries today link their currency to some other, stronger currency, such as the dollar or the euro. This means that these countries have no control over their own currency and are at the mercy of an arbitrary link. But as the dollar and euro weaken, so do the currencies that have linked themselves to it. This serves as a disruption of all global economies.
“Stable money” provides us with logical economic guidelines. Market forces become the determining factor of what is produced and where capital is spent. For example, if the price of oil becomes too high, the consumer will reduce oil consumption while companies will either increase their production of oil or seek other sources. When market forces rule, everyone benefits.
Market forces have largely been replaced by government interference and manipulation. The cost of a loaf of bread is what the government says it will be. (See Venezuela for an extreme example.) To manipulate prices, the government, or the Fed, needs to manipulate the value of the dollar. The loaf of bread purchased a year ago for $2.00 now costs $2.50. Same bread, manipulated price. When market forces rule, the price of a loaf of bread would be determined by consumer choice. Under central banking rules, the price would be manipulated by some artificial whim.
One of the easiest ways to manipulate money is through easy credit. Print unlimited currency with no intrinsic value and you create a mountain of debt. This will inevitably lead to inflation and higher prices. If the dollar were once again linked to gold, only a certain amount of money, backed by gold, could be printed. Debt, inflation and higher prices would almost immediately go into a tailspin. Money cannot be manipulated under the gold standard. Perhaps that is why so many economists fear to return to such a standard.
Judy Shelton will be duly criticized for her opinions. Stable money is a new concept for a new generation of bankers and economists. But gold has been around for thousands of years and will undoubtedly outlast these new thinkers.
(Sven Henrich) Are we hitting the wall? Markets. Economy. Technicals. Valuations. All appear at a key crossroads here. Last week’s 3% pullback, while in itself not seemingly dramatic, came at a very key point. Whether it is meaningful is too early to tell, but I have some eye opening data points for you that suggests it may very well turn out to be extremely meaningful.
In last weekend’s update (End Game) I highlighted the issue of market capitalization versus the underlying size of the economy. Let me dig a little deeper.
Is there a natural wall beyond which bubbles cannot go before they revert back to a more natural state of valuation? It’s a serious question especially looking at the structural context of the last few bubbles. The biggest bubbles in our lifetimes were the 2000 tech bubble, the 2007 real estate bubble and the monstrosity we are witnessing now, the central bank, cheap money bubble.
All 3 have done something unique. They have vastly accelerated asset prices above their historic track record. In 2000 and 2007 these bubbles moved stock markets wildly above the mean and investors got punished badly.
This is the chart I showed last week:
Peaks of 147% and 137% respectively. Now this bubble has arrived in full vengeance on the heels of $20 trillion in central bank intervention, a global collapse in yields and the TINA effects.
Now look closely what just happened in the past 18 months:
We keep hitting the same wall. January 2018 nearly 150% market cap to GDP and stocks got punished with a 10% correction.
Last September/October we hit a slightly lower high around 147% and stocks got hit with a 20% correction.
Now in July we hit 145%, another slightly lower high, and stocks have begun selling off again.
Is that it? Is that the valuation wall? How far and for how long can stock markets stay this far disconnected from the underlying size of the economy? All of history says: Not for very long.
Incidentally, why these slight lower highs? Because the larger stock market is weakening underneath from new high to new high. It’s what I’ve outlined with divergences and weakening participation, but neatly captured by the value line geometric index:
But the plot thickens.
The earth is not flat, despite some adherents to that fantasy, the same valuation wall can be observed across the globe (viaWordbank):
Each time market capitalizations cross the 110% mark things get iffy don’t they? Added plot twist: The world can lead in the realignment to reality process. Note the global valuation scheme peaked in 1999. US markets famously puked some more highs out into March of 2000. Well, this time around the world peaked in 2018 and since then it’s the US again squeezing out marginal new highs in 2019. Not Europe, not Asia, no, it’s the US on its own.
The earth is not flat.
The bull case from here is based on one factor alone: The Fed. I see it in every Wall Street case for new highs. The Fed is cutting, you must buy stocks. That’s it. It’s not earnings, not growth, no, Goldman is cutting earnings and growth, but raising price targets because of the Fed.
I submit to you that, while this may indeed come to fruition, it is structurally a reckless thing to do. For 2 reasons, both of which are predicated on the same thing: History.
There is no history, none, that supports stock market capitalizations above 145% of GDP for an extended period of time. None.
There is also no history, none, that’s suggests unemployment can stay this low for an extended period of time. None.
And their certainly is no history suggests that BOTH can be maintained for an extended period to time concurrently:
None. But you are welcome to believe it if you wish.
And hence, in context, Jay Powell’s comment about a ‘mid-cycle adjustment” was either disingenuous, ignorant or an outright lie.
We are here:
Looking at the yield curve, the reaction of the 10 year off of the 30+ year trend line and the basing of the low unemployment rate, does any of this suggest anything remotely close to mid-cycle? I submit to you that they don’t.
And switching to technicals, look at the trend lines in the $SPX chart above: The 2009 trend line STILL remains broken. I submit to you they jammed stocks higher in 2019 on the Fed pivot, the flip in policy, the promises of a rate cut, and the delivery of a rate cut, aided by still massive buybacks in the system. That’s it. They haven’t changed anything substantive on the economy. It’s still slowing, we still have trade wars and earnings growth remains flat to negative and there’s no growth in CAPEX or business investment.
Previous business cycles came to a sudden end when the employment picture changed trajectory, from a period of basing at the low end to shift to higher unemployment and a sudden steepening in the yield curves:
And guess what? Everything, the yield curves, the stock market valuation to GDP ratio at 145%, the Fed pivot, it all has led to here:
The magic 2.618 fib zone on $SPX (we missed it by a few handles) and exceeded it temporarily on the $DJIA:
We’ve hit walls everywhere. Technically, economically, valuation wise. To trust the Fed and to go long stocks here is to believe that none of these walls mean anything.
It’s to believe unemployment can be maintained at a historic 50 year low for an extended period of time, it’s to believe that stock market capitalization can be accelerated above a historic unproven 145% threshold for an extended period and it’s to believe in one’s ability to time any future steepening in the yield curves.
That’s a lot of believing.
I prefer seeing. And here’s what we just saw. We saw a market enter a technical risk zone that was outlined in advance:
And we saw market cleanly rejecting from that risk zone:
That doesn’t mean immediate confirmed doom and gloom, certainly not with a mere 3% from from the highs, but it speaks to the impressive confluence of technical and valuations factors that suggest that markets may be hitting the wall.
Technicals matter. Valuations matter.
For a run down on the technicals and implications please see the video below:
Somewhere, Albert Edwards is dancing a jig as the ice age he predicted will grip the world, appears to finally be here.
While global equities are sharply lower today following the end of the US-China trade ceasefire, it’s nothing compared to what is going on in the bond market, where one day after the 10Y US Treasury plunged a whopping 6% to 1.832% – the biggest one day drop since Brexit – to the lowest since the Trump election…
… the real show is in Germany, where not only did German 10Y Bunds tumble to the lowest on record, sliding to -0.503%, far below the ECB’s -0.40% deposit rate, the highlight was the plunge in 30Y yield, which today dropped below 0%…
Enter “Japanification”: as Bloomberg notes, “the move will add to fears that the region’s economic slowdown is being driven by more structural factors akin to Japan’s lost decade”, which is ironic because not even Japan’s 30Ys trade negative. Germany’s bond market is widely perceived as being one of the world’s safest, with investors lured in by the liquidity and credit quality offered. Funds still looking to extract a positive return from European sovereign assets have been forced further out the yield curve or into riskier debt markets such as Italy. And as of today, anyone investing in German paper is guaranteed to lose money if holding to maturity.
“It underlines that the hunt for yield, or rather hunt to avoid negative yields, is accelerating day by day,” said Arne Lohmann Rasmussen, head of fixed-income research at Danske Bank A/S. “It just makes things more complicated.”
In addition to fears about a German recession sparked by the renewed Trump tariff threat, Germany’s bond market is also plagued by a problem of scarcity, with the government mandated by law to effectively maintain a budget surplus. The ECB holds nearly a third of the existing debt, leaving less to trade, which has helped to compress yields even further.
“It is a combination of a very uncertain economic outlook, a central bank that left all doors open in terms of new easing measures, the absence of inflation and vigorous search for yield,” said Nordea Bank chief strategist Jan von Gerich. “It was almost bound to happen.”
In light of Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest for sex trafficking minors, previously taboo conversations about political elite’s infatuation with deviant social practices have become normalized.
BLP reported that the billionaire pedophile was “arrested for allegedlysex traffickingdozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005.” Interestingly, Epstein has close connections to political elites such as the Clinton family, which has raised speculation about how deep Epstein’s pedophile ring went and who else was involved in it.
With all the talk about pedophile rings, an interestingposton Facebook was posted on July 24, 2019 that also implicates a famous economist in this socially degenerate activity.
The individual in question is renowned economist John Maynard Keynes.
Students of economics know Keynes as arguably the most influential economist of the 20th century. His prescriptions for stimulus spending and active government intervention in economic affairs have become go-to-strategies for governments across the world.
However, one lesser known aspect about his life was his pedophiliac activity. Economist Saifedean Ammous’ book, The Bitcoin Standard, details some interesting factoids about Keynes’ life.
Ammous started off by detailing how the family unit is destroyed by government largesse:
Substituting the family with government largesse has arguably been a losing trade for individuals who have partaken in it. Several studies show that life satisfaction depends to a large degree on establishing intimate long-term familial bonds with a partner and children. Many studies also show that rates of depression and psychological diseases are rising over time as the family breaks down, particularly for women. Cases of depression and psychological disorders very frequently have family breakdown as a leading cause.
The economist then transitioned his analysis into Keynes’ life, which revealed his pedophiliac tendencies:
It is no coincidence that the breakdown of the family has come about through the implementation of the economic teachings of a man who never had any interest in the long term. A son of a rich family that had accumulated significant capital over generations, Keynes was a libertine hedonist who wasted most his adult life engaging in sexual relationships with children, including traveling around the Mediterranean to visit children’s brothels.
Ammous notes that Keynes’ lifestyle is in stark contrast to the previous Victorian era in Britain which was known for its social modesty and social cohesion:
Whereas Victorian Britain was a low-time-preference society with a strong sense of morality, low interpersonal conflict, and stable families, Keynes was part of a generation that rose against these traditions and viewed them as a repressive institution to be brought down. It is impossible to understand the economics of Keynes without understanding the kind of morality he wanted to see in a society he increasingly believed he could shape according to his will.
In his book, Ammous highlights the concept oftime preference—the extent in which people value current consumption over future consumption. One of his main focuses was on how central banks distorts people’s decision-making. Specifically, when it comes to finance and certain lifestyle choices.
In times when Americans aresaving less moneythan ever, and the general culture is embracing socially degenerate activity, such economic insights are necessary to understand what’s going on throughout American society.
At the same time, Ammous’ research may shed light on even bigger acts of criminal behavior that political elites are involved in. Since Donald Trump was elected in 2016, new avenues into political research have opened up.
Previous sacred cows are fair game for investigative journalism. The Bitcoin Standard may be one of several pieces of literature that will get people to look into the behavior of power elites and potentially unveil a list of well-kept secrets that could sully politicians’ images in the eyes of the public.
New Jersey residents are fleeing their state in droves thanks to the over taxation and immense financial burden placed on them by their socialist state government. In addition to the already sky-high federal tax that we are all forced to pay, those in New Jersey are struggling to make enough money to live after the state also steals a cut of their income.
The SALT (state and local tax) cap has hit high-tax states like New York, California, and New Jersey particularly hard because these states steal a higher portion of an individual’s income. As a result, affected residents have begun to move to other states – a trend that experts expect to accelerate, according to Fox Business.
They can’t tax us anymore, the middle class is getting wiped out,” former “Saturday Night Live” cast member and New Jersey resident Joe Piscopo toldFOX Business’ Neil Cavuto on Friday,adding that wealthy individuals are leaving the state “in droves.” This is always the case, as governments all seek to find ways to steal more from the producers to fund their corruption. This problem is only going to get worse too and New Jersey Democrats are attempting to pass a state wealth tax.
Democratic Governor Phil Murphy renewed a push to implement the state tax (with a top rate of 10.75 percent) on people with incomes over $1 million. However, amid disagreements with the state legislature, which threatened to shut down the state government, Murphy said he will sign a budget over the weekend. State Democrats sent Murphy a budget proposal last week, which did not include the tax increase on people with more than $1 million. Murphy, however, has been a strong advocate for implementing the tax and it has been one of his top campaign promises.
Therefore, most residents have a difficult time believing that the issue has been completely put to rest. So instead, they’ve taken action and made the decision to leave the state entirely taking their wealth with them rather than having it stolen by tyrannical fascists.
New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer was one of several lawmakers from states including New York, Illinois, and California who took to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to air out their grievances against the new SALT cap. Gottheimer called the cap a “double-taxation grenade” that was “lobbed at New Jersey and other high-tax states” by so-called “moocher states.” The average SALT deduction claimed in Bergen County, New Jersey, was more than $24,700 before the implementation of the cap. -Fox Business
Piscopo says that a handful of states in the U.S. are already socialist. And those are the states people continue to flee in droves and are facing homeless epidemics.
“I’m telling you right now, If Gov. Murphy, if Steve Sweeney does a primary, and I don’t mean inside around the rest of the country, but this is huge in Jersey because Jersey, New York, and California are now socialist states,” he toldFOX Business‘ Neil Cavuto on Friday.
In“Parasites on Parade,”Larken Rose (author of“The Most Dangerous Superstition”and“The Iron Web”) uses his own direct experiences with bureaucratic and judicial stupidity, intrusion and corruption to illustrate why, everywhere and at all times, in every situation and at every level, government sucks!
This snarky, flippant look at the mentality and tactics of various state busybodies also provides an important lesson regarding the true nature of political “authority,” and the problems and abuses it naturally creates. – Parasites on Parade
Hamptons, the beachfront playground for New York City’s financial elite, just recorded the worst second quarter for sales in eight years, according to a report from Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel,and first reported by CNBC.
Real estates sales and prices in the Hamptons extended lower through 2Q19, indicating the luxury home market continues to stagnate for the last six quarters, the report said.
The weakness in the Hamptons was confusing for CNBC, considering they said real estate in the region should have been positive because the stock market is higher. But as Zerohedge readers know, the stock market has remained extremely disconnected from fundamentals this year, if not the last decade.
The Hamptons is experiencing the same pressures as many luxury markets across the country: an oversupply of mansions, dwindling demand from foreign buyers, changes to SALT deductions, and sellers who have become delusional that real estate prices can still hold 2014 values.
With no end in sight, the bust of the Hamptons real estate market could become more severe through 2020.
Miller Samuel said the number of homes listed in the region doubled in 2Q19, to 2,500. This is the highest level the research firm has recorded since it started gathering data in 2006.
According to the report, there is a 5-month supply of listings, with more than a three-year supply of luxury properties.
“I think it’s premature to talk about a turnaround until the inventory growth slows down,” said Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel, the appraisal firm.
“There is just not a sense of urgency. The buyers are just waiting it out.”
Brokers told CNBC that demand is showing up for more affordable homes but not for +$5 million.
“You might look at Zillow and see nine properties on the oceanfront in Southampton, which looks like a lot,” said Cody Vichinsky of Bespoke Real Estate in the Hamptons.
“But then you dig into it, and you see that six of them are in places where you’d never want to live, with constant helicopter noise or a triple dune or encumbrances. And then the others, the price is ridiculous. When a property is priced decently, it goes.”
Glancing at Zillow Hamptons, hundreds of homes are for sale ranging from $625k to $60 million.
In a recent listing, the family of James Evans, the former chairman of the Union Pacific railroad empire, put their waterfront estate in East Hampton on the market for $60 million. The 5,500-square-foot home sits on 5.4 oceanfront acres, has an estimated mortgage payment of $362k per month.
A $49 million mansion on 4.5 acres with 430 feet of direct oceanfront has been on the market for 850 days.
The pullback in Hamptons real estate is a sobering reminder that inventory is building to levels that are making sellers uncomfortable, could unleash panic selling and metastasize into a full-blown market rout with implications beyond New York City.
A massive pullback in international buyers purchasing US real estate has been seen in the last few years, resulting in the softening of housing markets across South Florida,reported The Palm Beach Post.
Foreign buyers purchased $153 billion in US homes from April 2016 to March 2017, total sales of homes to international buyers dropped to $121 billion for the year ending in March 2018, then plunged to $77.9 billion for the year ending on March 2019, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) said in its latest report.
Florida transactions involving foreign buyers fell to 36,000 in the year ending in March 2019, down from 50,000 the previous year, and 60,000 in the year ending March 2017.
“The magnitude of the decline is quite striking, implying less confidence in owning a property in the US,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement.
South Florida is a top destination for foreign buyers, accounting for 20% of the 183,100 international transactions nationwide over the past year.
Capital flight from Latin America over the past decade has driven at least a quarter of Florida’s real estate market, but new trends today suggest foreigners are abandoning US markets with home prices in bubble territory.
“It takes a lot more pounds to buy an American property than it did a few years ago,” said John Mike, an agent at RE/MAX Prestige Realty in Royal Palm Beach.
Mike said a stronger dollar that stated to rise in 2014 had deterred many buyers from Britain and Europe who are now increasingly buying vacation homes in Spain and the Bahamas rather than Florida.
Mike said President Trump’s crackdown on immigration and a dangerous trade war with China had hampered demand. He added that international buyers “don’t feel welcome” in America anymore because of President Trump’s policies – so they are going elsewhere.
The exodus of foreign buyers and crashing sales explains why homes in South Florida are experiencing the most significant percentage of price cuts in some time, that has led to properties staying on the market for longer, and has tipped the overall market to buyers. All of this suggests that a top could be near.
(John Myers) Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration said Friday it would begin work on transferring $331 million back into a special fund designed to help California homeowners hit hard by the recession-era mortgage crisis, money that the courts have ruled was wrongly used to help balance the state budget.
The California Supreme Court refused earlier this week to hear an appeal by the administration disputing lower court rulings that found the state mistakenly used a portion of the money — paid by large banks and lenders as part of a nationwide legal agreement in 2012 — to pay off housing bonds. In some cases, those bonds were enacted a decade before the mortgage settlement. In all, three years of state budget expenses were covered by a portion of what California received from the mortgage settlement.
The decision to use the money was championed by Newsom’s predecessor, former Gov. Jerry Brown. Legislators subsequently ratified the plan, and last year went even further: They passed legislation seeking to block a court ruling to repay more than $331 million into a fund originally designed for statewide homeowner assistance efforts. Groups that waged a five-year court battle over the funds expressed relief that the legal fight was finally over.
“Truth prevails,” said Faith Bautista, president and chief executive of the National Asian American Coalition. “They’re now facing the reality that the money belonged to the homeowners in distress.”
While the money in question was undoubtedly tempting at the time it was diverted — California’s budget was still reeling from successive years of back-to-back deficits — the state’s coffers are now overflowing. The budget signed by Newsom last month includes $19.2 billion in cash reserves, making the repayment of the mortgage settlement money limited only by how fast state leaders can take action. The Legislature will return next month for the final weeks of its 2019 session.
The money diverted to state budget needs was a small portion of what both California homeowners and the government received from the national settlement agreed to by 49 states in 2012. Those states, along with the federal government and the District of Columbia, had earlier filed suit against the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers: Ally (formerly known as GMAC), Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. The legal action alleged a number of federal law violations, and the financial institutions agreed to pay more than $20 billion to homeowners affected by the mortgage crisis. The companies also agreed to pay the states a total of $2.5 billion.
California’s share of the state payments was $410 million, to be used for a variety of services directed by then-Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris. But most of the money was used instead for budget-balancing items which, while related to housing, were long-term costs that further shrank the funds available for basic government services. A coalition including representatives for Asian American and Latino communities sued the state in 2014 over its decision to use the money to help erase a projected budget deficit. A Sacramento judge ruled for the coalition in 2015 and the 3rd District Court of Appeal agreed with that ruling last year.
In April, the same appeals court again rebuked state officials.
“It is the judicial branch that has the constitutional authority to interpret statutes,” the three-judge panel wrote in its ruling, stating that the mortgage settlement “money was unlawfully diverted from a special fund in contravention of the purposes for which that special fund was established.”
On Wednesday, the California Supreme Court refused Newsom’s request to hear the case, allowing the appeals ruling to stand.
“Now that the Supreme Court has issued its decision in this matter, we will move forward to implement the ruling,” said H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the California Department of Finance.
Bautista, whose Daly City-based group works with low-income communities of color across the state, said she hopes the $331 million will be supplemented by money from the nation’s leading lenders to offer services such as down payment assistance for those who went through foreclosure during the housing crisis and want to again own a home. She said other services, including financial literacy efforts and those helping Californians with low credit scores, should also be considered. And she urged Newsom to make such efforts part of his larger discussion about the state’s housing crisis.
“People are hurting in East L.A., Riverside, the Central Valley,” Bautista said. “Let’s pick what’s best and use the money wisely.”
Neil Barofsky, an attorney who represented the groups that fought the cash diversion in the courts, said it was disappointing that state officials spent so many years on “frivolous appeals,” culminating in what he called the “ginned- up legislative action” last year designed to block repayment of the money and the appeals court ruling.
“We understand it was a desperate time for the state when this happened,” he said. “But once we returned to surpluses, the idea that they would just keep fighting this has been breathtaking.”
All we’re doing is waiting for the fake “prosperity” to crumble, and the resulting loss of credibility and legitimacy will follow like night follows day.
The citizenry of corrupt regimes ruled by self-serving elites tolerate this oppressive misrule for one reason and only one reason: increasing prosperity,which we can define as continual improvement in material well-being and financial security.
The legitimacy of every corrupt regime ruled by self-serving elites hangs on this single thread: once prosperity fades, the legitimacy of the regime evaporates, as the citizenry have no reason to tolerate their rapacious, predatory overlords.
A broken, unfair system will be tolerated as long as every participant feels they’re getting a few shreds of improvement. This is why there is such an enormous push of propaganda touting “growth”; if the citizenry can be conned into believing that their deteriorating well-being and security are actually “prosperity,” then they will continue to grant the status quo some measure of credibility and legitimacy.
When the gap between the propaganda and reality widens to the breaking point, the regime loses its credibility and legitimacy. This manifests in a number of ways:
1. Nobody believes anything the state or its agencies reports as “fact”: since it misreported economic well-being and security to benefit the few at the expense of the many, why believe anything official?
2. Increased lawlessness: since the Ruling Elites get away with virtually everything, why we should we obey the laws?
3. Opting out: rather than become a target for the state’s oppressive organs of security, the safer path is to opt out: quit supporting a parasitic and predatory Status Quo of corporations and the state with your labor, slip into the shadows of the economy, avoid debt like the plague, get by on a fraction of your former income.
4. Breakdown of Status Quo political parties: since all parties are bands of self-serving thieves, what’s the point of even nominal membership?
5. Increasing reliance on anti-depression and anti-anxiety medications, more self-medication/drug use, and other manifestations of social stress and breakdown.
6. Those who can move away from crumbling high-tax cities, essentially giving up civic hope for fair, affordable solutions to rising inequality and social disorder.
7. Increasing defaults and bankruptcies as households and enterprises no longer see any other way out.
8. Increasing mockery of financial/corporate media parroting the propaganda that “prosperity” is real and rising– S&P 500 hits 3,000, we’re all getting better in every way, every day, etc.
Truth is the most essential form of capital, and once it has been squandered to serve insiders, vested interests and Ruling Elites, the nation is morally, spiritually, politically and financially bankrupt. All we’re doing is waiting for the fake “prosperity” to crumble, and the resulting loss of credibility and legitimacy will follow like night follows day.
California is being hit by a “plague of rats”, and some commentators are suggesting that this is exactly what they deserve. In fact, some have even gone so far as to suggest that the name of Los Angeles should be formally changed to “Los Ratas” because the rat problem is so severe there. From Crescent City in the north all the way down to Chula Vista in the south, the rats are seemingly everywhere. There are millions of them, and the more poison that people put out the more they seem to multiply. The state of California has never seen anything like this before, and it is getting worse with each passing month.
Pest control and public health experts are calling on California Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a public health emergency over what they say is a sharp rise in the state’s rodent population.
“California is being overrun by rodents – and without immediate emergency action by state and local government, we face significant economic costs and risk a public health crisis,” said Carl DeMaio, chairman of Reform California, at a news conference Tuesday at City Hall in downtown Los Angeles.
It would be difficult to overstate the severity of this crisis. According to a recent survey of California pest control companies, rat service requests are up“as much as 60% in the last 12 months”.
If you have ever lived some place where you can literally hear rodents crawling in the walls and in the ceiling, then you know how deeply unsettling it can be.
And in some instances, rodents are literally starting to fall out of the ceilings in California. Just considerthis example…
Maggots and mice have fallen onto inmates’ dining tables at a California state prison where holes in the roof also allow rain and bird droppings to seep through and streak the walls, according to an inmate lawsuit that charges the state isn’t moving fast enough to repair deteriorating prisons.
California has committed $260 million over four years to repair leaking roofs and clear dangerous mold at more than two dozen deteriorating prisons where the cost of overdue maintenance is pegged at more than $1 billion.
Customers at a Los Angeles, Calif., Buffalo Wild Wings were in for a stomach-churning incident when a rat reportedly fell from the ceiling and landed on a table.
Alisha Norman, who was visiting Los Angeles from Texas, was getting ready to order at the chain restaurant when she heard something crawling above her, she told FOX35. Soon after, a rat fell and landed on a menu on the table.
This isn’t some third world country that we are talking about. The state of California is the wealthiest state in the entire country, and they are being absolutely overrun by rats.
Of course it certainly doesn’t help that many California cities have a major trash collection problem. The following was published by NBC Los Angelesearlier this year…
Rat-infested piles of rotting garbage left uncollected by the city of Los Angeles, even after promises to clean it up, are fueling concerns about a new epidemic after last year’s record number of flea-borne typhus cases.
Even the city’s most notorious trash pile, located between downtown LA’s busy Fashion and Produce districts, continues to be a magnet for rats after it was cleaned up months ago. The rodents can carry typhus-infected fleas, which can spread the disease to humans through bacteria rubbed into the eyes or cuts and scrapes on the skin, resulting in severe flu-like symptoms.
Officials at Los Angeles’ City Hall are considering ripping all of the building’s carpets up, as rats and fleas are said to be running riot in its halls.
A motion was filed by Council President Herb Wesson on Wednesday to enact the much needed makeover amid a typhus outbreak in the downtown area.
Wesson said a city employee had contracted the deadly bacterial disease at work, and now he’s urging officials to investigate the ‘scope’ of the long-running pest problem at the council building.
When there is a huge problem like this that gets national attention, it is inevitable that California legislators will throw a lot more money at the problem, but that hasn’t worked so well in other cases.
For instance, two years ago New York Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a 32 million dollar program to fight the rat problem in his city, but that didn’t help. In fact, the number of rat complaints actually increasedby 38 percentlast year…
According to the New York Times, rat complaints have risen from 12,617 in 2014 to 17,353 last year. That’s a 38% jump citywide — and comes even after Mayor Bill de Blasio allocated $32 million in 2017 to reduce the number of the rodents.
OpenTheBooks.comanalyzed the number of calls for rats to 311 and found that, according to the Post, “the rats are running wild in this fancy area.”
A local publication calledWest Side Ragagreed that the Upper West Side has an extreme rat problem. “We’re like the Tom Brady of rats. All we do is win,” an article reads.
Despite all of our advanced technology, we cannot even handle the rats.
Somehow it seems fitting that the rat epidemic is most severe in the areas that are on the cutting edge of America’s social decline. In life, you can try to run from the consequences of your actions, butthey will catch up with you eventually.
As I have discussed previously, under ideal conditions rats can multiply very, very rapidly. In fact, it has been estimated that two healthy rats could potentially become 482 million rats in just three years.
Perhaps Californians should just give up and let the rats take over. After all, they couldn’t possibly do any worse than the politicians are currently doing.
The global central bank experiment with re-normalization is officially over.
After roughly half the world’s central banks hiked rates at least once in 2018, the major central banks have returned to easing mode, and as the chart below shows, for the first time since 2013, not a single central bank is hiking rates.
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced Friday that it has begun sending letters to taxpayers who own cryptocurrency, advising them to pay any back taxes they may owe or to file amended tax returns regarding their holdings.
Ina news bulletin, the agency said that it began mailing what it called “educational letters” last week. According to the statement, there are three variations of the letter that were sent.
The IRS further said that it will have sent such letters to “more than 10,000 taxpayers” by the end of this month,” adding that “the names of these taxpayers were obtained through various ongoing IRS compliance efforts.”
“Taxpayers should take these letters very seriously by reviewing their tax filings and when appropriate, amend past returns and pay back taxes, interest and penalties,” IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig said in a statement. “The IRS is expanding our efforts involving virtual currency, including increased use of data analytics. We are focused on enforcing the law and helping taxpayers fully understand and meet their obligations.”
In May, it wasreportedthat the IRS is beginning to work on new guidance regarding cryptocurrencies, its first such effort since 2014. A number of organizations and industry advocates have called on the agency in past years to update its guidance following its decision to treat cryptocurrencies as a form of intangible property for tax purposes.
On Thursday, a user of the r/bitcoin subredditdescribedreceiving such a letter. Lawyer Tyson Cross, writing forForbes, also detailed how a number of his crypto-focused clients have received this kind of letter from the IRS.
Despite yesterday’s disappointing existing home sales print, new home sales were expected to spike (after dropping for two straight months), and did – thanks to a large downward revision in May.
New Home Sales were 646k SAAR in June – missing expectations of 658k. However this 7.0% MoM jump was bigger than expected thanks to the 8.2% revised plunge in May.
May new-home sales were revised down to 604,000 from 626,000; March and April purchases were also revised lower.
Year-over-year, new home sales rebounded…
Purchases of new homes jumped in the West by the most since August 2010, while sales also rose in the South. Sales in the Midwest slumped to 56,000 last month, the slowest pace since September 2015.
The supply of homes at the current sales rate declined to 6.3 months from 6.7 months in May.
The median sales price was little changed from a year earlier at $310,400.
Despite a collapse in mortgage rates, new home sales refuse to accelerate…
Time for a Fed rate-cut then… because that has helped housing, right? Oh wait…
Despite a collapse in European Manufacturing PMIs (led by Germany), and 3rd month of contraction in Japan PMIs; US PMIs were expected to modestly rebound in preliminary July data, but instead the picture was mixed:
US Manufacturing PMI missed – printing 50.0 versus 51.0 exp and down from 50.6 in June
US Services PMI beat – printing 52.2 versus 51.8 exp and up from 51.5 in June.
This manufacturing print is the lowest in 118 months.
At 51.6 in July, the seasonally adjusted IHS Markit Flash U.S. Composite PMI Output Index edged up from 51.5 in June and remained higher than the three-year low recorded during May.
“The overall picture of modest growth conceals a two-speed economy, with steady service sector growth masking a deepening downturn in the manufacturing sector. The survey’s gauge of factory production has slumped to its lowest since August 2009, and indicates that manufacturing output is falling at a quarterly rate of over 1%, led by an increasing rate of loss of export sales.
“The survey’s employment gauge has meanwhile fallen to a level consistent with 130,000 jobs being added in July, down from an average of 200,000, in the first quarter and 150,000 in the second quarter, as firm became increasingly cautious in relation to hiring. Manufacturers are shedding workers at the fastest rate since 2009 and service sector job creation is now down to its lowest since April 2017.
“Future prospects have also darkened to the gloomiest since comparable data were first available in 2012, suggesting that companies may look to tighten their belts further in coming months, dampening spending, investment and jobs growth. Geopolitical worries, trade wars and increasingly widespread expectations of slower economic growth at home and internationally have all pulled business optimism lower.”
Williamson concludes:
“The survey data indicated that the economy started the third quarter on a disappointingly soft footing. The PMIs for manufacturing and services collectively point to annualized GDP growth of just 1.6%, up only very marginally from a lacklustre 1.5% indicated by the survey in the second quarter.”
Finally, we note former fund manager and FX trader Richard Breslow’s comments on the dismal data:
“It doesn’t seem like a tremendous leap of faith to worry that they are proving the point of the declining efficacy of existing policies in order to justify experimenting with some of the more outlandish proposals, like MMT, that are getting way too much airtime.”
(ZeroHedge) Almosteight year ago, we first presented a chart first created by JPMorgan’s Michael Cembalest, which showed very simply and vividly that reserve currencies don’t last forever, and that in the not too distant future, the US Dollar would also lose its status as the world’s most important currency, since it is never different this time.
As Cembalest put it back in January 2012, “I am reminded of the following remark from late MIT economist Rudiger Dornbusch: ‘Crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.'”
Perhaps it is not a coincidence then that in light of the growing number of mentions of MMT and various other terminal, destructive monetary policies that have been proposed to kick on the current financial system the can just a little bit longer, that the topic of longevity of reserve currency status is once again becoming all the rage, and none other than JPMorgan’s Private Bank ask in this month’s investment strategy note whether “the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” is coming to an end?”
So why is JPM, after first creating the iconic chart above which has since spread virally across all financial corners of the internet, not only worried that the dollar’s reserve status may be coming to an end, but in fact goes so far as to state that “we believe the dollar could lose its status as the world’s dominant currency (which could see it depreciate over the medium term) due to structural reasons as well as cyclical impediments.”
Read on to learn why even the largest US bank has started to lose faith in the world’s most powerful currency.
Is the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” coming to an end?
In Brief
The U.S. dollar (USD) has been the world’s dominant reserve currency for almost a century. As such, many investors today, even outside the United States, have built and become comfortable with sizable USD over weights in their portfolios. However, we believe the dollar could lose its status as the world’s dominant currency (which could see it depreciate over the medium term) due to structural reasons as well as cyclical impediments.
As such, diversifying dollar exposure by placing a higher weighting on other currencies in developed markets and in Asia, as well as precious metals makes sense today. This diversification can be achieved with a strategy that maintains the underlying assets in an investment portfolio, but changes the mix of currencies within that portfolio. This is a completely bespoke approach that can be customized to meet the unique needs of individual clients.
The Rise Of The U.S. Dollar
It is commonly perceived that the U.S. dollar overtook the Great British Pound (GBP) as the world’s international reserve currency with the signing of the Bretton Woods Agreements after World War II. The reality is that sterling’s value was eroded for many decades prior to Bretton Woods. The dollar’s rise to international prominence was fueled by the establishment of the Federal Reserve System a little over a century ago and U.S. economic emergence after World War I. The Federal Reserve System aided in the establishment of more mature capital markets and a nationally coordinated monetary policy, two important pillars of reserve-currency countries. Being the world’s unit of account has given the United States what former French Finance Minister Valery d’Estaing called an “exorbitant privilege” by being able to purchase imports and issue debt in its own currency and run persistent deficits seemingly without consequence.
The Shifting Center
There is nothing to suggest that the dollar dominance should remain in perpetuity. In fact, the dominant international currency has changed many times throughout history going back thousands of years as the world’s economic center has shifted.
After the end of World War II, the U.S. accounted for biggest share of world GDP at more than 25%. This number is brought to more than 40% when we include Western European powers. Since then, the main driver of economic growth has shifted eastwards towards Asia at the expense of the U.S. and the West. China is at the epicenter of this recent economic shift driven by the country’s strong growth and commitment to domestic reforms. Over the last 70 years, China has quadrupled its share of global GDP to around 20%—roughly the same share as the U.S.—and this share is expected to continue to grow in the years ahead. China is no longer just a manufacturer of low cost goods as a growing share of corporate earnings is coming from “high value add” sectors like technology.
China Regaining Its Status As A Global Superpower
Source: Angus Maddison Database, IMF, J.P. Morgan Private Bank Economics. Data as of June 14, 2019
Earnings In China Are Becoming More Balanced
In addition to China, the economies of Southeast Asia, including India, have strong secular tailwinds driven by younger demographics and proliferating technological know-how. Specifically, the Asian economic zone—from the Arabian Peninsula and Turkey in the West to Japan and New Zealand in the East and from Russia in the North and Australia in the South—now represents 50% of global GDP and two-thirds of global economic growth. Of the estimated $30 trillion in middle-class consumption growth between 2015 and 2030, only $1 trillion is expected to come from today’s Western economies. As this region grows, the share of non-USD transactions will inevitably increase which will likely erode the dollar’s “reserveness”, even if the dollar isn’t replaced as the dominant international currency.
In other words, in the coming decades we think the world economy will transition from U.S. and USD dominance toward a system where Asia wields greater power. In currency space, this means the USD will likely lose value compared to a basket of other currencies, including precious commodities like gold.
Dollar’s Declining Role Already Under Way?
Recent data on currency reserve holdings among global central banks suggests this shift may already be under way. As a share of overall central bank reserves, the USD’s role has been declining ever since the Great Recession (see chart). The most recent central bank reserve flow data also suggests that for the first time since the euro’s introduction in 1999, central banks simultaneously sold dollars and bought euros.
Central banks across the globe are also adding to gold reserves at their strongest pace on record. 2018 saw the strongest demand for gold from central banks since 1971 and a rolling four-quarter sum of gold purchases is the strongest on record. To us, this makes sense: gold is a stable source of value with thousands of years of trust among humans supporting it.
USD Share Of Central Bank Reserves, %
Trade Wars Have Long-Term Consequences
The current U.S. administration has called into question agreements with nearly all of its largest partners—tariffs on China, Mexico and the European Union, renegotiating NAFTA, as well as abandoning the Trans Pacific Partnership. A more adversarial U.S. administration could also encourage countries to reduce their reliance on USD in trade. Currently 85% of all currency transactions involve the USD despite the U.S. accounting for only roughly 25% of global GDP.
Countries around the world are already developing payment mechanisms that would avoid using the dollar. These systems are small and still developing but this is likely to be a structural story that will extend beyond one particular administration. In a recent speech on the international role of the euro, Bank for International Settlements Chief Economist Claudio Borio brought up the benefits of pricing oil in the euro saying, “Trading and settling oil in the euro would move payments from dollars to euros and thereby shift ultimate settlement to the euro’s TARGET2 system. This could limit the reach of U.S. foreign policy insofar as it leverages dollar payments.” The European Central Bank also alluded to this theme in a recent report saying that “growing concerns about the impact of international trade tensions and challenges to multilateralism, including the imposition of unilateral sanctions seem to have lent support to the euro’s global standing.”
We believe we are at an important juncture. On a real basis, the dollar stands currently more than 10% above its long-term average and on a nominal basis has actually been trending lower for 50 years (see chart below).
Given the persistent—and rising—deficits in the United States (in both fiscal and trade), we believe the U.S. dollar could become vulnerable to a loss of value relative to a more diversified basket of currencies, including gold. As we scan client portfolios, we see that many of them have far more U.S. dollar exposure than we feel is prudent. At this stage of the economic cycle, we believe this exposure should be more diversified. In many cases, our recommendation would likely be to place a higher weighting on other G10 currencies, currencies in Asia and gold (see chart).
Unhappy with its market share in the US real estate market, the largest online retailer in the world and global commercial monopolist, Amazon, announced a deal on Tuesday morning with the largest US residential real estate brokerage company, Realogy, in a strategy designed to boost sales for both.
AsCNBC reports, Realogy – whose stock soared 25% on the news – and Amazon will now offer TurnKey, a horizontally and vertically integrated program meant to streamline and optimize the home- and furniture-buying process, by taking potential homebuyers through the Amazon portal and connects them to a Realogy agent. Once they purchase a home, they then get complimentary Amazon Home Services and products worth up to $5,000.
Realogy, which is the largest real estate broker in the US and which owns such brands as Coldwell Banker, Century 21, Sotheby’s International Realty, Corcoran, ERA and Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, has been facing stiff online competition from newcomers like Compass and Redfin, which rely heavily on high-tech, online platforms. As CNBC’s Diana Olick writes, “partnering with Amazon gives Realogy a platform unlike any other, not to mention access to more buyer data.”
“We’re the market leaders in this industry and we like that position, but you always have to be innovating to stay ahead, you’ve got to be willing to cannibalize yourself, you’ve got to do all the things that a big successful company needs to do to stay on the forefront,” said Realogy CEO Ryan Schneider.
“In a world that is awash with low quality lead generation out there, where you can get real estate leads from millions of online websites, giving an agent and franchisees high-quality leads from a source like Amazon and Realogy together is a real differentiator that’s going to be very powerful for the group.”
The group’s simple strategy for success: Always Be Closing... and then get the buyer to purchase a whole lot of additional stuff as well.
Here’s how it will work: a potential buyer will go to the TurnKey portal on Amazon and put in information on the type of home they’d like to purchase, the location and price. Amazon then matches them with a Realogy agent. Once the buyer closes on the home, Amazon connects them with services and experts in the area. The buyer not only gets a selection of Amazon Home Services, like painting or hanging a large TV, but they also gain access to smart home products, like a Ring doorbell, to be installed by Amazon professionals. The value of the free products and services can range from $1,000 to $5,000 depending on the purchase price of the home.
“Customers can be overwhelmed when moving, and we’re excited to be working with Realogy to offer homebuyers a simplified way to settle into a new home,” said Pat Bigatel, director of Amazon Home Services. “The Amazon Move-In Benefit will enable homebuyers to adapt the offering to their needs — from help assembling furniture, to assisting with smart home device set up, to a deep clean, and more.”
As CNBC notes, one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, Lennar, previously partnered with Amazon in 2018, introducing smart-home “experience showrooms.” Amazon outfitted Lennar model homes with smart-home technology available for purchase on its site. In something of a show-and-sell strategy, Lennar then offered 90 days of free Amazon home services with the purchase of a home.
“Amazon, Google, Apple, most of the technology-centric companies are starting to think about the home as a centerpiece for the way they think about the future of how their products work and how they interact with them, ” said Stuart Miller, executive chairman of Lennar, in an interview in May 2018. “Home automation is a point of attraction. It’s a proxy for a lot of other things.”
The new TurnKey service will first launch in 15 major metropolitan housing markets, including Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago and Washington, D.C., and will then expand into more markets. However Realogy CEO Ryan Schneider did not suggest that this is a stepping stone to putting Realogy brokerages’ listings on Amazon.
“We’ve never had that conversation with Amazon,” he said.
Of course, when Amazon decides to simply eliminate the middleman, it will do so without holding such a conversation in advance. For now, however, Realogy shares are enjoying the added exposure and the stock has soared over 25% this morning on the Amazon news.
Adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) prepayments hit their highest levels in 12 years during June, according to new data fromBlack Knight Inc.
The company also noted that prepays on 2018 vintage loans were up by more than 300 percent over the prior four months. As of June 27, Black Knight estimated there were 1.5 million potential refinance candidates in the 2018 vintage alone, matching the total of potential refinance candidates in the 2013-2017 vintages combined.
“Overall, prepayment activity–largely driven by home sales and mortgage refinances–has more than doubled over the past four months,” said Black Knight Data & Analytics President Ben Graboske. “It’s now at the highest levels we’ve seen since the fall of 2016, when rates began their steep upward climb. While we’ve observed increases across nearly every investor type, product type, credit score bucket and vintage, some changes stand out. For instance, prepayments among fixed-rate loans have hewed close to the overall market average, rising by more than two times over the past four months. However, ARM prepayment rates have now jumped to their highest level since 2007 as borrowers have sought to shed the uncertainty of their adjustable-rate products for the security of a low, fixed interest rate over the long haul.”
Graboske added that “some 8.2 million homeowners with mortgages could now both benefit from and likely qualify for a refinance, including more than 35 percent of those who took out their mortgages just last year. Early estimates suggest closed refinances rose by more than 30 percent from April 2019, with May’s volumes estimated to be three times higher than the 10-year low seen in November 2018.”
Black Knight also reported that approximately 44 million homeowners with mortgages have more than 20 percent equity in their home. With a combined $5.98 trillion, that works out to an average of $136,00 per borrower with tappable equity. While this level is near last summer’s all-time high of $6.06 trillion, Black Knight also observed the annual growth rate slowed to three percent in the first quarter, down from five percent in the prior quarter and 16 percent.
(Jeanette Settembre) Jeffrey Epstein lived in what’s reportedly one of the largest private homes in Manhattan, where he allegedly sexually abused under aged girls, an allegation so horrific, real-estate experts say people will go out of their way to avoid walking down the block.
Epstein has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Epstein’s seven-story, 21,000-square-footUpper East Side homenear Central Park is reportedly valued at $56 million, and if the home ever hits the market again, the stigma from the financier’s alleged sex-trafficking scandal will likely diminish its worth.
“After an event like this occurs, and the public becomes aware of it, all of a sudden the value drops significantly,” real-estate appraiser Orell Anderson, who valued the homes where Nicole Brown Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey were murdered, told MarketWatch.
“When tragedy or crime occurs at a home, it could take years before it ever sells, even if it’s a high profile residence”
One might find what’s inside the mansion disturbing even without knowing the harrowing acts that occurred inside.The home is reportedly adorned with unsettling decor choices, like a female doll hanging from the chandelier, and a self-portrait Epstein reportedly commissioned of himself portrayed in a prison scene behind barbed wire in the middle of a corrections officer and a guard station, according to The New York Times. All of those adornments, of course, would be removed in lieu of any sale.
When tragedy or crime occurs at a home, it could take years before it ever sells, even if it’s a high profile residence. And when it does, the buyer usually gets a discount on it, and the market value could take years to bounce back, if it ever does, Anderson says.
Homes where something as extreme as a murder occurs can often decrease a property’s value by 25% because of physical damages to the house like blood stains, or the lingering smell of dead bodies, Anderson explains. Then there’s the stigma of living in a house where someone was killed, or a tragedy happened.
After O.J. Simpson’s former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her 26-year-old friend Ron Goldman were found dead outside of her Brentwood home in 1994, Brown Simpson’s family tried to sell it, but no one wanted to buy a home where a double homicide occurred.
The house was on the market for two years before it finally sold for a fraction of what Brown Simpson paid for it. She purchased the home for $625,000 and it sold for $525,000, according to realtor.com. And in 1974 when Ronald DeFeo murdered an entire family in the “Amityville Horror House,” it sold for a $250,000 loss in 2017.
“The property in the short-term would take a significant hit to what its potential would be.”
New York City-based real-estate appraiser Jonathan Miller says even cursed homes see resiliency.
“Whenever there is a tragedy, generally speaking, at least in New York, the property in the short-term would take a significant hit to what its potential would be,” Miller explained.
He said Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion is especially unique because there’s only a handful like them on the block near Central Park. “I find that within a few years that generally fades away and even accelerates when you have a unique property or housing shortage.”
How to salvage and attempt to sell a cursed property
Once the dust settles after a tragedy, there are physical changes that can be made to present the property in a new light.
“It’s best to make the house look different from the pictures of it in the media so that people don’t immediately recognize it.” Anderson says, of changing the facade. “Put in more lights or change the color of the walls so there’s a perception that things have changed.”
That could mean investing in landscapers to add more plants to the front entrance to make it look more inviting, or changing the color of the home to make it appear brand new so perspective buyers don’t associate the property with it’s dark history.
However, real-estate agents are typically obliged to reveal the history of a house, especially if there were serious crimes committed there such as a murder, to a prospective buyer.
To boost the value of Simpson Brown’s home, it underwent a massive renovation and an address change so prospective buyers wouldn’t associate the condo with its past. It took more than a decade to bounce back selling for $1.72 million in 2006, according to realtor.com.
In the DeFeo murder home, granite counter tops, a heated sun room, fireplace and home sprinkler system were added likely to help boost the value in 2016 before it sold a year later.
Homes where tragedies occur can be redeveloped, turned into memorials or destroyed
Anderson says another way to restore a property that’s been plagued by crime or violence is to demolish it and rebuild something completely new, like turning a single-family mansion into an apartment building or office space depending on what zoning and land laws permit.
“If you had the kind of money, you could tear down the home and make it into something different,” Anderson said. In other cases, like an act of terrorism or a mass shooting, sometimes homes or the place where a tragedy occurred are destroyed all together, Anderson noted.
Some buyers hire energy healers to chase away evil spirits and bad vibes
When the DeFeo murder home first sold in 1975 after he was convicted, the buyers reportedly moved out nearly a month after they moved in because they allegedly heard voices telling them to “get out.” It could be worth getting an energy healer or spiritual leader to come in and cleanse the house, Anderson says, to put potential home owners at ease.
“If your market demands it, you could get your local priest or energy healer to come exercise the bad spirits. It might sound ridiculous, but that seems to be calming for people who believe in ghosts, or have superstitions,” Anderson says.
It seems like the whole Epstein thing was an elaborate professional blackmail operation intended to ensnare the rich and powerful. But who was really behind it, who was really bankrolling Epstein?
We really need to get to the bottom of this for all the right dominos fall.
The average villa is now trading for less than it did following the last global financial crisis
Newly constructed villas in Dubai. Chris Jackson / Getty Images
(Mansion Global) Dubai house prices plummeted to their lowest levels in over a decade last quarter, according to new data from U.A.E.-based property firm Cavendish Maxwell.
The average single-family home price sunk 24% over the past year to AED1.82 million (US$495,500), a level not seen in over 11 years despite a global recession and regional economic meltdowns over the past decade, according to data on website Property Monitor.
The average house, referred to locally as a villa, is now trading for less than it did during the darkest days of the global financial crisis and subsequent credit crunch, which hit Dubai the hardest in 2010-11. It’s also lower than at any point since oil prices crashed in 2015, according Property Monitor, which is powered by Cavendish Maxwell.
In June alone, the average home price—including both single-family houses and apartments—fell over 15% compared to a year ago, according to a report from Cavendish Maxwell on Thursday.
While the Dubai economy remains relatively robust, powered by nearly 8 million foreign expats who live and work in the city, nonstop building has created a glut of housing that’s prevented home values from appreciating in more than a decade.
Sprawling master-planned communities dotted with mansions have been hit the hardest.
“The annual decline in house prices was more pronounced in communities such as IMPZ, Arabian Ranches, Emirates Living, Discovery Garden and Dubai Silicon Oasis, where house prices declined by more than 16% on average,” said the firm in its report.
In the exclusive man-made island known as Palm Jumeirah, prices have slipped 14% over the past year. Even thriving Dubai Marina, which overlooks a port of luxury yachts, has seen average home prices slip 13.5% since June 2018, according to the report.
(Nathan Su) Newly discovered deep ties between the chief investment officer (CIO) of the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) and the Chinese government, along with CalPERS’s China investment holdings, have provoked controversy about the operations of the largest public retirement fund in the United States.
CalPERS manages more than $350 billion for public employees either retired from or currently working for most of the state and local public agencies in California.
The fund holds tens of millions of shares in equities of Chinese companies. Among other things, these companies develop advanced weapons for China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and, according to one expert, are involved in unethical business practices and human rights abuses, including the concentration camps holding Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
According to a 2017 report by People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), CalPERS’s current CIO, Yu “Ben” Meng, as of 2015 was a participant in the Chinese government’s prestigious headhunting program called the Thousand Talents Plan (TTP).
We are told China’s economy is hurting, the “trade wars” are working and bringing China to it’s knees. From where I sit nothing could be further from the truth.
Currently China holds well north of $1 TRILLION in U.S. Treasuries – debt – that you and I, the tax payers of this country, send interest payments to month after month for them to continue holding our debt. It’s like the mortgage on your house, student loan or car note you have but instead of you getting anything for the debt payment you get to know the warmongers are going to purchase more bombs, weapons of all kinds and create more destruction. China, on the other hand, takes the payment and is building out the Belt and Road Initiative around the world. So, while we are working like slaves to pay our taxes, China is using our labor (taxes) paid to them to build a better global economic and financial system that does not include you and I. Pretty cool, aye?
While this is happening on one side of China’s national ledger sheet, on the other side something completely different is happening.
China reentered the gold market seven months ago, in December 2018 and has added a little less than 74 tons to their official gold holdings of approximately 1,935+ tons of gold. Please keep in mind this does not count the known 80-100 tons per annum that is flowing in from Russia. While this is not a large volume of gold in the grand scheme, this has been going on since 2016 so we are now talking about upwards of 240 – 300 additional tons. This changes their “official” gold holdings from approximately 1,935 tons to somewhere north of 2,175+. It could be as high as 2,235 or more tons of gold.
With more and more central banks continuing to add to their gold hoards did China see the pipeline tightening? China made their exit from the market in October 2016, the same month the yuan / renminbi was added to the IMF basket of currencies accounting for the SDR global trade note. Then fourteen months later decided to jump back in and have been adding to their horde ever since.
Last year, central banks bought 651.5 tons, 74% up on the previous year, theWorld Gold Councilsaid in January. Official sector purchases could reach 700 tons this year, assuming the China trend continues and Russia at least matches 2018 volumes of about 275 tons,Citigroup Inc.said in April. Buying from central banks in the first five months of this year is 73% higher than a year earlier, with Turkey and Kazakhstan joining China and Russia as the four biggest buyers, according to data released on Monday by the WGC.Source
If 2018 saw national / central banks acquiring more than they have since 1968 and this they are outpacing last year by 73% will this be the biggest year for gold national / central bank acquisitions in history? If not history it would have to be much earlier than 1968 since that record has already been breached.
With the global economic changes that are occurring we have been calling for some type of gold trade settlement for a number of years. We believe that Russia and China are on the cusp on making this change. We have no proof this going to happen this year or next, but all the signs are pointing in that direction. We believe, especially if China continues acquiring more “official” gold on the open market, there will be a gold trade settlement note announced before 2025. Possibly much sooner if the warmongers in Washington DC continue with the war drums over Iran. If President Trump listens to the war-pigs in the Pentagon this will not fare well for the U.S. economy and gold will be much in demand at all levels – from retail to government and everything in between.
After years of farm income falling and the U.S./China trade war now taking its toll on the sector, Wall Street banks look as though they are giving up on lending to farmers, according toReuters.
Meanwhile, total U.S. farm debt is slated to rise to $427 billion this year, up from an inflation adjusted $317 billion just 10 years ago. The debt is reaching levels not seen since the 1980’s farm crisis.
Agricultural loan portfolios of the nation’s top 30 banks was lower by $3.9 billion, to $18.3 billion between their peak in December 2015 and March 2019. This is a 17.5% fall.
An analysis performed by Reuters identified the banks by their quarterly filings of loan performance with the FDIC and grouped banks that were owned by the same holding company.
The slide in farm lending is happening as cash flow worries surface for farmers. We’ve highlighted numerous instances of farmers under pressure due to the U.S./China trade war and poor conditions, likethis reportfrom early June andthis reporton farmer bankruptcies from May.
Sales of products like soybeans have fallen significantly since China and Mexico imposed tariffs in retaliation to U.S. duties on their goods. The trade war losses exacerbated an already strained sector, under pressure from “years over global oversupply and low commodity prices.”
Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings for small farmers were up from 361 filings in 2014 to 498 in 2018.
Minneapolis-St. Paul area bankruptcy attorney Barbara May said:
“My phone is ringing constantly. It’s all farmers. Their banks are calling in the loans and cutting them off.”
At the same time, surveys are showing that demand for farm credit is growing. The demand is most pronounced among Midwest grain and soybean producers. Having fewer options to borrow could threaten the survival of many farms, especially when incomes have been cut in half since 2013.
Gordon Giese, a 66-year-old dairy and corn farmer in Mayville, Wisconsin, was forced to sell most of his cows, his farmhouse and about one-third of his land last year to pay off his debt obligations.
He said:
“If you have any signs of trouble, the banks don’t want to work with you. I don’t want to get out of farming, but we might be forced to.”
Michelle Bowman, a governor at the U.S. Federal Reserve called the decline in farm incomes a “troubling echos of the 1980’s farm crisis”.
Between the end of 2015 and March 31 of this year, JP Morgan pared back its farm loan holdings by 22%, or $245 million. Capital One’s farm-loan holdings at FDIC-insured units fell 33% between the end of 2015 and March 2019. U.S. Bancorp’s fell by 25%. Agricultural loans at BB&T Corp have fallen 29% since summer of 2016. PNC Financial Services Group Inc has cut its farm loans by 12% since 2015.
The four-quarter growth rate for farm loans at all FDIC-insured banks slowed from 6.4% in December 2015 to 3.9% in March 2019. But many smaller, regional banks depend on farms as the main key to their loan books.
In March, FDIC insured banks reported 1.53% of farm loans were 90 days past due, up from 0.74% at the end of 2015.
Curt Everson, president of the South Dakota Bankers Association said: “All you have are farmers and companies that work with, sell to or buy from farmers.”
The now-bankrupt PG&E has put together a contingency plan that would plunge millions of unsuspecting Californians into rolling blackouts reminiscent of the early 2000s (when the utility was last pushed into bankruptcy protection thanks to the market-manipulation hijinx of Enron and other electricity brokers), but as WSJ revealed in an explosive report published Wednesday – a report that was probably the result of months of battles between the paper’s lawyers and California’s Freedom of Information Commission – PG&E’s long history of deterring maintenance on its lines and towers, a practice that directly contributed to causing the deadliest forest fire in California history.
The utility knew for years that hundreds of miles of high-voltage lines running in high-risk fire areas were at risk of failing and sparking a fire. And instead of acting swiftly to make the necessary upgrades, it appears the company routinely failed to identify the infrastructure most in need of maintenance.
Last year, a 100-year old line failed and sparked the Camp Fire, which eventually caused the deaths of 85 people.Documents obtained by WSJ – mostly internal emails and reports – revealed that the utility knew that 49 of the steel towers that carry the electrical line that failed needed to be replaced entirely.
For years, PG&E, which operates one of the oldest long-distance electricity transmission systems in the world, much of it having been built in the early 1900s, was able to get away with neglecting its lines and towers. But that changed in 2013, when California entered a punishing and prolonged drought.
It dried out much of the state, exponentially amplifying the risk of wildfires. In a 2017 internal presentation, PG&E said it needed a plan to replace towers and better manage lines to prevent “structure failure resulting [in] conductor on ground causing fire.” But inscrutably, the company opted instead to focus its efforts (and billions in capital) on upgrading substations, and instead labeled many of its transmission lines as low-risk projects.
Now, let’s look at the Caribou-Palermo line, the line that failed and caused the Camp Fire. PG&E delayed work on that line for more than five years, despite acknowledging that it, and dozens of aluminum lines and towers, needed urgent work “due to age.”
Similarly, PG&E’s regulators did nothing to change the company’s plans because no regulator keeps a close eye on these projects. PG&E told federal regulators it planned to overhaul the Caribou-Palermo line in 2013, yet no improvements had been made when a piece of hardware holding a high-voltage line failed last November, sending sparks into nearby dry grass and sparking the fire.
What’s worse, the company appears poised to make these same mistakes again as wildfire season progresses. PG&E has delayed maintenance work on several lines in Northern California’s highest-threat fire areas, including at least one near the Plumas National Forest, according to documents obtained by WSJ.
The company hasn’t detailed the scope of the work needed for each line, but it has disclosed that some require upgrades similar to those needed on the Caribou-Palermo line. Across northern California, WSJ able to identify dozens of lines in high-risk fire areas that were as old or older than Caribou-Palermo, and need similar types of maintenance.
One researcher at the University of Pittsburgh offered a damning assessment of their business model: “We have known for a long time that we are dealing with aging and antiquated infrastructure,” he said. “In a lot of cases, the business model was to wait for a failure and then respond.”
Unfortunately, forcing the company to make these repairs can be difficult without intense public scrutiny, given that none of the agency’s regulators has authority over the utility’s projects and maintenance work.
Whether this WSJ report spurs the state to act remains to be seen.
TheUnited States’Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is allegedly considering requiring tech giants to report on crypto activity by users, according to apresentationreportedly from an IRS presentation and provided by a Twitter user on July 9.
According to the documentsshared, the IRS hopes to use Grand Jury subpoenas on firms such as Apple, Google and Microsoft to check taxpayers’ download history for crypto-related applications.
Known asCrypto Tax Girl,Laura Walter, certified public accountant and cryptotaxspecialist, tweeted thepresentation, which was allegedly for agents in the IRS’s Criminal Investigation division.
Citing the document, Walter concluded that the tax authority is conducting exhaustive research into detection ofcriminaltax evasion cases involving crypto. As such, the IRS is considering carrying out interviews, open-source and social media searches, as well as electronic surveillance, the expert noted.
Specifically, the 181-page document reads:
“Grand Jury Subpoena should be considered for Apple, Google, and Microsoft for the Subject’s complete application download history. Each application’s function should be explored to determine whether or not the application can transmit, or otherwise allow, transactions in bitcoin.”
As Walter emphasized, the presentation envisions that IRS agents ensure that taxpayers are not notified about the obtained information regarding their use of cryptocurrencies to prevent detrimental to the investigation.
Cointelegraph notes that the IRS has not confirmed the authenticity of the presentation’s origin.
According to the documents provided, the IRS is hoping to serve subpoenas to check data from accounts in banks and Paypal for connection with crypto transactions. Additionally, the tax authority is considering reviewing social media giants such asFacebookand Twitter to find and record publicly available cryptocurrency addresses.
“There is a ton of other information in there about crypto in general, tracing transactions via the blockchain, limitations of the blockchain, etc. but what you need to know is that the IRS is working HARD to identify criminal tax cases involving cryptocurrency.”
As previously reported, the IRS currently considers cryptocurrenciesproperty. In late 2018, an advisory committee of the IRSexpressedits intent to provide additional guidelines for the taxation of crypto transactions.
Recently, Cointelegraph reported onSingapore’splan to exempt cryptocurrencies that are intended to function as a medium of exchange from Goods and Services Tax (GST).
The international financial establishment is known to express concern about the risks of money laundering when the crypto space is mentioned. A string of scandals indicates, however, that traditional banks are not only susceptible to the phenomenon but sometimes complicit, whether knowingly or inadvertently. New chapters have been added to the saga over the last few months that are hurting banks, bankers and their clients.
Deutsche Bank Prepares to Lay Off 20,000 Employees
Deutsche Bank, one of the biggest names associated with money laundering accusations, has been dogged by many problems during the past year. The leading German financial institution is now preparing for a major reorganization that may include the sacking of up to 20,000 employees, if the plan is approved at the end of this week.
The changes come after a failed merger with Germany’s Commerzbank a couple of months ago, which was eventually deemed too risky by the teams of both banks. It did not materialize, despite the support of the federal government in Berlin.
Many of the layoffs are expected to affect Deutsche Bank’s investment banking offices in London and New York. According to a BBC report, the German bank has 8,000 employees in the British capital. And the 20,000 jobs that are likely to be cut represent a fifth of the institution’s global staff.
Besides persistent problems with its investment business and unsatisfactory financial results, the banking giant has been suffering from its involvement in money laundering scandals. In November, 2018 its headquarters and other offices in Frankfurt wereraidedby law enforcement officers and representatives of the German tax authority.
(by Luke Delorme) As an investment adviser, I can’t help but sometimes fall into the trap of industry lingo. Mea culpa.
This is my short list of things I hear way too often in the investment industry, and my honest translation into English.
What advisers say: “Your returns were good last year because we maintained exposure to equities.”
What it means: “The stock market went up and we didn’t do anything stupid.”
What advisers say: “Your portfolio has downside protection in the event that the market falls.”
What it means: “Your portfolio includes both stocks and bonds (and probably some other stuff). Usually, when stocks fall, bonds will go up to offset the losses.”
What advisers say: “We’re cautiously optimistic about the market.”
What it means: “We have no idea what’s going to happen, but things generally go up if you wait long enough.”
What advisers say: “Economic fundamentals are strong.”
What it means: “Unemployment is low. Other economic factors seem to be moving in the right direction. The economy is growing instead of contracting. We have no idea what that means in the short term for the stock market, but a growing economy should help companies that issue stocks and bonds, which is good for investors over long periods of time.”
What advisers say: “The equity premium is still positive.”
What it means: “Stocks have historically gone up more than bonds. We expect that to happen in the future,although nothing is guaranteed over the short-term.”
What advisers say: “The 5-year return of this hypothetical portfolio was 7% per year.”
What it means: “The 5-year return of this hypothetical portfolio was 7% per year, which means practically nothing without context. The return over the next five years could be almost anything.”
What advisers say: “We see an opportunity in … emerging markets equities, small cap value, high yield bonds, gold, and so on.”
What it means: “Since no one knows what will do well next, it’s probably smart to hold a little bit of everything. That way, when something goes up, we can point to it and everyone will be happy.”
What advisers say: “We believe it is important to maintain broad diversification.”
What it means: “Again, since no one knows what will happen next, we want to be positioned to capture returns wherever they happen to show up. Also, holding a broad array of assets reduces exposure to any single asset that might tank.”
What advisers say: “Portfolio A has higher expected returns than Portfolio B.”
What it means: “Portfolio A is riskier than Portfolio B, and probably more concentrated in stocks. This may or may not be a good idea based on your financial needs, expectations, and circumstances.”
What advisers say: “These funds are actively managed.”
What it means: “Someone is getting paid really well to guess what companies to buy in that fund. There is no evidence that they can consistently succeed, but they get paid either way.”
What advisers say: “We are forecasting that X, Y, and Z will happen and the result will be A, B, and C.”
What it means: “There are an infinite number of possible outcomes in the world. Good luck guessing what will happen next. Even if you can guess it, financial markets will react unpredictably. We’re going to tell you that we’re forecasting something because it sounds good to tell a confident story instead of being honest.”
What advisers say: “We charge a very reasonable 1.5 percent wrapper on assets under management.”
What it means: “Thanks for putting my kids through college.”
“The Deutsche Bank As You Knew It Is No More”: DB Exits Equities In $8.4 Billion Overhaul, To Fire Thousands
Europe’s 2nd largest banking behemoth that only a decade ago dominated equity, fixed income, sales, trading, and investment banking across the globe is no more.
Negative interest rates are little understood in the U.S., and this may lead to very expensive mistakes by many investors.
The move to negative interest rates can be extremely profitable – but investors have to be prepared before it happens or the opportunities will be gone.
Detailed analysis of how the Fed using trillions in quantitative easing to force negative interest rates can directly create hundreds of billions of dollars in profits for sophisticated insiders.
When we “follow the money”, quantitative easing in a new recession would use monetary creation to force artificially high prices and vastly overpay knowledgeable investors.
(Daniel Amerman) “Following the money” can be a good way of unraveling complexity. Sometimes what the technical jargon is covering up can be as simple as Insider A handing money over to Insider B in massive quantities – and when we understand that, our whole perspective can change.
In this analysis, we will explore how a potential future of negative interest rates in combination with quantitative easing could become one of the largest re-distributions of wealth in U.S. history, with hundreds of billions of dollars in profits going disproportionately to insiders – at the expense of the general public. As illustrated with a step by step example when we follow the money – $279 billion out of every $1 trillion in newly created money could end up going straight into the hands of organizations and individuals who make up a relatively small percentage of the nation.
If there is another recession, then the Federal Reserve intends to engage in what could become the largest round of monetary creation in U.S. history. Those dollars will be quite real, and the reason for their creation is to spend them. A big chunk of that spending will become profits going straight into the pockets of investors. This won’t actually be a closed game – anyone can try for a share of those new Federal Reserve dollars, but first, they have to understand that the game exists, and then they need to learn how it is played.
When people talk about the economy, they generally focus on government policies such as taxation and regulation. For instance, Republicans credit President Trump’s tax cuts for the seemingly booming economy and surging stock markets. Meanwhile, Democrats blame “deregulation” for the 2008 financial crisis. While government policies do have an impact on the direction of the economy, this analysis completely ignores the biggest player on the stage – the Federal Reserve.
Not surprisingly, apartment rents in the US are the highest in land-use restricted coastal cities like San Francisco, New York city, San Jose CA, Boston and Washington DC. Other west coast cities and Miami round out the remaining top ten most expensive apartment rents.
According to Zumper, North Carolina (Raleigh and Charlotte) and Arizona (Glendale and Scottsdale) along with Fort Worth TX saw the biggest increases in apartment rents.
–Raleigh, NCsaw one bedroom rent climb 5.1%, which was the largest monthly rental growth rate in the nation, to $1,040. This large bump moved the city up 2 positions to become 49th most expensive rental market.
–Charlotte, NCtook a 5 ranking bump up to 26th with one bedroom rent climbing 5% to $1,260 and two bedrooms increasing 2.2% to $1,370.
–Glendale, AZjumped up 7 spots to rank as the 67th most expensive city. One bedroom rent grew 5% to $840, while two bedrooms were up 1.9% to $1,070.
–Scottsdale, AZsaw one bedroom rent climb 4.5%, settling at $1,380, and up 3 positions to become the 21st priciest city.
–Fort Worth, TXmoved up 3 spots to rank as 40th with one bedroom rent jumping 4.5% to $1,150 and two bedrooms increasing 2.3% to $1,340.
–Chicago, ILfell 2 spots to rank as the 17th priciest city with one bedroom rent dropping 5.1%, which is tied with Bakersfield’s growth rate as the largest dip in the nation, to $1,490.
–Bakersfield, CAsaw one bedroom rent drop 5.1%, settling at $740, and down 7 positions to become 86th.
–Anchorage, AKmoved down 3 spots to 62nd with one bedroom rent falling 4.2% to $910. Two bedrooms, on the other hand, were flat at $1,150.
–Atlanta, GAtook a 4 ranking dip to 22nd with one bedroom rent decreasing 4.2% to $1,370 and two bedrooms down 3.3% to $1,740.
–Philadelphia, PAone bedroom rent dropped 3%, settling at $1,310, and down 2 spots to rank as the 24th priciest city. Two bedrooms stayed stable at $1,700.
Of the top 100 cities, LeBron James’s home town of Akron has the lowest apartment rents in the nation. Followed closely by other non-coastal cities like Wichita, Detroit, Lubbock TX and Tucson AZ.And if you are taken back to Tulsa, you will find relatively inexpensive apartment rents.
California is among the states with increases and taxes in the Golden State are going up by 5.6 cents. That now equates to 47.3 cents per gallon, meaning California once again has thehighest gasoline pricesin the country.
But, the increase is particularly notable in Illinois given,as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, that the state hasn’t altered its gas tax since 1990. It’s bumping its gas tax by 19 cents to 38 cents a gallon.
On June 28, Gov. J.B. Pritzkersigned into lawa $45 billion infrastructure plan that will bring Illinois drivers a record gas tax hike and higher vehicle registration costs.
Those tax and fee increases will come in addition totax hikeson cigarettes, e-cigarettes, parking and real-estate transfers, on top of new revenue from amassive gambling expansionthat includes new casinos and legalized sport betting – all of which the Illinois General Assembly introduced and passed in asingle day.
The gas tax hike is the most painful increase to come, doubling to 38 cents from 19 cents per gallon.
This will bump Illinois’ total gas tax burden to the third-highest in the nation, and possibly higher if local governments exercise their increased taxing authority under the plan. An Illinois Policy Instituteanalysisfound the typical Illinois driver will pay at least $100 more on gasoline each year under a doubled gas tax.
Illinois is one of justseven stateswhere drivers pay layers of both general sales taxes and special excise taxes on gasoline at the state and local levels. Those multiple layers mean drivers filling up in Chicago, for example, will pay 96 cents in taxes and fees on a $2.46 gallon of gasoline – an effective tax burden of39%.
The infrastructure plan also hikes Illinois’ vehicle registration fees to among thehighest in the nation. Illinois drivers of standard vehicles weighing 8,000 pounds or less will see registration fees jump to $148 from $98.
The gas tax hike kicks in July 1, and motorists will pay more for license plate stickers starting in 2020.
Taken together, increases in the gas tax and vehicle registration fees aloneeraseany promised income tax savings included in Pritzker’sprogressive income tax plan, which Illinoisans will vote on in November 2020.
Under Pritzker’s proposed progressive tax system, a married couple in Illinois with two kids earning the $79,168 median annual income and paying the average property tax bill of$4,157would see $195 in total tax relief, according to the Pritzker administration’s online “fair tax calculator.”
But if that same family uses two cars on a regular basis, their budget will take a $300 hit – a $200 gas tax increase and a $100 vehicle registration fee hike.
Notably, the gas tax will be tied to inflation, meaning it willautomatically riseannually. This allows state lawmakers in future years to avoid blame from frustrated motorists.
Based on current inflation projections, the gas tax will rise almost a penny a year. Lawmakers’ inflation mechanism could drive the gas tax to 43.5 cents by 2025, nearly 25 cents per gallon more than it is now.
Using the most recent inflationforecastsfor the United States, the gas tax will grow just short of a penny each year until 2025 – a 130% increase.
The new law lets Chicago raise its local gas tax by an extra 3 cents, which would put it at 8 cents. It allows Lake County and Will County to impose a gas tax of up to 8 cents per gallon. DuPage, Kane and McHenry counties would be able to double their4-cent-per-gallongas taxes to 8 cents.
According to state projections, the doubled gas tax alone will raise$1.2 billion, with $560 million going to the state and $650 million to local governments.
If Chicago and the collar counties increase their motor fuel taxes – along with automatic yearly inflation-tied increases at the state level – residents could soon be looking at the highest average gas tax burden in the country.
State lawmakers could have achieved a more responsible plan by focusing on maintenance infrastructure, reforming costly prevailing wage mandates and using an objective project selection process, while dedicating revenue from legalized sports betting and sales taxes on gasoline to transportation infrastructure.
Instead, state leaders once again chose to demand more of already-overburdened Illinois taxpayers.
It’s a bloodbath. No matter where you look, global manufacturing surveys are signaling growth is over and in most cases, outright contraction is upon us.
JPMorgan’s Global Manufacturing PMI fell to its lowest level for over six-and-a-half years and posted back-to-back sub-50.0 readings for the first time since the second half of 2012.
June data signalled a mild decrease in global manufacturing employment for the second month running (but every sub-index declined in June).
Of the 30 nations for which a June PMI reading was available, the majority (18) signalled contraction. China, Japan, Germany, the UK, Taiwan, South Korea, Italy and Russia were among those countries experiencing downturns. The US, India, Brazil and Australia were some of the larger industrial nations to register an expansion.
“The global manufacturing sector downshifted again at the end of the second quarter. The PMI surveys signalled that output stopped growing, as inflows of new business shrank at the fastest pace since September 2012. This impacted hiring and business optimism, with the latter at a series-record low. Conditions will need to stage a marked recovery if manufacturing is to revive later in the year.”
The National Low Income Housing Coalition has published its latest“Out of Reach”report which shows that renting is becoming increasingly unaffordable for countless Americans.
Its central statistic is the Housing Wage which is an estimate of the hourly wage a full-time worker must earn torent a homewithout spending more than 30 percent of his or her income on housing costs.As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, for 2019, the Housing Wage is $22.96 and $18.65 for a modest two and one-bedroom flat respectively based on the “fair market rent”.
A worker earning the federal wage would have to put in 127 hours every week – equivalent to more than two full-time jobs – to afford a two-bedroom apartment. It isn’t just a regional issue – there isn’t a single state, metro area or county in the U.S. where a full-time worker earning the minimum wage can afford to rent a two-bedroom property.
The report also states that the average renter’s hourly wage is $1.08 less than the Housing Wage for a one-bedroom rental and $5.39 less than a two-bedroom rental. That means that an average renter in the U.S. has to work a 52 hour week, something that becomes increasingly difficult if that renter is a single parent of someone struggling with a disability. When it comes to the situation in different occupations, a median-wage worker in eight of the country’s largest ten occupations does not earn enough to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
Software developers, general managers and nurses are able to meet both Housing Wages but for many other occupations and accomodations, renting is becoming increasingly difficult. Medical assistants, laborers and janitors are among those falling short while the gap back to minimum wage workers is even greater still. Worryingly, these are the ten jobs that are expected to see the biggest growth over the coming decade and that is likely to result in an even greater disparity between wages and housing costs by 2026.
Global hedge fund liquidations exceeded launches for the third straight quarter as a result of a tougher capital raising environment, according toBloomberg.
During the first quarter of this year, about 213 funds closed compared to 136 that opened. Liquidations remained steady from the quarter prior and launches were up about 23%.
But hedge fund startups remain under pressure due to poor performance and investors grappling with high fees. $17.8 billion was pulled from hedge funds during the first 3 months of the year, marking the fourth consecutive quarterly outflow. Additionally, the industry has seen a number of funds shut down or return capital, including Highbridge Capital Management and Duane Park Capital.
The average management fee for funds that launched in the first quarter was down 10 bps to 1.19%, while the average incentive fee increased to 18.79% from 17.9% in 2018.
Hedge funds on average were up 3% in the first quarter on an asset weighted basis, which lagged the S&P index by a stunning 10.7% with dividends reinvested over the same period.
In May we had noted that the broader S&P 500 had trounced the average hedge fund, returning 18% YTD, and charging precisely nothing for this out performance.
Also in late May, wedocumentedshocking losses from Horseman Global. The fund’s losses more than doubled in April, when the fund was down a was a staggering 12%, which brought its total loss YTD to more than 25%.
In early June, we wrote about Neil Woodford, the UK’s equivalent of David Tepper, blocking redemptions from his £3.7bn equity income fund after serial under performance led to an investor exodus, “inflicting a serious blow to the reputation of the UK’s highest-profile fund manager.”
A new report byOxford Economicssays accelerating technological advances in automation, engineering, energy storage, artificial intelligence, and machine learning have the potential to reshape the world in the 2020s through 2030. The collision of these forces could trigger economic disruption far greater than what was seen in the early 20th century.
Across the world, a new wave of investment in automation could displace 20 million manufacturing jobs by 2030. This coming period of change should be called the great transformation period where job losses due to automation will be on par to the automation of agriculture revolution ( the transition of farm workers into the industrial sector) from 1900 to 1940.
Robots have so far increased three-fold since the Dot Com bust. Momentum in trends suggests the global stock of robots will multiply even quicker through the 2020s, reaching as many as 20 million by 2030, with 14 million in China alone. The collision of automation in the economy will lead to more volatility and economic swings.
The adoption of new automation technologies can significantly boost income inequality and, by extension, wealth inequality. Many countries, including the US, are entering the 2020’s with extreme inequalities, and automation will likely accelerate that trend. Oxford Economics estimates that 20 million manufacturing jobs across the world will be displaced by robots by 2030.
By 2030, most of the automation disruption in major manufacturing countries will be centered in China, the EU, and the US:
China: over 11 million
European Union: almost 2 million
United States: nearly 1.7 million
South Korea: nearly 800,000
The rest of the world: 3 million
Oxford Economics developed the Robot Vulnerability Index – where specific regions across the US are at the highest risk of labor disruption thanks to automation.
The crosscurrents of these macroeconomic force could dramatically reshape economies around the world. Nevertheless, displacing blue-collar manufacturing jobs with robots will continue to drive income/wealth inequality to such extreme levels that governments will be forced to become more interventionist, using higher taxes, regulation, and policy to control economic imbalances.
Georgetown University Medical Center reveals brutal dynamic governing long-term care in America
The results of a six-year study by Georgetown University Medical Center revealed just how fast U.S. nursing home prices have been increasing all across America. And the future looks just as grim.
Dr. Sean Huang, the study’s lead author, said the brutal dynamic governing long-term care in America — where many nursing home residents must spend down the bulk of their life savings before qualifying for federal assistance — is intensifying. California, Florida, New York and Texas all saw increases that far outstripped the 11.6% rise in inflation between 2005 and 2010, the period reviewed by Georgetown’s analysis of eight states. Additional data show the upward trend has continued in the years since.
And it’s not just baby boomers who need to worry — Generation X, millennials and Generation Z might face an even darker old age. Rising wage pressure on a sector in need of workers is driving up costs, and unless Washington comes up with a fix, be it a version of Medicare-for-All or something less ambitious, the funding for some programs is projected to start running out in the next decade.
“We’re talking about long stays — people who have disabilities, dementia, Parkinson’s disease,” Mr. Huang explained about the growing nursing home population. “Medicare does not cover that. They will pay out-of-pocket until they use all of their wealth.”
Many Americans have no idea how Medicare works, including those approaching retirement. A sort-of government health insurance policy largely for older Americans, eligibility generally begins at age 65, covering some of the costs of routine and emergency medical care. What it doesn’t cover is most aspects of long-term “custodial” care — as in nursing homes, where a large portion of Americans can expect to spend the last years of their lives.
That’s where Medicaid — state-administered coverage for Americans whose assets fall below a certain level — comes in. For those who qualify for nursing home admission, Medicaid generally requires they exhaust most of their assets first before qualifying for coverage. Without expensive long-term care insurance, which most people don’t have, an increasing number of older Americans are falling into this financial trap, Mr. Huang said.
And their nest eggs are being depleted more quickly than ever. Mr. Huang’s study found nursing home price rises over the period measured generally outpaced increases in overall medical care (20.2%) and consumer prices (11.7%). For example, in California between 2002 and 2011, the median out-of-pocket cost for nursing home care increased by 56.7%.
Mr. Huang and three co-authors began looking into the matter in 2013. With no central database, they had to collect information from each state and individual nursing homes. Some states only had data through 2010, he said. In the end, they managed to crunch data from an average of 3,900 nursing homes for each of the years measured, representing approximately 27% of freestanding U.S. facilities.
Nursing homes in New York during the period reviewed had the highest average daily price of $302, while Texas had the lowest average daily price of $121. Additional information has shown that nursing home costs have continued to increase at a much higher rate than inflation, albeit slightly slower than the study period.
In 2010, the average price per day for nursing home care in California was $217, up more than 30% (with Florida close behind) from 2005. In a more recent analysis, Mr. Huang calculated that, from 2010 to 2015, nursing home prices in California rose more slowly, by roughly 19.6% to $258 per day. However, inflation from 2010 to 2015 only increased by 8.7%, he noted. Mr. Huang said his research doesn’t point to any improvement going forward.
“I don’t see there’s any major changes that suggest the trend will be different,” Mr. Huang said.
Indeed, the median daily price for a private room in a California nursing home just last year was $323, while the national median was $275 per day, according to life insurance company Genworth. Looking at the issue from an annual perspective, the median cost in the U.S. for a private room in a nursing home was $100,375. Oklahoma provided the cheapest annual median cost at $63,510, while Alaska was the most expensive at $330,873, Genworth data showed.
Nursing homes have long been a financial drain on most who need them, constituting one of the greatest risks retirees face when it comes to managing retirement funds, a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showed. Unfortunately, the annual costs for nursing home care will continue to grow at a rate much faster than inflation, according to Urban Institute Senior Fellow Richard W. Johnson.
“It’s that labor market pressure,” Mr. Johnson said. More elderly Americans mean more demand for nursing home care, and more demand for nursing home employees. Wages go up, and the cost is passed along to consumers who, under the current system by which America looks after its elderly, coverage is limited.
In an industry that requires significant hands-on attention, technology can’t eliminate many jobs, Mr. Johnson said. And just when the labor market for nursing homes is already tight, uncertainty over U.S. immigration policies may further reduce available workers, he said. In 2017, immigrants made up 23.5% of formal and non-formal long-term care sector workers, according to Health Affairs.
“It’s unlikely that you’re going to see any improvement in these trends, and if anything, things will probably get worse because nursing homes are probably going to face something of a worker shortage,” Mr. Johnson said. Home health aides and personal care aides are ranked as the third and fourth fastest growing occupations and are expected to increase 47% and 39% respectively from 2016 to 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The baby boom generation is so large,” Mr. Johnson said. “They’re approaching their 80s, and that means that many more of them are going to need nursing home care or other types of long term care.”
“If there would be a higher reimbursement rate, either by Medicaid or Medicare, nursing home quality would be likely to improve.”
Another trend emerging in the industry that may be driving up costs is Wall Street. Four out of the 10 largest for-profit nursing home chains were purchased by private equity firms from 2003-2008, according to a case study analyzing private equity takeover.
Research on the impact of private equity has shown mixed results, though one study showed how a nursing home chain that was taken over by a private equity firm showed a general reinforcement of profit-seeking strategies that were already in place, while adding some strategies aimed at improving efficiency. Other reports have detailed darker results.
During the Obama administration, the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act (CLASS Act) was signed into law to help ease the burden as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but it was later rescinded by Congress over concerns voluntary enrollment wasn’t viable — premiums would be too high and the system would eventually collapse, Mr. Johnson said. This left the ACA with little to no assistance for long-term care costs.
Some states have started taking matters into their own hands. Washington State passed a bill in April that would implement a 0.58% payroll tax that would give residents up to $36,500 to pay for long-term care services. Payroll tax will begin collecting in 2022, while residents can start withdrawing in 2025. But that’s just one state, and the problem, Huang and Johnson note, is national in scope.
“If there would be a higher reimbursement rate, either by Medicaid or Medicare, nursing home quality would be likely to improve,” Mr. Huang said. “But I don’t see that happening in the near future.
RBOB Gasoline futures jumped overnight, accelerating their recent ascent ever since the explosion and massive inferon at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) plant, following a Reuters report that the largest east coast refinery is expected to seek to permanently shut its oil refinery in the city after a massive fire caused substantial damage to the complex.
Shutting therefinery, the largest and oldest on the U.S. East Coast, would result in not only hundreds of lost jobs but also sharply higher gasoline prices as gasoline supplies are squeezed in the busiest, most densely populated corridor of the United States.
PES is expected to file a notice of intent with state and federal regulators as early as Wednesday, setting in motion the process of closing the refinery, the sources said.
The refinery, which could still change its plans, is also expected to begin layoffs of the 700 union workers at the plant as early as Wednesday, Reuters reported. The layoffs could include about half of the union workforce, with the remaining staff staying at the site until the investigation into the blast concludes.
Asreported previously, the 335,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) complex, located in a densely populated area in the southern part of the city, erupted in flames in the early hours on Friday, in a series of explosions that could be heard miles away and which some compared to a meteor strike or a nuclear bomb going off.
The cause of the fire was still unknown as of Tuesday, though city fire officials said it started in a butane vat around 4 a.m. (0800 GMT). It destroyed a 30,000-bpd alkylation unit that uses hydrofluoric acid to process refined products. Had the acid caught fire, it could have resulted in a vapor cloud that can damage the skin, eyes and lungs of nearby residents.
Prior to the massive inferno, the refinery had suffered from years of financial struggles, forcing it to slash worker benefits and scale back capital projects to save cash. It went through a bankruptcy process last year to reduce its debt, but its difficulties continued as its cash on hand dwindled even after emerging from bankruptcy in August; some have speculated that cost cutting resulted in the structure becoming fragile and susceptible to accident.
After bankruptcy, Credit Suisse Asset Management and Bardin Hill became the controlling owners, with former primary owners Carlyle Group and Sunoco Logistics, an Energy Transfer subsidiary, holding a minority stake.
Last Friday’s blaze was the second in two weeks at the complex, spurring calls from Philadelphia’s mayor for a task force to look into both the cause and community outreach in the wake of the incidents. A spokesperson for Mayor Jim Kenney declined to comment on the potential closure of the plant.
That may be difficult as investigators on the scene are said to be dealing with unstable structures that need to be certified by engineers, slowing down the inquiry, city officials said. The investigation could ultimately take months or perhaps years. Additionally, the state Department of Environmental Protection said they have concerns about the integrity of storage tanks on site, the agency said on Tuesday. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board is also investigating the incident, according to Reuters.
While none of this will make much news outside of Philly, what will impact all East Coast drivers is that gasoline futures rose as much as 5.4% on Wednesday to $1.9787 a gallon, the highest since May 23. The front month price was at $1.945 early on Wednesday.
Futures are up 8.9% since Thursday’s close.
NY Gasoline prices have surged back into a premium over US Gulf Gasoline…
All of which will drag, as always with a lag, the price of gas at the pump notably higher…
The rally in U.S. gasoline futures has pushed U.S. gasoline prices above European and Asian markets, raising the prospects for US imports. According to Matthew Chew, oil analyst at IHS Markit, “chances are that (the wider price spread) could open up the arbs between U.S. Gulf/Europe and [the East Coast] PADD 1.”
Having tested $1300 numerous times over the past few years, gold has broken dramatically higher in the last month, hitting 6-year highs as President Trump rhetoric around the world raises tensions, increasing the odds of open WWIII conflict.
The surge in the precious metal has accompanied a collapse in bond yields around the world and a record level of negative-yielding debt…
And while Gold volatility is soaring…
Demand remains abundant, as Goldman details in its latest note, raising its outlook for gold, countries with “geopolitical tensions with the US” are buying everything:
Central bank demand is gaining momentum and we now expect 2019 purchases to reach 750 tonnes vs 650 tonnes last year. Visible gold purchases YTD are running at 211 tonnes until April vs 117 tonnes over the same period last year (see Exhibit 11).
Importantly, China just raised its gold purchasing pace from 10 tonnes per month to 15 tonnes for April and May as it aims to diversify its reserve holdings.
With the Fed and ECB now both likely easing monetary policy, more CBs may decide to add gold to their portfolios as they did between 2008 and 2012 (see Exhibit 12).
Also, just recently, trade tensions between India and the US have begun to escalate as India retaliated with tariffs on US goods in response to US steel tariffs. Rising tensions with the US often create upside potential to a country’s gold purchases
Additionally, in case you thought the move was exhausted, Goldman notes that there is about to a pick up in demand as Russia purchases tend to be strongest in Q3…
And finally, Goldman notes that good economic news and bad economic news could both be positive for the precious metal at this point in the cycle.
If DM growth fails to pick up in the second half, gold has substantial upside potential
If DM growth continues to underperform, there is room for a much more substantial build in ETF positions. Last time we were in a similar environment was in 2016. DM growth back then was as weak as it is now and both the Fed and the ECB turned more dovish.
But back then the push into ETFs was significantly higher than it is currently… we think that current low growth makes owning gold appealing from a diversification perspective.
And Goldman notes that an improvement in global economic growth is not necessarily bearish for gold.
Our economists expect the bulk of the acceleration in GDP growth to come from ex-US and EM countries in particular. This should support gold through the “wealth” channel. Importantly, a reduced US growth outperformance points to a weakening of the dollar, which should boost the dollar purchasing power of the world ex-US (see Exhibit 7). In addition to this, gold is starting to build momentum in the local currencies of its two biggest consumers, India and China.
And the momentum gold prices built in the first half of 2019 can lead to an increase in EM (emerging markets) retail gold demand in the second half.
Goldman concludes, we believe that gold continues to offer significant diversification value with substantial upside if DM (developed markets) growth continues to underperform… or, as we noted above, global tensions continue to rise.
As we noted previously,combined Russia and China Treasury holdings are at their lowest since June 2010 as China and Russia’s gold holdings have soared…
It’s been a pretty good couple of months for precious metals, but more so for gold than silver. Both are up but gold is up more, and the imbalance that this creates might be one of the major investment themes of the next few years.
The gold/silver ratio – that is, how many ounces of silver it takes to buy an ounce of gold – has bounced all over the place since the 1960s. But whenever it’s gotten extremely high – say above 80 – silver outperformed gold, sometimes dramatically.
As this is written, the ratio stands at almost 93x, which is not far from its record high. With precious metals finally breaking out of a five-year siesta – and theworld getting dramatically scarier– it’s not a surprise that safe haven assets are catching a bid. And it would also not be a surprise if the current move has legs, as central banks resume their easing and geopolitical tensions persist.
Combine a chaotic, easy-money world with silver’s relative cheapness and the result is a nice set-up, for both the metal and the stocks of the companies that mine it. Here’s the one-month chart for First Majestic Silver (AG), a large primary silver producer. It’s up about 40%, even while silver underperforms gold. Let the metal start to outperform in the context of an overall precious metals bull run, and stocks like this will go parabolic.
… China’s banking stress has taken a turn for the worse, and on Monday, China’s overnight repurchase rate dropped to its lowest level in nearly 10 years, after the central bank’s repeated liquidity injections to ease credit concerns in small-to-medium banks: The rate fell as much as 11 basis points to 0.9861% on Monday, before being fixed at exactly 1.000%.
Seeking to ease funding strains after the Baoshang collapse and to unfreeze the financial channels in the banking sector, the PBOC has been injecting cash into the financial system to soothe credit risk concerns in smaller banks following the seizure of Baoshang Bank, which sent shockwaves through China’s markets.
Also helping drive the rate lower is China’s move to allow brokerages to issue more debt, said ANZ Bank’s Zhaopeng Xing, quoted by Bloomberg. As a result, at least five brokerages had their short-term debt quotas increased by the People’s Bank of China in recent days, according to filings.
The improved access to shorter-term debt will cut costs for brokerages compared with alternative funding sources such as bond issuance. The flipside, of course, is that the lower overnight funding rates drop, the greater the investor skepticism that China’s massive, $40 trillion financial system is doing ok, especially since the last time overnight funding rates were this low, the near-collapse of the global financial system was still fresh and the S&P was trading in the triple-digits.
Commenting on the ongoing collapse in SHIBOR, Commodore Research wrote overnight that “low SHIBOR lending rates are supposed to be supportive and accommodative in nature — but rates are now at the lowest level seen this decade and are very likely an indication that China is facing significant banking stress at the moment. It is extremely rare for the overnight SHIBOR lending rate to be set as low as 1.00%. This previously had not all been seen this decade, and the last time it occurred was during the financial crisis in 2008 – 2009.”
Meanwhile, as the world’s biggest financial time bomb ticks ever louder, traders and analysts are blissfully oblivious, focusing instead on central banks admitting that the recession is imminent and trying to spin how a world war with Iran would be bullish for stocks.
The US stock market is retesting its all-time highs at record valuations yet again. We strongly believe it is poised to fail. The problem for bullish late-cycle momentum investors trying to play a breakout to new highs here is the oncoming freight train of deteriorating macro-economic conditions.
US corporate profit growth, year-over-year, for the S&P 500 already fully evaporated in the first quarter of 2019 and is heading toward outright decline for the full year based on earnings estimate revision trends. Note the alligator jaws divergence in the chart below between the S&P 500 and its underlying expected earnings for 2019. Expected earnings for 2019 already trended down sharply in the first quarter and have started trending down again after the May trade war escalation.
The “deflationary ice age” predicted by SocGen’s Albert Edwards some 25 years ago is upon us.
The one-two punch of a dovish Draghi and Powell unleashing the “deflationary spirits” has resulted not only in the S&P hitting a new all time high, but in an unprecedneted flight to safety as investors freak out that a recession may be imminent (judging by the forceful jawboning by central bankers hinting of imminent easing), pushing gold above $1,400 – its highest price since 2013 – and global yields to new all time lows.
As a result, the total notional amount of global debt trading with negative yields soared by $700 billion in just one day, and a whopping $1.2 trillion this week, the biggest weekly increase in at least three years.
This has pushed the amount of negative yielding debt to a new all time high of $13 trillion.
Europe in particular is, for lack of a better word, a disaster.
We won’t paraphrase everything else we said in the context of thisvery troubling observation (see our latest post from yesterday discussing the surge in (-) yielding debt), we’ll just repeat the big picture summary: such a collapse in yields is not bullish, or indicative of a new golden age for the global economy. Quite the contrary – it signifies that debt investors are more confident than ever that the global growth rate is collapsing and only central bank intervention may possibly delay (not prevent) the world sliding into recession. Worse, rates are set to only drop, because as Rabobank’s Michael Every wrote yesterday “if the Fed do cut ahead then yields fall, more so at the shorter end; but if they don’t cut then yields still fall, but more so at the longer end (now around 2.02%).”
His conclusion: “Either way US (and global) yields are going to fall – which tells its own sad story.“
After April’s disappointing drop in all segments of the home-sales data, existing home sales were expected to rebound (again) in May and surprised modestly to the upside.
Existing home sales rose 2.5% MoM to 5.34mm in May (and saw a modest upward revision in April)
However, existing home sales have declined on a YoY basis for 15 straight months…
Home purchases advanced across all four regions, led by a 4.7% rise in the Northeast.
First time buyers accounted for 32% of sales nationally, unchanged from the prior month.
Finally, we note that the recent drop in existing home sales suggests a lagged response in mortgage purchase applications… even with rates collapsing…
As lower rates have apparently sparked a surge in prices as median home prices to a new record $277,700 – with a 4.8% YoY surge – the biggest spike since Aug 2018.
“The purchasing power to buy a home has been bolstered by falling mortgage rates, and buyers are responding,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement.
As Bloomberg notes, recent housing data have offered a mixed picture on the market, with housing starts falling from an April reading that was stronger than initially reported. Homebuilder sentiment deteriorated in June for the first time this year while permits gained, signaling a more robust pipeline of properties.
As the California state legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom dislocate their shoulders in the hearty backslapping of their self-congratulatory moment in American history, the rest of the nation is snarling and spitting over the lunacy of the left coast Democrats. That is, according to the new Rasmussen Reports poll, which asked if illegalimmigrantsshould receive free health care.
The answer was a resounding no. No way, no how, nuh-uh, nada.
It was a brief two-question survey that spoke volumes: “Do you favor or oppose making health care benefits available to young low-income illegal immigrants in your state? Is it offensive to refer to someone who has entered this country illegally as ‘an illegal immigrant?’”
Out of 1,000 online and telephone respondents, “31% of Likely U.S. Voters favor making health care benefits available to low-income illegal immigrants under the age of 26 in their state. Fifty-five percent (55%) are opposed, while 13% are not sure.” One can only imagine the responses to question number two.
The only surprising statistic is that 13% had not yet picked a side in what might be thewatershed issuefor 2020 presidential candidates.
Force Fed Mandates Gag Americans
Last week, Newsom’s quest for universal healthcare – including illegal residents – was passed by the legislature as part of a $215 billion budget. He was self-assured and puffing in his peacock fashion, declaring, “We’re going to get it. We’re committed to universal health care. Universal health care means everybody…We will lead a massive expansion of health care, and that’s a major deviation from the past.’’
Laurel Lucia, health care program director at the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center, gushed excitement at expanding Medi-Cal to illegal immigrants while forcing taxpayers to foot the bill through individual-mandate penalties. “The bigger reason to do this is about values,” says the woman who seems not to care about legal citizens in need of health care benefits.
And to boil it down in dollars, for those Californians who do not buy insurance, they will now be hit with a penalty of $695 or 2% of their household income, whichever figure is higher.
But Lucia went a tad over the top with “What kind of state do we want to live in?”
Funny you should ask. Many Californians – and other Americans, for that matter – are aghast that 130,000 plus people in the Golden State are homeless, living in undeniable squalor, and not only contracting highly contagiousmedieval diseasesbut spreading them to others. Perhaps the state should round up the unwashed American masses, clean them up, and give them free healthcare so the rest of the nation can avoid the Black Death.
Newsom’s Noose
Gov. Newsom campaigned in part on universal healthcare, and it’s no secret he has his sights on a national run in the future – perhaps president in 2024 depending on whether President Trump trumps the progressive left in the 2020 winner take all contest. But protecting illegal aliens before addressing the most significant crisis his state faces – homelessness – is not going to help him avoid the political gallows.
The state’s current crisis of reality — highest poverty rate in the country, noaffordable housing, taxpayers fleeing to points east, and viciousidentity politicsranking California much further left of the nation as a whole — are becoming serious millstones for this progressive governor.
Add to the list of Newsom’s liabilities, the boilerplate individual health plan in California starts with premiums of more than $5,000 a year and annual deductibles can skyrocket to several thousand dollars each year. Which means folks are going to have to decide to pay thousands for private health plans or be taxed in penalty thousands to pay for illegal aliens.
Perhaps the good governor should take stock of what Americans think about his plan to give aid to illegals as his fellow countrymen suffer on his once gold-paved streets. He may find his holier-than-thou ideology could soon blow up on him — and signing this budget might be the match he strikes and regrets.
The American Association of Private Lenders says the number of hard money lenders is approximately 8,300, up 40% since 2016,reported Bloomberg.
A hard money loan is an asset-based loan financing through which a borrower receives capital secured by the property. The volume of these loans to house flippers last year rose to $20 billion. That’s up 37% from 2016 and about double the figure from 2014. ATTOM Data Solutions believes hard money is a significant source of lending for house flippers.
“There’s a lot of activity. Every time I turn around there’s new entrants,” said Glen Weinberg of Fairview Commercial Lending in Evergreen, Colorado.
While Weinberg usually loans up to 60% of a property’s value, some newer lenders will go up to 90%, he said.
Blackstone Group LP and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. recently dove into the hard money lending space, drawn by interest rates of 8% to 12%.
About ten years from the real estate trough in 2009, the outlook is starting to seem worrisome for flippers and their hard money financiers.
ATTOM Data Solutionspublisheda new report earlier this month called Q1 2019 US Home Flipping Report, which shows house-flipping volume rebounded across the country earlier this year as gross profits and return on investment fell.
In Atlanta, house flippers want to put up smaller down payments than ever before, said Michael Braswell, a broker who works with hard money lenders.
“I would say, probably more than half the deals that come across my desk are not viable deals,” Braswell said.
Nationwide, 49,000 homes flipped in 1Q19, represented 7.2% of all home sales last quarter, up from 5.9% MoM and up 6.7% YoY, the highest home flipping rate since 1Q10. While this could be interpreted as a sign of continued progress, it also may suggest that investors are unloading their homes while they still can, Attom’s Todd Teta told Bloomberg this month.
The West Coast has seen some of the most significant house flipping declines in the country.
Bloomberg said hard money lenders aren’t forecasting a downturn in the real estate market just yet, but as we have mentioned before, many have overlooked the economy cycling down into 2H19.
As Zerohedge readers would know, any disruption in hard money lending and or a downturn in the house flipping market would be a ‘canary in the coal mine’ that could suggest the overall housing market will continue to deteriorate into 2020.
Despite the hype of soaring mortgage applications (refis, not purchases) and homebuilder stocks, housing starts tumbled 0.9% MoM in May (drastically missing expectations for a 0.3% rise), and while permits rose a better than expected 0.3% MoM, it remains very flat for the last six months.
Multi-family permits fell in May (to 820k) as single-family rose modestly (to 449k)…
The better than expected print for overall starts (at 1.294mm), was thanks to a massive spike in rental units…
Breakdown
Housing Starts 1-Unit: -6.4%, from 876K, to 820K
Housing Starts Multi Unit: +13.8%, from 383K to 436K
Not exactly a picture of health for the future of millennial homeownership as rental nation remains front and center, despite plunging mortgage rates.
At least 1-unit starts got one surge from declining mortgage rates in January 2019.
What the gold buying strategies of major countries have in common is a desire to escape from dollar hegemony and the imposition of dollar-based sanctions.
The practical implication for gold investors is a firm floor under gold prices since these players can be relied upon to buy any dips. Downside is limited.
The technical charts are starting to sing the same tune with lyrics such as “Reverse Head & Shoulders”, “Cup & Handle” and “Bullish Ascending Triangle”.
All of this leaves us currently at critical overhead resistance levels, which if broken will likely take gold denominated in US dollar towards previous highs.
The reaction to the “Weaponization” of the US dollar via US sanctions has accelerated the ongoing global de-dollarization efforts. We outlined the rapidly unfolding developments earlier this year in our 151 page Annual Thesis paper entitled, De-Dollarization. Documented de-dollarization efforts are now underway in China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, India, Turkey, Syria, Qatar, Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, Philippines and more.
Situational Analysis
The real power of the dollar is its relationship with sanctions programs. Legislation such as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, The Trading With the Enemy Act and The Patriot Act have allowed Washington to weaponize payment flows. The proposed Defending Elections From Threats by Establishing Redlines Act and Defending American Security From Kremlin Aggression Act would extend that armory.
When combined with access it gained to data from Swift, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication’s global messaging system, the U.S. exerts unprecedented control over global economic activity. Sanctions target persons, entities, organizations, a regime or an entire country. Secondary curbs restrict foreign corporations, financial institutions and individuals from doing business with sanctioned entities. Any dollar payment flowing through a U.S. bank or the American payments system provides the necessary nexus for the U.S. to prosecute the offender or act against its American assets. This gives the nation extraterritorial reach over non-Americans trading with or financing a sanctioned party. The mere threat of prosecution can destabilize finances, trade and currency markets, effectively disrupting the activities of non-Americans.
The countries cited above are aggressively reacting to this. Gold is non-digital and does not move through electronic payments systems, so it is impossible for the U.S. to freeze on interdict.
Central banks are stocking up on gold. According to the World Gold Council, net buying by central banks reached 145.5 tons in the first quarter of 2019. That’s a 68% increase over last year. And it’s the most gold central banks have bought in the first quarter since 2013.
High Probability Market Ramifications
Soon both the buying of gold by major players such as Russia, China, India, Iran and Turkey, along with an emerging gold backed cryptocurrency for international settlements, will take gold towards testing prior 2011 highs.
Major investors such as Paul Tudor Jones recently wenton recordas saying:
“The best trade is going to be gold. If I have to pick my favorite for the next 12-24 months it probably would be gold. I think gold goes beyond $1,400… it goes to $1,700 rather quickly. It has everything going for it in a world where rates are conceivably going to zero in the United States.”
“Remember we’ve had 75 years of expanding globalization and trade, and we built the machine around the believe that’s the way the world’s going to be. Now all of a sudden it’s stopped, and we are reversing that. When you break something like that, the consequences won’t be seen at first, it might be seen one year, two years, three years later. That would make one think that it’s possible that we go into a recession. That would make one think that rates in the US go back toward the zero bound and in the course of that situation, gold is going to scream. “
Of course, we have heard this sort of talk ever since gold hit its prior high in 2011.
Technical Support
However, this time the technical charts are starting to sing the same tune with lyrics such as “Reverse Head & Shoulders”, “Cup & Handle” and “Bullish Ascending Triangle”.
All of this leaves us currently at critical overhead resistance levels, which if broken will likely take gold denominated in US dollar towards previous highs.
What the gold buying strategies of Russia, China, India, Iran, Turkey et al. have in common is a desire to escape from dollar hegemony and the imposition of dollar-based sanctions by the U.S. The practical implication for gold investors is a firm floor under gold prices since these players can be relied upon to buy any dips.
Downside Is Limited – Upside Is Good
According to James Rickards:
“The primary factor that has been keeping a lid on gold prices is the strong dollar. The dollar itself has been propped up by the Fed’s policy of raising interest rates and reducing money supply, so-called “quantitative tightening” or QT. These tight money policies have amplified disinflationary trends and pushed the Fed further away from its 2% inflation goal.
However, the Fed reversed course on rate hikes last December and has announced it will end QT next September. These actions will make gold more attractive to dollar investors and lead to a dollar devaluation when measured in gold.
The price of gold in euros, yen and yuan could go even higher since the ECB, Bank of Japan and People’s Bank of China will still be trying to devalue against the dollar as part of the ongoing currency wars. The only way all major currencies can devalue at the same time is against gold, since they cannot simultaneously devalue against each other.
A situation in which there is a solid floor on the dollar price of gold and a need to devalue the dollar means only one thing – higher dollar prices for gold. A breakout to the upside is the next move for gold.“
(Bloomberg) — Buyers looking for the perfect luxury ranch, that billionaire’s take on American rural life, may have to hold out to get what they want.
Whether it’s sky-high in New York or in the Big Sky country of Montana, high-end properties seem to be hitting a soft patch: they’re harder to sell unless they come with an exclusivity where price matter less. But that means paying a premium for that perfect combination: from mountain views at sunset to proximity to well-stocked towns to wildlife or the cachet of neighbors.
While six of 38 ranches listed for sale at more than $10 million have been marked down in the past 90 days, there’s a limited supply of properties that cover the full range of features, according to Billings, Montana-based broker Hall and Hall.
“When you get all of those things working together, if you really want that, you have to pay up if it comes available,” said Hall and Hall managing director B Elfland, who goes by his first-name initial without a period.
That has some sellers betting that bigger is better. Morton Fleischer, chairman and co-founder of Store Capital Corp., is marketing his Arizona and Montana ranches together for $50 million. One selling point, he said by phone, is the millions poured into the area by GoDaddy Inc.’s billionaire founder Bob Parsons.
Private Jet, Horses
“If I was younger, I wouldn’t sell that ranch,” Fleischer, 82, said of his Scottsdale home. “It’s a good investment for someone.”
“I got out of the pressure cooker and could get on my horses,” he said. “Perhaps someone running a hedge fund who’s in their 40s and wants to live a lifestyle out west and has enough money to have a jet plane to get back and forth could do the same.’’
Nearly doubling the price to attract a buyer may seem counterintuitive. Take West Creek Ranch in Colorado, with no buyer since John Hendricks listed it for $149 million in 2017. Now the Discovery Channel founder is combining the offer with his guest resort and car museum down the road for $279 million, according to Sotheby’s International Realty.
Also on the market in Colorado for $46 million is Henry Kravis’s Westlands Ranch. Kravis has a net worth of $6.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index. Private-equity executive Charlie Gallagher is asking $36 million for his Elk Island Ranch.
Exclusive Market
That’s a far cry from what NFL and Premier League team owner Stan Kroenke paid in 2016 when he bought the W.T. Waggoner Estate Ranch in Texas listed for $725 million, which is bigger than New York city and Los Angeles combined. Kroenke has a net worth of $8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index.
In Montana, “In each 2016 and 2017, there were only four sales $10 million and above,’’ said Hall and Hall broker David Johnson. “The next year, there were eight. It wasn’t a double in demand. It was a double in supply.”
Hall and Hall sold 16 ranches for more than $10 million in 2018, compared to six so far in 2019. While that may suggest a slowdown, ranch sales can’t be compared to the frenzy of big cities.
“Our market doesn’t have the dramatic swings that New York and California residential markets have,” said Elfland.
Owning a rural slice of heaven runs deep in the psyche of even the biggest victors of capitalism. Shining examples of the American Dream are the country’s biggest individual landowners, John Malone, who has a net worth of $8.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index, and Ted Turner, founder of CNN.
Life Timing
Buying a ranch can be a matter of timing, of having a job on autopilot and kids out of the house who want to visit.
“The clock is running, so if they’re going to enjoy it, it’s an incentive to pay a premium,” said Johnson.
When the kids stop visiting, it can be sad.
“We sold one last year that had been on the market for 10 years,’’ he said. “The price had come down by two thirds to where the buyer would pick it up.’’
The recent surge in bitcoin, and the entire cryptocurrency space accelerated over the weekend, coinciding with the latest massive protest in Hong Kong which may be among the catalysts for the aggressive buying, and sending bitcoin above $9,000 for the first time since May 10, 2018, a price that is almost triple where bitcoin traded at the start of the year, making it the best performing major asset class of 2019, with a market cap of $163 billion.
And as the price of bitcoin surge, naturally so does its volatility, which has quadrupled from its near all-time lows hit at the start of April to 95 for the 30-day historical vol, in the process making it once again a favorite of traders desperate for highly-volatile assets.
It’s not just Bitcoin’s volatility that has returned: so have volumes as what appears to be the latest reflation of the bitcoin bubble is drawing in investors from around the globe, hoping to make a quick profit. Only this time there is one major difference as JPMorgan explains.
According to JPMorgan’s Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou writes, there has been a sharp increase in reported trading volumes of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies over the past few months, with Bitcoin trading volumes on crypto exchanges increasing to $445bn in April from a 1Q19 average of $220bn per month, and in May volumes increased further to around $725bn. This compares to previous peak volumes in Dec17 and Jan18 of $420bn. Curiously, for the three largest three cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple, the combined volumes for May stand at above $1tr compared to a previous peak in Jan18 of around $685bn, suggesting that all else equal, there is an even greater interest in the crypto space .
Meanwhile, this development comes at a time when the market value of outstanding bitcoins is around half of its Dec17 high, and the combined market value of all crypto currencies is around a third of its previous high. While a substantial part of the increase in volumes in dollar terms reflects an increase in the market value of bitcoin and other crypto currencies, the volumes in bitcoin terms are also significantly above their previous peaks.
But there is more here than meets the eye.
As JPM explains, taken at face value, this volume surge would suggest a dramatic increase in cryptocurrency activity. But over the past year or so, concerns have increasingly been expressed over how authentic the reported volumes really are. To wit:
… recently published work by Bitwise, a cryptocurrency asset manager, to the SEC as part of an application for a bitcoin ETF suggests that bitcoin trading volumes on many cryptocurrency exchanges are significantly overstated by ‘fake’ trading, e.g. exchanges reporting volume of trades that never took place or via wash trades, and that genuine trading volumes could be around 5% of the reported total. Similarly, the Blockchain Transparency Institute publish monthly market surveillance reports, and estimated in April 2019 that less than 1% of reported volume for some exchanges represented real trades.
If these estimates of the proportion of real trades are correct, i.e. “that only around 5% of trading is genuine,” that would imply that the genuine volumes of Bitcoin trading on cryptocurrency exchanges in May were around $36bn, rather than $725bn.
If this sharp revision in actual trading volumes is accurate, a critical implication, beyond the fact that the actual market size is markedly lower than reported numbers would suggest, is that as JPM notes, “the importance of the listed futures market has been significantly understated.” According to the Bitwise report, traded futures are credited as an important development in allowing short exposures that enabled arbitrageurs in properly engaging in arbitrage (and also resulted in a massive squeeze at the start of April that sent bitcoin breaking out again, and which we discussed previously), and that the futures share of spot bitcoin volumes increased sharply in April/May.
Indeed, when looking at aggregate volumes on both the CME and CBOE futures contracts (shown below), JPM estimates around $12bn of traded volume on these two futures exchanges in May. Indeed, the $12bn of bitcoin futures trading volume in May also represented a significant increase on the April’s $5.5bn and a 1Q19 monthly average of $1.8bn, suggesting that some rise in trading volume was genuine, even if the total volumes on cryptocurrency exchanges was likely vastly overstated.
The conclusion to this overstatement of trading volumes by cryptocurrency exchanges, and by implication theunderstatement of the importance of listed futures, suggests that in the two years since bitcoin’s last major spike in 2017 the “market structure has likely changed considerably… with a greater influence from institutional investors.”
This also means that whereas bitcoin’s historic surge to its all time high of $20,000 in December 2017 was largely retail driven, and thus extremely fickle as the subsequent crash showed, this time it is largely the result of institutional buying, which is far more stable and far less prone to sudden, painful shifts in sentiment and volatility.
In other words, “this time may be different” for bitcoin in a good way: because with institutions now piling into the crypto space, this is precisely the investor group that bitcoin bulls wanted from the beginning as it creates a far more stable price base for the future. Add to this the potential return of retail buying from east Asian (or even US) retail clients, and it is possible that what wepredicted in early April, namely that the 3rd bitcoin bubble is starting…
… may soon be confirmed, and that the next bitcoin bubble peak will be somewhere between $60,000 and $100,000.
That is according to a gauge of business conditions tracked by Morgan Stanley, which said in a recent note that its proprietary Business Conditions Index, or MSBCI, fell 32 points last month, marking its sharpest collapse since the metric was formulated. The gauge touched its lowest point since the 2007-08 financial crisis. A separate composite business-condition index also fell by the most since 2008 and hit its lowest level since February of 2016.
Morgan Stanley’s report comes as stocks in June have mostly drifted higher in turbulent trading, with the Nasdaq Composite IndexCOMP, -0.52%entering correction territory on June 3, but gaining 6.3% since that point as of Friday morning trade, according to FactSet data.
Swirling anxiety around the U.S.’s trade relationship with China and other major international counterparts has hurt the confidence of business leaders because the unresolved tariff battles have made it difficult for corporate chieftains to develop business strategies and forced many companies to alter their supply chains.
Morgan Stanley said that its index also reflects an apparent slowdown in domestic jobs growth. Economists for the report, led by Ellen Zentner, wrote that the fall in business conditions is “consistent with the slowdown in gross hirings reflected in the latest employment report for May, and raising the risk that weakness in labor demand persists into next month’s report.”
Indeed, theU.S. created just 75,000 new jobs in May, well off consensus forecast for some 185,000 jobs created on the month, and potentially marking a significant change of momentum in what has been a pillar of strength in the domestic economy.
Morgan Stanley said that taken with other metrics that drill down deeper into financial conditions, “these indicators point to business expansion coming to a near halt in June.”
In their second year of government service, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner reported income from their companies and investments of as much as $135 million, according to their annual financial disclosure reports made public on Friday.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner reported an income range of $29 million to $135 million for 2018, down from a range of $82 million to $222 million in 2017.CreditCreditToby Melville/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
All told, the couple’s real estate holdings and other investments were worth as much as $786 million,down slightly from 2017. Their total annual income was between $29 million and $135 million, a range that was lower than what they reported in 2017.
Mr. Kushner’s partial ownership of his family-run real estate business, Kushner Companies, has drawn criticism from ethics experts, particularly as the firm has solicited investments from foreign sources, includingin the Middle East, where Mr. Kushner is a top White House liaison.
Although Mr. Kushner held on to the bulk of his stake in the company, which he once ran, he sold some of his assets to a trust controlled by his mother.
One of those divested assets was his share in Kushner Companies’ flagship property at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Last year, Kushner Companiesstruck a dealwith Brookfield Asset Management for a roughly $1 billion bailout of the troubled property. Brookfield’s property arm is partly owned by the Qatari government.
Ms. Trump reported 2018 income totaling between $6.7 million and $10.7 million. She has resigned from her leadership roles at her fashion business and her family’s real estate and branding company since her father became president, but she retained stakes in some of those businesses.
Ms. Trump earned just under $4 million from the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which has become a magnet for visiting executives and foreign officials with interests before the federal government.
Ms. Trump reported another portion of an advance from Penguin Random House, for her book “Women Who Work,” this time totaling $263,500. She also reported donating it to the Ivanka M. Trump Charitable Fund. In 2017, she received about $289,000 from that advance.
The couple’s total income was between $29 million and $135 million in 2018, compared with a range of $82 million to $222 million in 2017.
The drop was due, in part, to their divestment of several assets that previously generated tens of millions of dollars in income for the couple, including the stake in 666 Fifth Avenue.
Last year,The New York Times reportedthat Mr. Kushner apparently had paid almost no federal income taxes for several years running.
Have you ever had a problem with a Homeowners Association? After having enough of his HOA, this homeowner took matters into his own hands.
It may come as no surprise, but Homeowners Associations have a bit of a bad reputation. While there are good HOAs out in the wild, you typically only read about the worst offenders, and it’s usually for a good reason.
Just ask Alec, whose friend, Hal, inherited his grandparents’ house in a neighborhood with a tenacious HOA helmed by a group of power hungry, greedy busy bodies who made it their mission in life to get the entire neighborhood under their control.
When Hal first moved into the house his late grandparents’ built and lived in for decades, the HOA assumed they could take advantage of a seemingly young and inexperienced first-time homeowner.
But the group would soon find out that not only did Hal not have any intention of joining their association, he also wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
So buckle up and prepare for one wild ride…
There Was The First Encounter
It didn’t take long for the HOA board members to show up and start pestering Hal with lists of demands, rules, and random searches.
Shortly after he moved in, Hal received a knock at the door, and when he opened it, he was greeted by a group of the HOA members shoving papers in his face, demanding he sign them right away.
If that wasn’t bad enough, one of the board members demanded that he be allowed entry into Hal’s garage to see “if everything there is in order.”
This essentially meant that the HOA had the “right to do this bi-weekly,” and denying any of the members access would result in a fine.
Hall was appalled by the “audacity” of the HOA for thinking that they had any right forcefully entering people’s homes to randomly dig through their property.
Having enough of the HOA, Hal promptly kicked them out of his garage and off his property, refusing to sign the membership papers in the process.
It seemed like the HOA was banking on the idea that since Hal was young and naive, he would probably back down.
Little did they know, Hal’s grandfather had written his grandson a letter detailing the years of abuse by the HOA, preparing him for the fight that would be coming his way.
“It turns out they were wrong on both accounts, since his grandpa left him a letter pointing out what his rights exactly were, what they would possibly try, what else they might try, how hard it is to fight what, when he needs to react and how, so he prepared him really well for this,” Alec wrote.
Then Came The List Of Demands
With the HOA gone, Hal looked through the HOAs list of guidelines, which sounded more like a list of demands from an occupying force than a neighborhood association.
“They had, for example, a right to visit your home bi-weekly to check things like that you do not use the garage for storage or don’t have gasoline in containers in your garage,” Alec wrote.
“You had to mow your lawn every week, snow had to be shoveled every two hours when it snowed (starting at 5 o’clock in the morning).
You could not park more than one car on your grounds (except inside the garage).”
Three days went by and Hal still hadn’t signed the contract, so the group came back by like some geriatric mafia trying to get him to comply with their rules.
When the group said they wanted to check Hal’s garage again, he said no and kicked them off his property.
“To them, that meant war,” Alec wrote.
Within a week of the confrontation, Hal received received fines upwards of $1,000 for simply not allowing them to enter his home.
Hal was neither impressed nor intimidated and used the “stupid letters to help fire his grill.”
But this only fanned the flames of discontent…
But Then It Went Too Far
Hal went on with his life, but would you be shocked to hear that the HOA board wasn’t so willing to forgive and forget?
Because they did neither.
One day, Hal came home to find one of the HOA members had broken into his his garage, writing down things on a notepad.
It didn’t take long for Hal to realize the zealous HOA board was willing to take any step necessary to keep tabs on him, even if that meant using bolt cutters to bust up a lock on the garage door.
Hal quickly called out the intruder, but he soon realized that the intrusion was just part of the HOA’s plan.
As he was trying to figure out what the man was doing breaking into his home and prying through his personal belongings, he heard what sounded like demolition of some sort coming from his front yard.
In front of his house stood two oak trees that his grandparent’s planted with seeds from their home country when they first built the home all those years ago, and now a tree removal company was in the process of tearing them down.
Those trees had stood there for decades, serving as a reminder of where they had come from, a reminder of their heritage, and a reminder of their love.
Hal stood there in disbelief as something that had meant so much to his family was being ripped away.
“They had called a professional crew for this,” Alec wrote.
“One was already so damaged (basically all twigs were already down, it was just a stump that was left).
The other one they had just started with.”
It only got worse when Hal was informed that the HOA told the crew that Alec had given them permission to cut down the trees because they were in violation of HOA rules.
But what kind of rule would give an HOA member the right to walk onto someone’s property and cut down decades-old trees?
It All Came Crashing Down
Hal would find out that there was a rule (which he didn’t sign off on) where if a garden produces more than a 40-liter sack of leaves within two weeks, the garden owner needs to take down the “offending trees” within two weeks of the violation.
Having had enough of the HOA, its members, and its rules, Hal decided it was time to get back at the people who had made his first weeks of being a homeowner a living nightmare.
He struck up a deal with the tree crew where he would overlook the trespassing if they would agree to be witnesses if he filed charges against the HOA.
Having the crew’s word that they would back him up, Hal did what he had to do.
“Then he called the cops on the board members for trespassing, breaking and entering (they actually had used a bolt cutter to get into the garage; he had it always closed with a big bike lock after they had tried to get in it twice before),” Alec wrote.
And believe it or not, this thing actually went to trial…
That’s When This Thing Went To Court And Got A Lot More Real
Alec didn’t provide details on the ins and outs of the criminal trial, but he said it must have been “glorious,” because not only did the HOA have to repay Hal for the broken lock and damage to the trees (which ended up being close to $50,000), they also fought the charges which cost them another $15,000 in legal fees.
“All in all, this trial must have cost them over $120,000,” Alec recalled.
But it didn’t end there. Not having enough of his revenge, Hal decided to take the HOA and its members to civil court where he sued them for “emotional damage.”
You might be asking, “but what’s this business about ’emotional damage?'”
Well, Hal laid it on as thick as he could when he was pleading his case.
“He told them how much these trees meant to him, since his grandparents had planted them, with seeds from the home country,” Alec wrote.
“Plus, he felt threatened by the HOA, and can hardly sleep because he always fears they try to get into his house.”
Neither of which were lies, and so the court bought Hal’s story and ordered the HOA to pay $500,000 plus the cost of a state of the art home alarm system so he could “feel safe again in his own home.”
But that wasn’t all…
What It Cost
The HOA’s actions ended up costing the board around $750,000 before everything was said and done, but it would only get worse for some of the board members.
“They had to file for bankruptcy and get a person to check the books so my friend would get his money,” Alec wrote.
“But the best for last… The mediator found out that these three pricks had been defrauding the HOA for well over 10 years and were giving out as many fines as they possibly could so they could use it to bolster their income.”
Through their research, the mediator discovered that the HOA methodically tried to get rid of the people that they did not want there, and then they would buy their houses on the cheap.
The HOA would use the fines from their ridiculous rules to create enough money for the down payment on these homes.
With that being said, everyone wanted a piece of these crooks.
And that’s not even the best part…
Now That They’re Gone…
Due to the astronomical settlement, the three board members who had been waging a private war on Hal were left with no choice but to sell their homes in order to pay Hal’s settlement.
And with the three leaders of the HOA out of the neighborhood, Hal became somewhat of a local hero after freeing his neighbors from the abuse and extortion of the HOA board members.
“You see, most people never wanted the HOA in the first place, but the board member practically forced them to sign the contract, claiming it would not be optional, and if they did not sign before moving in it would be a $500 fine,” Alec recalled.
“Only six of the 50 members actually wanted this HOA (and people think they did get part of the action, as reward for spying on their neighbors to find violations).”
With his newfound fame, Hal found himself constantly being invited over to his neighbors’ for parties and BBQ’s while the former HOA board became nothing but a distant memory.
A Lesson To Be Learned
And so that concludes our story about the young homeowner who had enough of a tyrannical HOA and its board members and decided to get his own form of revenge.
It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t sweet, but Hal did what had to be done. He couldn’t stand on the sidelines and watch as the group of extortionists and petty crooks continued to reign over a neighborhood who wanted no part in being subjected to the rules of a neighborhood association.
Hal did what so many before him had failed to do…
he stood up, he made a stand, and he got his voice heard.
While the HOA’s former leaders are selling their homes, draining their bank accounts, and looking for any possible way to pay back one of their victims, Hal and the rest of his neighbors are enjoying the sweet taste of freedom and some of that BBQ his new friends keep offering him.
A recent in-depthinvestigationon foreclosure actions related to reverse mortgages published late Tuesday by USA Today paints a bleak picture surrounding the activities and practices of the reverse mortgage industry, but also relates some questionable and out-of-date information in key areas highlighted by the investigation, according to industry participants who spoke with RMD.
The investigative piece was the first in a new series of articles released by the outlet, touching on subjects including “questions to ask before getting a reverse mortgage,” ways to “fix” the reverse mortgage program, and details on how reverse mortgages work.
Referring to a wave of reverse mortgage foreclosures that predominantly affected urban African-American neighborhoods as a “stealth aftershock of the Great Recession,” the investigative article focuses on nearly 100,000 foreclosed reverse mortgages as having “failed,” and affecting the financial futures of the borrowers, negatively impacting the property values in the neighborhoods that surround the foreclosed properties.
In a related article, the publication details the various sources from which it drew information and the methodologies used to reach their conclusions, including some of the challenges involved in such an analysis.
The article authors detailed the ways in which they went about their information gathering, which included inquiries of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). However, some of the interpretations based on that data are largely out of date, according to sources who spoke with RMD about the coverage.
Non-borrowing spouses
A major component of the USA Today investigation revolved around a non-borrowing spouse who was taken off of the liened property’s title in order to allow for the couple’s access to a higher level of proceeds in 2010. When the borrowing husband passed away in 2016, the lender instituted a foreclosure action that has resulted in the non-borrowing wife having to vacate the property.
“Even when both husband and wife are old enough to qualify, reverse mortgage lenders often advise them to remove the younger spouse from loans and titles,” the article reads. The article does not address protections implemented in 2015 to address non-borrowing spouse issues.
In 2015, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) released a series of guidelines that were designed to strengthen protection for non-borrowing spouses in reverse mortgage transactions. In the revised guidelines, lenders were allowed to defer foreclosure for certain eligible non-borrowing spouses for HECM case numbers assigned before or after August 4, 2014.
Lenders are also allowed to proceed with submitting claims on HECMs with eligible surviving non-borrowing spouses by assigning the affected HECM to HUD upon the death of the last surviving borrower, where the HECM would not otherwise be assignable to FHA as part of a Mortgagee Optional Election Assignment (MOE).
A lender may also proceed by allowing claim payment following the sale of the property by heirs or the borrower’s estate, or by foreclosing in accordance with the terms of the mortgage and filing an insurance claim under the FHA insurance contract as endorsed.
Foreclosure vs. eviction
“A foreclosure is a failure, no matter the trigger,” said one of the article’s sources.
Multiple sources who wished to remain unnamed told RMD that positioning a foreclosure as a “failure” of the reverse mortgage is itself misleading particularly when taking a borrower’s specific circumstances into account, and that the article appears to, at times, conflate the terms “foreclosure” and “eviction.” One of the USA Today article’s own sources also added a perspective on a perceived incongruity between the use of the terms.
“There is a difference between foreclosure and eviction that isn’t really explained in the article,” said Dr. Stephanie Moulton, associate professor of public policy at Ohio State University in an email to RMD. “We would need to know the proportion of foreclosed loans that ended because of death of the borrower, versus other reasons for being called due and payable (including tax and insurance default).”
HECM evolution since the Great Recession
One of the factual issues underlying some of the ideas of the article is that it presents older problems of the HECM program in a modern context, without addressing many of the most relevant changes that have been made to the program in the years since many of the profiled loans were originated, particularly during a volatile period for the American housing market: the Great Recession.
This was observed by both industry participants, as well as Moulton.
“The other thing to keep in mind about this particular time period is the collapse of home values underlying HECMs that exacerbated crossover risk—which would increase the rate of both types of foreclosures,” Moulton said. “And, this was prior to many of the changes that have been made to protect borrowers and shore up the program, including limits on upfront draws, second appraisal rules, and financial assessment of borrowers.”
This includes the aforementioned protections instituted for non-borrowing spouses, in addition to changes including the addition of a financial assessment (FA) regulation designed to reduce persistent defaults, especially those related to tax-and-insurance defaults that regularly afflicted the HECM program in years prior to its implementation. These newer protections received only cursory mention in the USA Today article.
Industry response
The National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association (NRMLA) is preparing an industry response to the ideas and conclusions presented by USA Today, according to a statement made to RMD.
“A reverse mortgage is one potential and essential component for many Americans seeking to fund retirement,” said Steve Irwin, executive vice president of NRMLA in a call with RMD. “NRMLA and its members are committed to working with all stakeholders to continually improve the HECM program. NRMLA is developing a response to the piece.”
In yet another sign that Vancouver’s housing market has gone soft, desperate developers are resorting to all sorts of gimmicks to encourage young buyers to spring for a new place – such as a year’s supply of avocado toast, or a free glass of wine every day for a year.
“It’s a slower, more competitive market,” according to Vancounver-based Wesgroup Properties VP Brad Jones, adding “The onus is on us to show we have the most attractive offering.”
As wenoted in April, the decline of Vancouver’s housing market has become worldwide news – with sales plummeting 46% over the past year to levels not seen since 1986.
Buyers continue to have the strong upper hand after years of manipulated price appreciation due to Chinese tycoon “hot money” flooding the market. That panic buying is now quickly turning to panic selling.
Prior to the August 2016 implementation of the foreign buyers’ tax in Vancouver, condominiums in Metro Vancouver were firmly in seller’s market territory, defined by a sales-to-active-listings ratio of more than 20 per cent for several months in a row, according to data from the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver.
But even condos proved unable to remain impervious to multiple government intervention measures. The ratio dropped from peaks of over 80 per cent to below 22 per cent in September 2018, where it’s stayed since. If it dips below 12 per cent for several months, it becomes a buyer’s market and prices tend to come down. –The Globe and Mail
And as condos sat on the market longer and longer – some hitting 40 days or more on average between December 2018 and February 2019 – developers have had to get creative.
Condos at one Wesgroup’s newest developments, Mode in Vancouver’s southern Killarney neighbourhood, come with a promise of a free glass of wine a day for a year. That incentive comes as a $1,500 gift card to a neighbourhood wine and alcohol store, which equates to about $29 a week to spend on a bottle of wine. –The Globe and Mail
“Now is the time to be creative,” said Jones, who noted that the wine incentive generated a “massive amount of interest.”
The wine promotion was launched after Woodbridge Homes Ltc. announced that anyone who bought one of their Kira condos in the West Coquitlam development would receive a year’s supply of avocado toast – in the form of a $500 gift card to a local eatery.
After the announcement viral, the developer sold 60% of their initial offering according to MLA Canada president Ryan Lalonde. MLA provides real estate sales and project marketing services to developers, including Woodbridge.
In the first three weeks of sales, Lalonde said nearly 85 per cent of purchasers referenced the sandwich campaign and four buyers became aware of the building solely because of the media coverage of the toast offering.
“We wanted to find a way to cut through that noise (in the marketplace),,” said Lalonde, who added that the flood of media attention they received was unexpected.
The Treasury Department dealt the final blow to programs in states like New York and New Jersey designed to help residents circumvent the $10,000 limit on deductions for state and local taxes.
The federal regulations, issued Tuesday, prohibit workarounds that would allow residents to create charitable funds for a variety of programs where donors can get a state tax credit in exchange, effectively removing the state and local tax, or SALT, limitation.
The rules could also curb donations to some similarly structured charitable funds for private school tuition vouchers in Republican-led states such as Alabama and Georgia. Treasury said such programs allowed taxpayers to claim too many tax breaks in exchange for the donations.
The 2017 Republican tax law capped at $10,000 the amount of state and local tax payments that filers could deduct from their federal returns. That change spurred states like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to find a way to remove the economic pain of the cap, but Treasury said that most plans gave people too many tax breaks.
Here’s how it worked: A state resident could, instead of paying state property taxes, choose to donate to a state-created charitable fund, for example, $30,000. That person would then get to write off the $30,000 as a charitable donation on his or her federal taxes and get a state tax credit for some of that, easing the sting of the lower write-off for their SALT levy.
The new federal regulations say taxpayers can receive a write-off equal to the difference between the state tax credits they get and their charitable donations. That means the taxpayer who makes a $30,000 charitable donation to pay property taxes and receives a $25,000 state credit would only be able to write off $5,000 on his or her federal bill.
“The regulation is a based on a longstanding principle of tax law: When a taxpayer receives a valuable benefit in return for a donation to charity, the taxpayer can deduct only the net value of the donation as a charitable contribution,” the Treasury Department said in a statement.
The regulations formalize a proposal first floated last August to end the workarounds.
A senior Treasury official said Tuesday that the rules include a provision that give taxpayers the ability to elect to have some charitable contributions to state funds treated as state and local taxes. That would allow taxpayers to claim as much of the $10,000 cap as possible. That change helps equalize the tax treatment for some taxpayers who were disadvantaged in the initial version of these regulations, the official said.
Treasury gave taxpayers some leeway if the state tax credit they received was for 15% or less of their donation. In those cases, taxpayers don’t have to subtract the amount of the tax credit from the charitable donations.
The SALT change was felt most acutely by taxpayers in states where incomes and housing prices are high, places that tend to vote for Democrats. Representatives from those states say Republicans targeted their voters to pay for the tax cut law. House Democrats are working on a plan to increase the deduction limit or repeal it entirely, though any legislative action would likely stall in the Senate.
An IRS official said in March that the agency is also looking at prohibiting other workarounds passed in New York and Connecticut state legislatures that circumvent the SALT cap. The regulations issued Tuesday don’t address other ways to avert the deduction limit.
Connecticut allows owners of so-called pass-through businesses — such as partnerships, limited liability companies and S corporations — to take bigger federal deductions to absorb some of the hit from the SALT deduction limit. New York created a way for employers to shield their employees from the cap.
(by Jeff Clark) The data is in: based on a review of reports from multiple consultancies, the silver market has officially entered a supply/demand imbalance. The structure now in place sets up a scenario where a genuine crunch could occur.
The silver price has been stuck in a trading range for five years now. But behind the scenes, an imbalance has been forming that could potentially lead to price spikes based solely on the inability of supply to meet demand.
That statement isn’t based on some far-out projection or end-of-world scenario. It comes solely from the latest supply and demand data. As you’ll see, it demonstrates just how precarious the state of the silver market is. And as a result, how easily the price could ignite.
Here’s a pictorial that summarizes the current state of supply and demand for the silver market. See what conclusion you draw…
Silver Supply: It’s Fallen and It Can’t Get Up
Annual supply is in a major decline. And the downtrend is getting worse.
Check out how the amount of new metal coming to market has rolled over and continues to fall.
While the Fed may be surprised that low income workers aren’t as enthused about inflation as they are, we are not. A recentBloomberg reportlooked at the stark disconnect between Fed policy and well, everybody else but banks and the 1%.
While the Fed sees low inflation as “one of the major challenges of our time,” Shawn Smith, who trains some of the nation’s most vulnerable, low-income workers stated the obvious: people don’t want higher prices. Smith is the director of workforce development at Goodwill of Central and Coastal Virginia.
In fact, he said that “even slight increases make a huge difference to someone who is living on a limited income. Whether it is a 50 cents here or 10 cents there, they are managing their dollars day to day and trying to figure out how to make it all work.’’ Indeed, as wediscussed yesterday, it is the low-income workers – not the “1%”ers, who are most impacted by rising prices, as such all attempts by the Fed to “help” just make life even more unaffordable for millions of Americans.
Fears, and risks, associated higher prices comprise much of the feedback that the Fed has getting as part of its “Fed Listens” 2019 strategy tour, labeled as a multi-city “outreach tour”. So much for objectivity. Fed Governor Lael Brainard faced additional feedback from community leaders earlier this week in Chicago when she chaired a panel on full employment.
Patrick Dujakovich, president of the Greater Kansas City AFL-CIO, told the audience in Chicago: “I have heard a lot about price stability and fiscal sustainability from the Fed for a very, very long time. Maybe I wasn’t listening, but today is the first time I’ve heard about employment sustainability and employment security.”
The problem that the Fed continues to face is that it has backed itself into a corner. With the economy supposedly “booming” and the stock market at all time highs, rates remain low and any tick higher would likely begin to cause massive shocks to a debt-laden and spending-addicted economy that has been swelling into dangerously uncharted waters over the last 10 years.
As one potential answer, the Fed is now looking at “inflation targeting” (whose disastrous policies wediscussed here yesterday), which amounts to simply pursuing higher inflation for a while to “make up” for “undershoots” of the Fed’s 2% target since 2009. But the reality is that this idea cripples consumers, especially those at the lower end of the income spectrum.
Stuart Comstock-Gay, president of Delaware Community Foundation, told an audience at the Philadelphia Fed: “The sometimes positive impacts of inflation for certain of us have no good benefits for people at the lower end of the spectrum.”
And even former Fed economists agree. Andrew Levin, who’s now a Dartmouth College professor said: “The Fed and other central banks need to make sure they can foster the recovery from a severe adverse shock. But the answer is not to push inflation higher. Elevated inflation would be particularly burdensome for lower-income families.’’
Other economists have similar takes:
University of Chicago economist Greg Kaplan found that the cumulative inflation rate was 8-to-9 percentage points lower for households with incomes above $100,000 versus those with incomes below $20,000 over the 2004-2012 period. During that time, inflation averaged 2.2% which would be in the range of what Fed officials are now discussing as a possible strategy.
Luxury homes aren’t the only section of the American housing market that’s showing troubling signs of weakness. Increasingly, entrepreneurs who once saw the opportunity to make quick gains by investing in gentrifying markets before offloading their homes at a premium – a practice called ‘home flipping’ – are also heading for the exits.
But while activity surged to new cycle highs, the average return on investment, not including renovations and other expenses, dropped to 39%, an almost eight-year low.
All told, profits slumped to their lowest level in eight years.
Anybody who remembers the heady years ahead of the housing market crash will recall the role that unchecked speculation allowed unqualified investors, hairdressers, strippers and others, to secure adjustable rate ‘liar loans’ that helped them enter the speculation frenzy.
Speculators are on the housing market’s front lines, where softening price growth, waning demand and longer times to sell can turn quickly into shrinking profits, or even losses. Purchases of previously owned homes fell 4.4% in April, the 14th straight year-over-year decline, according to the National Association of Realtors.
“Investors may be getting out while the getting is good,” Todd Teta, chief product officer at Attom Data Solutions, said in the report. “If investors are seeing profit margins drop, they may be acting now and selling before price increases drop even more.”
The average gross flipping profit of $60,000 in Q1 2019 translated into an average 38.7% return on investment compared to the original acquisition price, down from a 42.5% average gross flipping ROI in Q4 2018 and down from an average gross flipping ROI of 48.6% in Q1 2018 to the lowest level since Q3 2011, a nearly eight-year low.
On Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, in his opening remarks at a monetary policy conference in Chicago, raised concerns about the rising trade tensions in the U.S.
The extremely negative environment that existed, particularly in the asset markets, provided a fertile starting point for monetary interventions.
Given rates are already negative in many parts of the world, which will likely be even more negative during a global recessionary environment, zero yields will still remain more attractive to foreign investors.
This idea was discussed in more depth with members of my private investing community,Real Investment Advice PRO.
(Lance Roberts) On Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, in his opening remarks at a monetary policy conference in Chicago, raised concerns about the rising trade tensions in the U.S.,
“We do not know how or when these issues will be resolved. As always, we will act as appropriate to sustain the expansion, with a strong labor market and inflation near our symmetric 2 percent objective.”
However, while there was nothing “new” in that comment, it was his following statement that sent “shorts” scrambling to cover.
“In short, the proximity of interest rates to the ELB has become the preeminent monetary policy challenge of our time, tainting all manner of issues with ELB risk and imbuing many old challenges with greater significance.
“Perhaps it is time to retire the term ‘unconventional’ when referring to tools that were used in the crisis. We know that tools like these are likely to be needed in some form in future ELB spells, which we hope will be rare.”
“To translate that statement, not only is the Fed ready to cut rates, but it may take ‘unconventional’ tools during the next recession, i.e., NIRP and even more QE.”
This is a very interesting statement considering that these tools, which were indeed unconventional“emergency” measures at the time, have now become standard operating procedure for the Fed.
Yet, these “policy tools” are still untested.
Clearly, QE worked well in lifting asset prices, but not so much for the economy. In other words, QE was ultimately a massive “wealth transfer” from the middle class to the rich which has created one of the greatest wealth gaps in the history of the U.S., not to mention an asset bubble of historic proportions.
However, they have yet to operate within the confines of an economic recession or a mean-reverting event in the financial markets. In simpler terms, no one knows for certain whether the bubbles created by monetary policies are infinitely sustainable? Or, what the consequences will be if they aren’t.
The other concern with restarting monetary policy at this stage of the financial cycle is the backdrop is not conducive for “emergency measures” to be effective. As we wrote in“QE, Then, Now, & Why It May Not Work:”
“If the market fell into a recession tomorrow, the Fed would be starting with roughly a $4 Trillion balance sheet with interest rates 2% lower than they were in 2009. In other words, the ability of the Fed to ‘bail out’ the markets today, is much more limited than it was in 2008.
But there is more to the story than just the Fed’s balance sheet and funds rate. The entire backdrop is completely reversed. The table below compares a variety of financial and economic factors from 2009 to present.
“The critical point here is that QE and rate reductions have the MOST effect when the economy, markets, and investors have been ‘blown out,’ deviations from the ‘norm’ are negatively extended, confidence is hugely negative.
In other words, there is nowhere to go but up.”
The extremely negative environment that existed, particularly in the asset markets, provided a fertile starting point for monetary interventions. Today, as shown in the table above, the economic and fundamental backdrop could not be more diametrically opposed.
This suggests that the Fed’s ability to stem the decline of the next recession, or offset a financial shock to the economy from falling asset prices, may be much more limited than the Fed, and most investors, currently believe.
While Powell is hinting at QE4, it likely will only be employed when rate reductions aren’t enough. Such was noted in 2016 by David Reifschneider, deputy director of the division of research and statistics for the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., released a staff working paper entitled“Gauging The Ability Of The FOMC To Respond To Future Recessions.”
The conclusion was simply this:
“Simulations of the FRB/US model of a severe recession suggest that large-scale asset purchases and forward guidance about the future path of the federal funds rate should be able to provide enough additional accommodation to fully compensate for a more limited [ability] to cut short-term interest rates in most, but probably not all, circumstances.”
In effect, Powell has become aware he has become caught in a liquidity trap. Without continued “emergency measures” the markets, and subsequently economic growth, cannot be sustained. This is where David compared three policy approaches to offset the next recession:
Fed funds goes into negative territory, but there is no breakdown in the structure of economic relationships.
Fed funds returns to zero and keeps it there long enough for unemployment to return to baseline.
Fed funds returns to zero and the FOMC augments it with additional $2-4 Trillion of QE and forward guidance.
This is exactly the prescription that Jerome Powell laid out on Tuesday, suggesting the Fed is already factoring in a scenario in which a shock to the economy leads to additional QE of either $2 trillion, or in a worst-case scenario, $4 trillion, effectively doubling the current size of the Fed’s balance sheet.
This is also why 10-year Treasury rates are going to ZERO.
“There is an assumption that because interest rates are low, that the bond bull market has come to its inevitable conclusion. The problem with this assumption is three-fold:
All interest rates are relative. With more than $10-Trillion in debt globally sporting negative interest rates, the assumption that rates in the U.S. are about to spike higher is likely wrong. Higher yields in U.S. debt attracts flows of capital from countries with negative yields which push rates lower in the U.S. Given the current push by Central Banks globally to suppress interest rates to keep nascent economic growth going, an eventual zero-yield on U.S. debt is not unrealistic.
The coming budget deficit balloon. Given the lack of fiscal policy controls in Washington, and promises of continued largesse in the future, the budget deficit is set to swell back to $1 Trillion or more in the coming years. This will require more government bond issuance to fund future expenditures which will be magnified during the next recessionary spat as tax revenue falls.
Central Banks will continue to be a buyer of bonds to maintain the current status quo, but will become more aggressive buyers during the next recession. The next QE program by the Fed to offset the next economic recession will likely be $2-4 Trillion which will push the 10-year yield towards zero.”
It’s item #3 that is most important.
In “Debt & Deficits: A Slow Motion Train Wreck”, I laid out the data constructs behind the points above.
However, it was in April 2016, when I stated that with more government spending, a budget deficit heading towards $1 Trillion, and real economic growth running well below expectations, the demand for bonds would continue to grow. Even from a purely technical perspective, the trend of interest rates suggested at that time a rate below one percent was likely during the next economic recession.
Outside of other events such as the S&L Crisis, Asian Contagion, Long-Term Capital Management, etc. which all drove money out of stocks and into bonds pushing rates lower, recessionary environments are especially prone at suppressing rates further. But, given the inflation of multiple asset bubbles, a credit-driven event that impacts the corporate bond market will drive rates to zero.
Furthermore, given rates are already negative in many parts of the world, which will likely be even more negative during a global recessionary environment, zero yields will still remain more attractive to foreign investors. This will be from both a potential capital appreciation perspective (expectations of negative rates in the U.S.) and the perceived safety and liquidity of the U.S. Treasury market.
Rates are ultimately directly impacted by the strength of economic growth and the demand for credit. While short-term dynamics may move rates, ultimately, the fundamentals, combined with the demand for safety and liquidity, will be the ultimate arbiter.
With the majority of yield curves that we track now inverted, many economic indicators flashing red, and financial markets dependent on “Fed action” rather than strong fundamentals, it is likely the bond market already knows a problem in brewing.
However, while I am fairly certain the “facts” will play out as they have historically, rest assured that if the “facts” do indeed change, I will gladly change my view.
Currently, there is NO evidence that a change of facts has occurred.
Of course, we aren’t the only ones expecting rates to go to zero.As Bloomberg noted:
“Billionaire Stan Druckenmiller said he could see the Fed funds rate going to zero in the next 18 months if the economy softens and that he recently piled into Treasuries as the U.S. trade war with China escalated.
‘When the Trump tweet went out, I went from 93% invested to net flat, and bought a bunch of Treasuries,’ Druckenmiller said Monday evening, referring to the May 5 tweet from President Donald Trump threatening an increase in tariffs on China. ‘Not because I’m trying to make money, I just don’t want to play in this environment.'”
It has taken a massive amount of interventions by Central Banks to keep economies afloat globally over the last decade, and there is rising evidence that growth is beginning to decelerate.
While another $2-4 Trillion in QE might indeed be successful in further inflating the third bubble in asset prices since the turn of the century, there is a finite ability to continue to pull forward future consumption to stimulate economic activity. In other words, there are only so many autos, houses, etc., which can be purchased within a given cycle.
There is evidence the cycle peak has been reached.
If I am correct, and the effectiveness of rate reductions and QE are diminished due to the reasons detailed herein, the subsequent destruction to the “wealth effect” will be far larger than currently imagined. There is a limit to just how many bonds the Federal Reserve can buy and a deep recession will likely find the Fed powerless to offset much of the negative effects.
If more “QE” works, great.
But, as investors, with our retirement savings at risk, what if it doesn’t?
(Brandon Smith) When discussing the fact that globalists often deliberately engineer economic crisis events, certain questions inevitably arise. The primary question being “Why would the elites ruin a system that is already working in their favor…?” The answer is in some ways complicated because there are multiple factors that motivate the globalists to do the things they do. However, before we get into explanations we have to understand that this kind of question is rooted in false assumptions, not logic.
The first assumption people make is that that current system is the ideal globalist system – it’s not even close.
When studying globalist literature and white papers, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, to H.G. Wells’ book The New World Order and his little known film Things To Come, to Manly P. Hall’s collection of writings titled‘The All Seeing Eye’, to Carol Quigley’s Tragedy And Hope, to the Club Of Rome documents, to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Between Two Ages, to former UN Director Robert Muller’sGood Morning World documents, to Henry Kissinger’sAssembly Of A New World Order, to the IMF and UN’s Agenda 2030, to nearly every document on globalization that is published by the Council on Foreign Relations, we see a rather blatant end goal described.
To summarize: For at least the past century the globalists have been pursuing a true one world system that is not covert, but overt. They want conscious public acceptance of a completely centralized global economic system, a single global currency, a one world government, and a one world religion (though that particular issue will require an entirely separate article).
To attain such a lofty and ultimately destructive goal, they would have to create continuous cycles of false prosperity followed by catastrophe. Meaning, great wars and engineered economic collapse are their primary tools to condition the masses to abandon their natural social and biological inclinations towards individualism and tribalism and embrace the collectivist philosophy. They created the current system as a means to an end. It is not their Utopian ideal; in fact, the current system was designed to fail. And, in that failure, the intended globalist “order” is meant to be introduced. The Hegelian Dialectic describes this strategy as Problem, Reaction, Solution.
This is the reality that many people just don’t seem to grasp. Even if they are educated on the existence of the globalist agenda, they think the globalists are trying to protect the system that exists, or protect the so-called “deep state”. But this is a propaganda meme that does not describe the bigger picture. The big picture is at the same time much worse, and also more hopeful.
The truth is that the old world order of the past century is a sacrificial measure, like the booster stage of a rocket to space that falls away and burns up in the atmosphere once it is expended. If you do not accept the reality that the globalists destroy in order to create opportunities for gain, then you will never be able to get a handle on why current events are taking the shape they are.
Of course, in public discourse the elites have learned to temper their language and how they describe their agenda. Public knowledge, or at least general awareness of the “new world order” is growing, and so they are forced to introduce the idea of a vast societal and economic shift in a way that sounds less nefarious and is relatively marketable. They also have a tendency to hint at events or warn about disasters that are about to happen; disasters they are about to cause. Perhaps this is simply a way to insulate themselves from blame once the suffering starts.
The International Monetary Fund began spreading a meme a few years ago as a way to describe a global economic crash without actually saying the word “crash”. Managing Director Christine Lagarde and others started using the phrase “global economic reset” in reference to greater centralization of economic and monetary management, all in the wake of a kind of crisis that was left mostly ambiguous. What she was describing was simply another name for the new world order, but it was one of the first times we had seen a globalist official actually hint that the change or “reset” would be built on the ashes of the old world system, rather than simply built as an extension of it.
Lagarde’smessage was essentially this: “Collective” cooperation will not just be encouraged in the new order, it will be required — meaning, the collective cooperation of all nations toward the same geopolitical and economic framework. If this is not accomplished, great fiscal pain will be felt and “spillover” will result. Translation: Due to the forced interdependency of globalism, crisis in one country could cause a domino effect of crisis in other countries; therefore, all countries and their economic behavior must be managed by a central authority to prevent blundering governments or “rogue central banks” from upsetting the balance.
The IMF and the CFR also refer to this as the “new multilateralism”, or the “multipolar world order”.
I believe the next stage of the economic reset has now begun in 2018 and 2019. In this phase of the globalist created theater, we see the world being torn apart by the “non-cooperation” that Lagarde and the CFR warned us about in 2015. The trade war is swiftly becoming a world economic war drawing in multiple nations on either side. This scenario only benefits the globalists, as it provides perfect cover as they initiate a crash of the historically massive ‘Everything Bubble’ which they have spent the last ten years inflating just for this moment.
“One question that needs to be addressed is how long the current trade war will last? Some people claim that economic hostilities will be short-lived, that foreign trading partners will quickly capitulate to the Trump administration’s demands and that any retaliation against tariffs will be meager and inconsequential. If this is the case and the trade war moves quickly, then I would agree — very little damage will be done to the U.S. economy beyond what has already been done by the Federal Reserve.
However, what if it doesn’t end quickly? What if the trade war drags on for the rest of Trump’s first term? What if it bleeds over into a second term or into the regime of a new president in 2020? This is exactly what I expect to happen, and the reason why I predict this will be the case rests on the opportunities such a drawn out trade war will provide for the globalists.”
The economic world has a very short attention span, but a year ago in the alternative media the trade war was being treated by Trump cheerleaders in particular as a novelty – a non-issue that would be resolved in a matter of a months with Trump victorious. Today, those same people are now vocal trade war fans, waving their pom-poms and screaming for more as they buy completely into the farce. Mentioning the fact that the trade war is only serving as a distraction so that the globalists can complete their economic reset agenda does not seem to phase them.
They usually make one of two arguments: Trump is an anti-globalist that is tearing down the “deep state” system and the trade war is part of his “4D chess game”. Or, the globalists don’t have enough control over the current system to achieve the kind of “conspiracy” I describe here.
First, going by his associations alone, it is clear that Donald Trump is controlled opposition playing the role of “anti-globalist” while at the same time stacking his cabinet with the very same elites he is supposedly at war with. As I have outlined in numerous articles, Trump was bought off in the 1990’s when he was saved from possible permanent bankruptcyby Rothschild banking agent Wilber Ross. Trump made Ross his Commerce Secretary as soon as he entered the White House, and Ross is one of the key figures in the developing trade war.
At this point I have to say that anyone arguing that Trump is “playing 4D chess” with the banking elites while he is surrounded by them on a daily basis must be clinically insane. Every economic and trade policy Trump has initiated in the past two years has served as a smokescreen for the globalists controlled demolition of the economy. As the reset continues in the midst of the trade war, it will be Trump and by extension all conservatives that get the blame. Trump is a pied piper of doom for conservative movements, which is why I have always said any attempts to impeach Trump (before the crash is completed) will fail. The globalists like him exactly where he is.
Second, there is a globalist controlled central bank in almost every nation in the world, including supposedly anti-globalist countries in the East like Russia and China. All of these central banks are coordinated through the Bank For International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. The globalists covertly dictate the economic policy of nearly the entire planet. They can easily create an economic collapse anytime they wish. This is a fact.
However, what they do not control is how elements of the public will react to their reset agenda. And this is where we find hope. They do not have their “new world order” yet, which is why they have to resort to elaborate theatrics and psychological operations. They know that an awake and aware segment of the population could annihilate them tomorrow with the right motivation, and so, they continue to distract us with a swarm of other concerns and calamities.
The purpose is to convince the masses to focus on all the wrong enemies while ignoring organized and psychopathic elites as the root of threat to humanity. We are supposed to hate the Russians, or hate the Chinese, or hate people on the left, or hate people on the right, and so it goes on. But these conflicts are just symptoms of a deeper disease. The great danger is that the focus on globalists as the virus will fade from public consciousness and conservative circles in particular as the trade war becomes a world war and economic collapse results in financial pain.
The reset is upon us. The narrative of the collapse is being written before our eyes. The end game rests not on the globalists, though, but proponents of liberty and sovereignty. Either we keep our crosshairs on the true enemy, or we get sucked into the maelstrom and forget who we are and why we are here. If the latter occurs, then the globalist reset will be assured.
As a result of high taxes and government debt, combined with a nightmarish looming pension liability, Chicago’s housing market continues to collapse, according to a new write-up in theCity Journal.
Average home prices in Chicago have still not recovered from the downturn that started in 2009, despite the fact that property taxes continue to climb. This is part of the reason Illinois ranks highest among states losing people to other areas of the country. Chicago homeowners are also taking big losses when they sell their homes.
Ball State economist Michael Hicks said last month:
“Taxes are high, the services [that taxes] pay for are terrible, and the debt load is so high, so palpably unsustainable that people have no belief that the resources can be found to turn it all around.”
“You won’t recruit a business, you won’t recruit a family to live here,” Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel said in 2012, warning about the city’s pension problems. And that looks to be the case: Realtor.com predicted that Chicago would have the weakest housing activity this year among the nation’s top 100 markets.
But unions in Chicago continue to push for higher pension contributions, even while efforts to curb the problem have failed. This has resulted on the money having to come from somewhere – and that somewhere is taxes. According to the report, Chicago’s annual pension payments have doubled over the last few years, to nearly $1.2 billion, and are set to rise to $2 billion in 3 years.
In 2015, the city approved $543 million in property tax increases as a result. Chicago schools also raised local homeowner taxes by $224 million in 2017. “Every penny” of these taxes goes into the pension system and Chicago now bears the title of “highest residential property-tax rates of any American city.”
And not surprisingly, residents are leaving Illinois and Chicago as a result. From 2011 to 2017, the state ranked second among states in outmigration, losing 640,000 more residents than it gained:
A recent Bloomberg study of metropolitan-area migration data found that the city had a net migration loss of 105,000 in 2014; it got worse in 2017, with the net loss totaling 155,000.
And while some governors, like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, acknowledge that taxes are driving people out, Illinois’ new governor Jay Pritzker has instead introduced legislation for more taxes on the wealthy, offering them a great excuse to leave Chicago, and the state. The city is losing its luster with millennials, too. Chicago now ranks as third-least attractive among the 53 largest metro areas in the U.S., losing an average of 19,000 young adults per year. Illinois ranks behind all but two states in trying to attract young adults.
The city’s economy is also sputtering, averaging less than 1% growth in private sector jobs in each of the last 2 years.
And when residents flee the city, they put a home up for sale in the market without buying one in the same market. This has caused the price of housing to plunge – according to the report, the “average price of a single-family home in Chicago is lower than it was before prices began plunging back in 2009.”
The national average is a rise of 30% in home prices since the crash. Housing speculators in the city have been decimated:
Crain’s Chicago Business told the story of a Chicago-area executive who lost more than half a million on the sale of his home when he retired to move elsewhere. If he had invested the money in the stock market instead, he said, “I’d probably have $6 million now.”
This has led to a slew of underwater mortgages – the most in any major US market. It’s estimated that 135,000 mortgages may risk default during the next economic downturn.
In early April, wenotedthat Chicago pension funds looked like a “collapsing ponzi scheme”. Back in December 2018, wenotedthat each Chicagoan owed $140,000 to bail out the city’s pensions.
And we’d love to say, “Let this be a lesson to the rest of the nation” who believes that government financial problems and pension liabilities are simply “no big deal”, but we’re certain they’re not listening anyway.
Arbor Realty Trust CEO and president Ivan Kaufman just bought a 58-acre estate in the Hamptons for $35 million — about HALF of its $75 million asking price from 2003 and about $14 million less than its most recent asking price,reported the New York Post.
The estate in Bridgehampton, called Three Ponds Farm, features an 18-hole golf course, a large pool, several gardens, a tennis court, and ponds.
The estate was first listed in 2003 with an asking price of $75 million. Then in 2007, listed again for $68 million. It was relisted back in December 2018 for $49 million.
Down the street, the 42-acre Jule Pond estate in Southampton was slashed by $30 million for an asking price around $145 million instead of $175 million.
The developments of the deteriorating Hamptons mansion market comes at a time when luxury real estate across the North East is under structural stress.
The median sale price of a Hamptons home has fallen to a seven-year low of $860,000, according to our report.
Some of the real estate slowdowns can be connected to President Trump’s federal tax reform, which makes it more expensive to own estates.
Across all price levels, sales in the Hamptons have declined five straight quarters. This has led to an overall decline in the median sale price of homes, down 5.5% in 1Q19 versus the same period a year ago. About 300 homes changed hands in last quarter, was the lowest sales transactions in many years.
(WSJ) Heavy duty vehicles line both sides of many of the winding two-way streets in the Hollywood Hills, making them treacherous single-lane thoroughfares. Construction workers wave stop signs as trucks laden with glass and steel back slowly out of driveways. Empty parcels of land all over Los Angeles’s poshest neighborhoods are being transformed into lavish mansions with price tags in the tens, or even hundreds, of millions.
“Every time I drive up there for any reason, if I return without getting my car dinged I breathe a sigh of relief,” says Andy Butler, a real-estate marketing consultant.
Real-estate experts estimate that there are about 50 ultra high-end spec houses under construction in the area, from Beverly Hills to Bel-Air and Brentwood.
The unprecedented wave of development has its roots in the heady days of 2014 and 2015, when foreign buyers poured into Los Angeles and luxury markets across the country logged record sales. A couple of local megawatt deals—including the $70 million sale of a Beverly Hills compound to billionaire Minecraft creator Markus Persson in 2014—inspired the construction of bigger and pricier homes, most of which were built as contemporary cubes. Some were built by inexperienced developers; many had price tags north of $20 million.
Now, there are simply too many, and not enough buyers to go around. “It’s created its own monster,” says Stephen Shapiro of Westside Estate Agency. “We have an enormous oversupply of these white boxes. There’s years of inventory out there.”
This Bel-Air home shaped like an airplane propeller is asking $56 million. A rendering of the home. Matthew Momberger
A review of the Los Angeles multiple listings service shows close to 100 homes on the market asking over $20 million in Los Angeles County, at least 35 of which could be classified as spec homes, and more are under construction. And those are just the listed ones: Appraiser Jonathan Miller says more than a third of homes in that price category are never entered in the MLS. Some of the city’s most expensive are notably absent.
The surplus mirrors a similar situation in New York, where high-end developers rushed to build pricey condos amid a market upswing, and are now faced with enormous competition for buyers.
But unlike New York, smaller, private lenders and wealthy individuals have provided much of the financing for the Los Angeles spec homes.
Don Hankey, a California businessman known as the king of subprime car loans, says one of his companies has provided close to $300 million on high-end homes in the Los Angeles market, including on spec homes. Public records show Hankey Capital provided about $82.5 million in financing to “The One,” an almost-built megamansion by Los Angeles developer Nile Niami, who plans to list it for $500 million.
“You have to be concerned,” Mr. Hankey says of the oversupply. “We’ve cut back. We’re not as aggressive in the financing.”
Other lenders on pricey spec homes include Axos Bank, formerly Bank of Internet, which financed a massive $180 million monolith built by plastic surgeon and newbie developer Raj Kanodia.
The debt load for developers can be substantial. “If I’m living in my house and I put it on the market for sale, I’m still living in my house,” Mr. Shapiro says. “These are empty houses, and the developer is spending a lot every month to keep them.”
Andy Warhol’s 1974, two-toned, Rolls-Royce Shadow can be included in the deal for a new Trousdale spec home that’s branded around the artist. Photo: Darren Asay
In this environment, and amid signs that prices are falling, developers and their agents are going to extraordinary lengths to differentiate their listings from the pack. They are throwing themed bashes in lieu of traditional open houses, thinking up gimmicky new amenities and hiring marketing experts to reimagine homes as individual brands with their own names, logos and stories. Some developers are relisting plots of land, hoping to get their money out without sinking more money into construction.
“People come to us because they want to stand out,” says Alexander Ali, whose marketing and public relations firm the Society Group is finding a growing business in creating brands for megamansions. “There are so many new homes coming to the market every day.”
Mr. Ali’s latest exercise: Turning a roughly 7,600-square-foot contemporary home in Trousdale into “WARHOL 90210,” a property branded around artist Andy Warhol. Mr. Ali and the developer, Wystein Opportunity Fund, joined with a local gallery to display Warhol prints in the home. At a Warhol-themed disco to be held on site, a Warhol look-alike will be filmed striding through the party; the resulting video will be blasted out on social media. (The house has no connection to Mr. Warhol.)
Amid a surplus of luxury spec homes, developers and their agents are going to extraordinary lengths to differentiate their listings from the pack, like throwing themed bashes in lieu of traditional open houses. Photo: Joshua Bobrove
David Parnes, Mauricio Umansky and James Harris of The Agency, which threw the party. Photo: Joshua Bobrove
Mr. Ali convinced the agent that Mr. Warhol’s onetime car—a 1974, two-toned, Rolls-Royce Shadow—and the Warhol prints featured in the home should be included in the deal. “It defines the house as a collector’s dream,” Mr. Ali says. The whole package seeks $17.75 million. The house can be sold separately for $15.625 million.
In February, Mr. Niami threw an elaborate party inspired by Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights” in a home he is listing for $39.995 million. Its three levels were organized into heaven, earth and hell, and models in colorful tulle dresses swam in the property’s glass bottomed pool, said Mr. Ali, who organized the party.
There were actors posing as Adam and Eve while hosting a virtual reality game that allowed guests to enter a rendition of the Bosch painting. People drank whiskey infused with the body of a dead cobra, and dancing women dressed in leather, whips and chains. A camel stood at the entrance to greet guests.
Another performer floated on the surface of the pool in a transparent bubble. Photo: Joshua Bobrove
In Bel-Air, real-estate brokerage firm the Agency recently threw a “Great Gatsby” themed event to launch a $35.5 million spec house. A female performer in a bedazzled costume hung upside down from a trapeze to pour champagne for guests, while another floated on the pool in a transparent bubble.
Mr. Ali says developers will pay anywhere from $20,000 to hundreds of thousands to throw such events.
In addition to the parties, developers are always on the hunt for creative new amenities. “It’s about the wow factor,” says spec home developer Ramtin Ray Nosrati, whose under-construction mansion in Brentwood includes a secret room for growing and smoking marijuana.
The ventilated room, accessed by hitting a button hidden inside a living room bookcase, will have tinted windows that darken for privacy. The house, slated to ask between $30 million and $40 million, will also come with a budget for an employee to supervise growing and harvesting. Mr. Nosrati compared the amenity to “having your own vineyard.”
Despite all this, price cuts are the order of the day. Bruce Makowsky, a handbag designer-turned-developer who sold the Minecraft property, lowered the price of his latest project, a lavish Bel-Air house with a candy room and a helipad, to $150 million, down from its original $250 million asking price. Mr. Niami slashed the price of a sprawling 20,500-square-foot house known as Opus to $59.995 million, down from$100 million.
Developer Ario Fakheri has chopped the asking price for his Hollywood Hills home with a roughly 300-gallon indoor shark tank to $26.995 millionfrom $35 million.
Sales are still happening: Approximately 11 deals have closed for more than $20 million in Los Angeles so far this year, and a Saudi buyer recently paid$45 million for a spec homebuilt by diamond manufacturer Rafael Zakaria. But buyers know they have the upper hand. “People are making lowball offers,” says Mr. Shapiro of Westside Estate Agency. “They’re not being shy.”
Doug Barnes, the founder of Eyemart Express, sold a contemporary home in Beverly Hills for $34.65 million in April, or nearly 40% off its original $55 million asking price, records show. British restaurateur and Soho House co-owner Richard Caring is listing a home he bought in Beverly Hills for $29.995 million; he paid $33 million for it in 2016, records show.
As for “The One,” the $500 million property was originally slated to come on the market in 2017 but has yet to be listed. The developer blamed construction delays.
Corrections & Amplifications: Stephen Shapiro of Westside Estate Agency said buyers know they have the upper hand in negotiations to purchase high-end spec homes. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that sellers have the upper hand. (May 30, 2019)
Appeared in the May 31, 2019, print edition as ‘The Spec Home Bubble.’
Diesel demand in China fell 14% and 19% in March and April respectively, reaching levels not seen in a decade, according to data compiled by Wells Fargo.
“We believe the accelerating decline is most likely tied to economic factors and the effects of the tariff ‘war’ with the U.S.,” Wells Fargo energy analyst Roger Read said in a note Monday. “If one wants to worry, that is where to focus most closely in our view.”
China said in April its economy grew by 6.4% in the first quarter of 2019. However, global investors and economists have been skeptical of China’s official economic figures for years as they believe they overstate how much China’s economy is growing.
China’s true pace of economic growth is always hard to decipher, but the country’s lagging diesel demand could be a sign that the world’s second-largest economy is in a much more dire state than official numbers indicate.
Diesel demand in China fell 14% and 19% in March and April, respectively, reaching levels not seen in a decade, according to data compiled by Wells Fargo. Monthly demand has also been falling every month since December 2017, the data shows.
Source: Wells Fargo Securities, Bloomberg
“We believe the accelerating decline is most likely tied to economic factors and the effects of the tariff ‘war’ with the U.S. (lifted demand earlier in 2019 to ‘beat’ the tariffs, but now falling),” Wells Fargo energy analyst Roger Read said in a note Monday. “If one wants to worry, that is where to focus most closely in our view.”
China said in April itseconomy grew by 6.4%in the first quarter of 2019. However, global investors and economists have been skeptical of China’s official economic figures for years as they believe they are overstated.
This skepticism has led analysts to use other ways to measure economic growth in China, including demand for diesel fuel and electricity. Diesel is largely used to fuel trucks that transport goods. Declining diesel demand is seen as signal of slowing economic growth as it could indicate fewer trucks are being used, hence fewer goods are being bought and sold.
China’s massive drop in diesel demand comes as it wages a trade war against the U.S.
Both countries have slapped tariffs on billions of dollars worth of their goods. Earlier this month, both countries hiked tariffs across their goods, leading to a ripple effect throughout financial markets.
Crude prices, for example, posted their worst weekly performance of 2019 last week and are down more than 7% this month. The S&P 500 is down more than 4% in May while the Shanghai Composite has lost 5.5%.
Neither side is showing signs of backing down, either. President Donald Trump said Monday the U.S. was not ready to make a deal with China. Meanwhile, a commentary in Chinese state-run newspaper Xinhua indicated China would not give into U.S. demands to change its state-run economy.
These tensions could shave off between 0.3% and 0.4% from China’s economic growth, according to UBS analyst Anna Ho. The analyst also said in a note: “Open economies, like Singapore, Korea and Malaysia are more sensitive to global trade and higher export exposure, and could see a reduced chance of growth recovery in 2H19.”
In another sign of tension between the two countries and perhaps declining economic activity, Chinese tourism to the U.S. fell for the first time in 15 years last year, according to the National Travel and Tourism Office.
After piling in when the market was hot, investors are facing losses from homes that take too long to sell.
(Bloomberg / Businessweek) Sean Pan wanted to be rich, and his day job as an aeronautical engineer wasn’t cutting it. So at 27 he started a side gig flipping houses in the booming San Francisco Bay Area. He was hooked after making $300,000 on his first deal. That was two years ago. Now home sales are plunging. One property in Sunnyvale, nearApple Inc.’s headquarters, left Pan and his partners with a $400,000 loss. “I ate it so hard,” he says.
Case-Shiller’s March home price index showed yet another deceleration in growth – the 12 months in a row of slowing equals the 2014 growth scare’s length but is the weakest growth since July 2012.
After February’s 20-City Composite 3.00% YoY print, expectations were for 2.55% growth in March and it surprised very modestly with a 2.68% YoY print (still the lowest in 7 years)…
Nationally, home-price gains slowed to a 3.7% pace.
“Given the broader economic picture, housing should be doing better,” David Blitzer, chairman of the S&P index committee, said in a statement.
“Measures of household debt service do not reveal any problems and consumer sentiment surveys are upbeat. The difficulty facing housing may be too-high price increases,” which continue to outpace inflation, he said.
While all 20 cities in the index showed year-over-year gains, five were below 2%: Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle, which a year ago posted a 13% increase. Las Vegas led the nation in March with an 8.2% gain, followed by Phoenix.
(John Rubino) There are trillions of dollars of bonds in the world with negative yields – a fact with which future historians will find baffling.
Copenhagen Mint Images/Getty Images
Until now those negative yields have been limited to the safest types of bonds issued by governments and major corporations. But this week a new category of negative-yielding paper joined the party: mortgage-backed bonds.
(Investing.com) – At the biggest mortgage bank in the world’s largest covered-bond market, a banker took a few steps away from his desk this week to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him.
As mortgage-bond refinancing auctions came to a close in Denmark, it was clear that homeowners in the country were about to get negative interest rates on their loans for all maturities through to five years, representing multiple all-time lows for borrowing costs.
“During this week’s auctions, there were three times when I had to stand back a little from the screen and raise my eyebrows somewhat,” said Jeppe Borre, who analyzes the mortgage-bond market from a unit of the Nykredit group that dominates Denmark’s $450 billion home-loan industry.
For one-year adjustable-rate mortgage bonds, Nykredit’s refinancing auctions resulted in a negative rate of 0.23%. The three-year rate was minus 0.28%, while the five-year rate was minus 0.04%.
The record-low mortgage rates, which don’t take into account the fees that homeowners pay their banks, are the latest reflection of the global shift in the monetary environment as central banks delay plans to remove stimulus amid concerns about economic growth.
Denmark has had negative rates longer than any other country. The central bank in Copenhagen first pushed its main rate below zero in the middle of 2012, in an effort to defend the krone’s peg to the euro. The ultra-low rate environment has dragged down the entire Danish yield curve, with households in the country paying as little as 1% to borrow for 30 years. That’s considerably less than the U.S. government.
The spread of negative yields to mortgage-backed bonds is both inevitable and ominous. Inevitable because the current amount of negative-yielding debt has not ignited the kind of rip-roaring boom that overindebted countries think they need, which, since interest rates are just about their only remaining stimulus tool, requires them to find other kinds of debt to push into negative territory. Ominous because, as the world discovered in the 2000s, mortgages are a cyclical instrument, doing well in good times and defaulting spectacularly in bad. Giving bonds based on this kind of paper a negative yield appears to guarantee massive losses in the next housing bust.
Meanwhile, this is year ten of an expansion – which means the next recession is coming fairly soon. During recessions, the US Fed, for instance, tends to cut short-term rates by about 5 percentage points to counter the slowdown in growth.
… this imminent slide in interest rates will turn the rest of the global financial system Danish, giving us bank accounts and bond funds that charge rather than pay, and very possibly mortgages that pay rather than charge.
Anyone who claims to know how this turns out is delusional.
The Economic Innovation Group’s (EIG)Distressed Communities Index(DCI) shows a significant economic transformation (from two distinct periods: 2007-2011 and 2012-2016) that occurred since the financial crisis. The shift of human capital, job creation, and business formation to metropolitan areas reveals that rural America is teetering on the edge of collapse.
Since the crisis, the number of people living in prosperous zip codes expanded by 10.2 million, to a total of 86.5 million, an increase that was much greater than any other social class. Meanwhile, the number of Americans living in distressed zip codes decreased to 3.4 million, to a total of 50 million, the smallest shift of any other social class. This indicates that the geography of economic pain is in rural America.
Visualizing the collapse: Economic distress was mostly centered in the Southeast, Rust Belt, and South Central. In Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia, at least one-third of the population were located in distressed zip codes.
“While the overall population in distressed zip codes declined, the number of rural Americans in that category increased by nearly 1 million between the two periods. Rural zip codes exhibited the most volatility and were by far the most likely to be downwardly mobile on the index, with 30 percent dropping into a lower quintile of prosperity—nearly twice the proportion of urban zip codes that fell into a lower quintile. Meanwhile, suburban communities registered the greatest stability, with 61 percent remaining in the same quintile over both periods. Urban zip codes were the most robust—least likely to decline and more likely than their suburban counterparts to rise,” the report said.
Prosperous zip codes were the top beneficiaries of the jobs recovery since the financial crisis. All zip codes saw job declines during the recession, each laying off several million jobs from 2007 to 2010. But by 2016, prosperous zip codes had 3.6 million jobs surplus over 2007 levels, which was more than the bottom 80% of distressed zip codes combined. It took five years for prosperous zip codes to replace all jobs lost from the financial crisis; meanwhile, distressed zip codes will never recover.
EIG shows that less than 25% of all counties have recovered from business closures from the recession.
“US business formation has been dismal in both magnitude and distribution since the Great Recession. The country’s population is almost evenly split between counties that have fully replaced (with 161 million residents) and those that have not (with 157.4 million). This divide is due to the fact that highly populous counties—those with more than 500,000 residents—were far more likely to add businesses above and beyond 2007 levels than their smaller peers. Nearly three in every five large counties added businesses on net over the period, compared to only one in every five small one,” the report said.
To highlight the weak recovery and geographic unevenness of new business formation, EIG shows that the entire country had 52,800 more business establishments in 2016 than it did in 2007.
Five counties (Los Angeles, CA; Brooklyn, NY; Harris, TX (Houston); Queens, NY; and Miami-Dade, FL. ) had a combined 55,500 more businesses in 2016 than before the recession. Without those five counties, the US economy would not have recovered.
On top of deep structural changes in rural America,JPMorgan told clients last weekthat the entire agriculture complex is on the verge of disaster, with farmers in rural America caught in the crossfire of an escalating trade war.
“Overall, this is a perfect storm for US farmers,” JPMorgan analyst Ann Duignan warned investors.
Farmers are facing tremendous headwinds, including a worsening trade war, collapsing soybean exports to China, global oversupply conditions, and crop yield losses in the Midwest due to flooding. This all comes at a time when farmers are defaulting and missing payments at alarming rates, forcing regional banks to restructure and refinance existing loans.
Today’s downturn of rural America is no different than what happened in the 1920s, 1930s, and the early 1980s.
USexisting home sales slumped for the 13th straight monthin March, but the pressures on the national housing market have yet to translate into cheaper rents: To wit, average national rent climbed 3% YoY in April, and 0.3% from the prior month, according to Yardi Matrix data cited byRentCafe.
The national average rent hit $1,436 in April, climbing about $42 from the prior year to $1,436 – which, though still positive, marked the slowest pace of growth in 11 months.
Across major US housing markets, rent in Wichita is the most affordable, averaging $646, followed by Tulsa, at $688. On the other end of the spectrum is the average rent in Manhattan, the world’s most expensive rental market, climbed to $4,130 in April. Behind Manhattan is – of course – San Francisco, with an average rent of $3,647, then Boston ($3,357) then Brooklyn ($2,878), then San Jose ($2,720) and Los Angeles ($2,471), in sixth place. Of the largest metropolitan rental hubs, Indianapolis had the lowest average rent ($861), followed by Columbus, Ohio ($924).
While rents tended to be highest in urban enclaves along the coasts, some large rental markets in the Sun Belt boasted surprisingly affordable prices, including Las Vegas ($1,061) or Phoenix ($1,046).
But in another sign of just how skewed rents are across the US, of the 253 cities examined as part of the study, only 64% have average rents below the $1,436 national average, while the other 36% have average rents above.
“A Crack in The Foundation?” Part 2: Three Decades of Red Flags — Mortgage Policy & Praxis, 1970-1999
Welcome to “A Crack in the Foundation?”, a four-part series in which Maxwell Digital Mortgage Solutions will examine the evolution of the mortgage industry and homeownership in America, with an eye on government policies and how GSEs can promote (or prohibit) periods of economic growth.
Part 2 begins at the start of the 1970s and follows the uneasy path of government policy and economic turmoil as we creep towards the end of the century. (Missed Part 1?Read it here). This section will follow the astronomical growth in the secondary market, the mounting government pressure put on Fannie and Freddie to increase their offerings to lower- and moderate-income borrowers, as well as a widespread shift towards deregulation in the market that (spoiler alert) will prove to have disastrous consequences as the new millennium begins.
Existing home sales were the odd one out in March (falling as new- and pending-home-sales spiked) but expectations were for a catch-up rebound in April, but did not, dramatically missing the expectation of a 2.7% rise by dropping (again) by 0.4% MoM…
This 0.4% decline comes after existing home sales fell 4.9% MoM in March with a tumbling mortgage rate seemingly not affecting the secondary market…
Single-family units fell 1.1% MoM but Condos/Co-ops jumped 5.6% in April (erasing March’s 5.3% drop).
Supply increased from 3.8 to 4.2 months (the highest since Oct 2018) as median prices jumped to their highest since July 2018.
Only The West saw an increase in sales (up 1.8% MoM) in April, with the Northeast worst, down 4.5% MoM.
Worse still, existing home sales are still down 4.4% year-over-year…
This is the 14th month in a row of annual declines – the longest stretch since the housing crisis over a decade ago…but that’s probably nothing!
California’s housing affordability crisis is getting worse. Affordability in San Francisco is now at 10-year lows, and only one in five households can afford to purchase a median-priced single-family home in the Bay Area. The crisis has driven many people onto the water, living on makeshift boats, outside marinas, and wealthy communities.
Sausalito officials and other agencies have been stepping up efforts to manage ‘anchor out’ mariners and floating debris in Richardson Bay. (Robert Tong/Marin Independent Journal)
In a letter to employees, Ford CEO Jim Hackett has confirmed that the company will eliminate 7,000 jobs, representing 10% of its global salaried workforce – literally, a decimation – as part of the carmaker’s multiyear restructuring plan.
The company said Monday that the plan will save about $600 million per year by eliminating bureaucracy and increasing the number of workers reporting to each manager.
In the U.S. about 2,300 jobs will be cut through buyouts and layoffs. About 1,500 white-collar employees have already left the company voluntarily since the restructuring began last year, some taking buyouts. About 500 workers will be let go this week.
Most of Ford’s white-collar workers are in and around the company’s Dearborn, Michigan, headquarters.
“A Crack in The Foundation?” Part 1: Fannie & Friends — The Evolution of Mortgage Policy from 1930-1960
Welcome to “A Crack in the Foundation?”, a four-part series in which Maxwell Digital Mortgage Solutions will examine the evolution of the mortgage industry and homeownership in America, with an eye on government policies and how GSEs can promote (or prohibit) periods of economic growth.
Part I starts at the turn of the 20th century and traces the establishment of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), as well as the birth of Fannie and Ginnie, to look at the inception of the modern mortgage and its impact on home ownership.
China phasing out imported waste is driving California recycling rates through the floor.
Carlos Guzman, operations manager at Republic Services, next to “The Pile” in Anaheim, CA, on Friday, May 17, 2019. The Pile is what they call the mound of recyclables waiting to be sorted. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
(Orange County Register) The market for recyclables is tumbling, the diversion rate of trash headed to dumps is shrinking and trash bills are going up as the cost of recycling increases.
“We used to pay haulers for recyclables,” said Bob Asgian, assistant department head of Los Angeles County’s recycling and landfill operations.
Single family home prices in Orange, Los Angeles and San Diego counties changed course, climbing up in April after falling year over year in March.
Sales volume was down statewide, but the median resale home price set a record high in California in April, hitting $602,920. (File photo by Marilyn Kalfus/SCNG)
Riverside County had the biggest price gain of five Southern California Counties, at 5.8%, with the median resale of a home up to $423,000 from $400,000 in April 2018. San Bernardino saw a 5.2% hike, with the price at $305,000 compared with $289,900 the prior year.
Orange County had the smallest uptick – 0.9% – but the heftiest price: It rose to $825,000 in April from $818,000 last year. Los Angeles, with a 3% increase, saw prices go to $544,170 from $528,550 last April. San Diego rose 2.2% to $649,000 from $635,000.
The analysis comes from the California Association of Realtors, which reports on the resale of houses around the state. Sales of existing houses account for just over two-thirds of all home sales in Southern California.
In March, CAR’s numbers reflected the first year-over-year price drop for Los Angeles and San Diego counties in seven years and the third in Orange County in the previous four months.
Statewide, demand weakened and sales were down, but the median home price set a record high in April, reaching $602,920 and passing the $602,760 high set in the summer of 2018. April’s price was up 3.2% from $584,460 in April 2018, CAR said.
“While we started off the spring homebuying season on a down note, home sales in the upcoming months may fare better than the top-level numbers suggest,” said Leslie Appleton-Young, CAR’s senior vice president and chief economist. “The year-over-year sales decrease was the smallest in nine months, and pending home sales increased for the second straight month after declining for more than two years.”
She said a sharp sales rebound is not expected, but neither is an acceleration of declines.
Sales volume dipped in Los Angeles (-0.1%), Riverside (-6.5%) and San Bernardino counties (-7.7%), but was up in Orange (0.5%) and San Diego counties (2.4%).
“Weak buyer demand, largely prompted by elevated home prices, is playing a role in the softening housing market,” said CAR president Jared Martin. “However, with low-interest rates, cooling competition and an increase in homes to choose from, buyers can take advantage of a more balanced housing market.”
Mortgage rates fell to 4.06%, in March, a 14-month low. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 4.07% for the week ending May 16, down from last week’s rate of 4.10%, according to Freddie Mac.
The deepening trade war between the US and China has roiled complex global supply chains and America’s Heartland. The latest breakdown in negotiations comes at a time when soybean exports to China have crashed, and huge stockpiles are building, have resulted in many farmers teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Mounting financial stress in the Midwest has allowed a public health crisis, where suicide rates among farmers have hit record highs, according to one trade organization’s interview with theSouth China Morning Post.
One of the main goals of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies of the past decade was to generate the “wealth effect”: by pushing the valuations of homes higher, would make American households feel wealthier. But it didn’t. Most Americans can’t afford the traditional home with a white picket fence around a private yard (otherwise known as the American dream), and as a result, has led to the popularity of tiny homes among heavily indebted millennials.
Tiny homes are popping up across West Coast cities as a solution to out of control rents and bubbly home prices, also known as the housing affordability crisis.
Amazon has recognized the hot market for tiny homes among millennials and has recently started selling DIY kits and complete tiny homes.
One of the first tiny homes we spotted on Amazon is a $7,250 kit for a tiny home that can be assembled in about eight hours.
A more luxurious tiny home on the e-commerce website is selling for $49,995 +$1,745.49 for shipping. This one is certified by the RV Industry Association’s standards inspection program, which means millennials can travel from Seattle to San Diego in a nomadic fashion searching for gig-economy jobs.
Those who want a 20 ft/40 ft expandable container house with solar energy, well, Amazon has that too. This tiny home has it all: a post-industrial feel using an old shipping container, virtue signaling with solar panels, full bathroom, and a kitchen to make avocado and toast.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration said on Thursday it was formally cancelling $929 million in previously awarded funding for California’s high-speed rail program after rejecting an appeal by the state.
FILE PHOTO – California Governor Jerry Brown’s name and others are pictured on a railroad rail after a ceremony for the California High Speed Rail in Fresno, California January 6, 2015. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith
The U.S. railway regulator, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), said on Thursday it had canceled the funding awarded in a 2010 agreement after it said the state had “repeatedly failed to comply” and “failed to make reasonable progress on the project.”
In a statement, the FRA said it was still considering “all options” on seeking the return of $2.5 billion in federal funds the state has already received.
But what will happen to banks and automakers when the cycle turns?
Serious auto-loan delinquencies – 90 days or more past due – jumped to 4.69% of outstanding auto loans and leases in the first quarter of 2019, according toNew York Fed data. This put the auto-loan delinquency rate at the highest level since Q4 2010 and merely 58 basis points below the peak during the Great Recession in Q4 2010 (5.27%):
With the trade war between the US and China re-escalating once more, investors are again casting frightened glances at declining global trade volumes, which as Bloomberg writes today, “threaten to upend the global economy’s much-anticipated rebound and could even throw its decade-long expansion into doubt if the conflict spirals out of control.”
“Just as tentative signs appeared that a recovery is taking hold, trade tensions have re-emerged as a credible and significant threat to the business cycle,” said Morgan Stanley’s chief economist, Chetan Ahya, highlighting a “serious impact on corporate confidence” from the tariff feud.
To be sure, even before the latest trade war round, global growth and trade were already suffering, confirmed most recently by last night’s dismal China economic data, which showed industrial output, retail sales and investment all sliding in April by more than economists forecast.
As a result of a new plan to cut power on high wind days during wildfire season, millions of Californians could wind up unprepared and in darkness, according toBloomberg.
Now bankrupt PG&E proposed the precautionary plan after a transmission line that snapped in windy weather likely started last year‘s Camp Fire – the deadliest wildfire in state history. The plan addresses the problem of wildfires, but creates another one in the process: blindsiding Californians with days of blackouts.
This has caused some California residents to turn to home battery systems and alternative means of power in their homes. However, the number of these systems in use is relatively small when compared to the 5.4 million customers PG&E currently services. Governor Gavin Newsom has said that he’s budgeting $75 million to help communities deal with the threat.
No country has better exemplified the global automobile recession than China. Sales for the world’s largest auto market continue to deteriorate, with the latest report confirming that passenger vehicle sales in China tanked yet again – this time dropping 16.6% year-over-year to 1.54 million units, following a 12% decline in March and an 18.5% slide in February. In addition, April SUV sales fell 14.7% to 642,220 units.
Gov. Gavin Newsom says California’s housing affordability crisis is so severe that he wants a bit of everything to solve it.
California Governor Gavin Newsom and Megan Colbert compare notes on raising toddlers as she shares her struggles as a single parent while talking about affordable housing issues on Tuesday, March 26, 2019 in Sacramento. Newsom held a round table discussion to address housing affordability and rising rents. Renée C. Byer rbyer@sacbee.com
That means seeding construction for millions of new residences, opening the door to a new rent control law and finding ways to protect low-income families from eviction.
Could this be the end of single-family zoning in California?
Changes to the comprehensive housing measure Senate Bill 50 – already hotly debated – allow property owners broad rights to turn single-family homes and vacant lots into two-, three- and four-unit homes and apartments.
When the next housing bust gets big enough, there will be a mortgage crisis, and it will hit banks, shadow banks, and mortgage insurers no matter what the mortgage laws are.
The area known as “Billionaire’s Row” in Manhattan is becoming one of the biggest real estate gluts in all of the city. 40% of apartments in the area are now sitting unsold in towers that top out at 100 stories, according to theNew York Post.
Only half a decade after the One57 building became the city’s first “supertall” residential skyscraper, only 84 of its 132 condos have been purchased. This means that more than a third of them are still on the market and none of them are under contract.
The story is the same down the road – six nearby buildings have as much of 80% of their units available, according to data, with the total value of all unsold inventory estimated to be between $5 billion and $7 billion.
And the supply glut is only going to get worse, as Central Park Tower, at 217-225 W. 57th St. is set to put an additional 179 apartments on the market next year. No deals for the new building have closed, which means if it opened today it would push the overall unsold percentage in the area to nearly 65%. Listings online show asking prices for units between $2.1 million and $64 million. Brokers are blaming the high prices for the sales drought.
Top broker Dolly Lenz said:
“When people come here from other parts of the country and from around the world, the first thing they want to see is Billionaires’ Row. We toured them through the properties but many felt they were too pricey for the market — $7,000, $8,000 and $10,000 a square foot.”
Lenz also said that these prices were caused by a combination of costs of property, construction, financing and high-end marketing, in addition to developers who have clauses in their contracts that keep lenders from forcing them to drop prices.
Many brokers feel pessimistic, expressing that the drought in Billionaire’s Row could telegraph a coming drought for the entire market. The Post provided a host of pessimistic quotes from brokers:
“Empty buildings are never good for the city,” one broker said.
“This happened in 1988 to 1992, when there were a glut of condos that didn’t sell. They were smaller and less expensive, but it led to bad times.”
Another broker said the prospects for selling the vacant apartments were grim.
“They are priced out of the constellation of buyers out there now,” the broker said.
“It’s all a function of price. You can do the most spectacular marketing and offer the most incredible amenities, but it all comes down to price.”
“There’s a whole food chain that relies on people living in these buildings,” one broker said.
One local resident said of the vacancies:
“To find out that people aren’t living in the condos is just, ugh. I wish this was all affordable housing. This really upsets me. So many are struggling in the city.”
An Extell spokeswoman disputed some data provided in the article, stating that One57 “is over 85 percent sold in units and over 90 percent sold in value.”
About one month ago,we reportedthat Manhattan’s housing market was on its “worst cold streak in 30 years”. We also took note of the rising prices that are pricing potential buyers – even the billionaires – out of the market.
By one broker’s count, Q1 marked the sixth straight quarterly drop in sales volume,the worst streak in at least 30 years.
Per the FT, sales tumbled by 11%, according to broker Stribling & Associates, by 5%, according to Corcoran, and by 2.7% for co-ops and condominium apartments, according to Douglas Elliman and real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel.
While the average sales price for new developments climbed a staggering 89.4% to $7.6 million, that figure was exaggerated by a single purchase: Ken Griffin’spurchase of a $240 million penthouseat 220 Central Park South, which, according to some, was the most expensive home ever sold in America. But depending on the report, the median sales price ranged from 2% lower to 3.2% higher. And although the entry level market in Manhattan – that is, apartments priced at $1 million and below – had held up for most of the past year, it has recently started to suffer.
“It’s like a layer cake,” Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel, told CNBC. “When you have softening at the top, it starts to melt into the next layer and the next layer after that, because those buyers further down have to compete on price.”
According to one broker, sellers with unrealistic expectations are the biggest barrier to sales, because they’re refusing to adjust for the fact that listings have been piling up and sitting on the market for longer periods, giving buyers more room to negotiate, and more options.
Inventory has climbed 9% over the past nine months, and there’s a glut in new developments that’s only going to get worse.
Funny thing, media commentary on employmentalmost never includes the immigration dimension—even now, when Democrats are desperate to downplay the strength of this cyclical recovery. Result: there’s absolutely no public awareness (except by VDARE.com readers) that continued immigrant displacement of American workers is emerging as one of President Trump’s worst policy failures.
Those curious who is more impacted by the sudden re-escalation in trade hostilities between the US and China can get a quick answer by looking at the market reaction to Sunday’s unexpected news: while the S&P is down barely 1%, overnight Chinese stocks plunged nearly 6%, their biggest drop in over three years, indicating just how much more sensitive to every twist and turn in trade relations Chinese stocks are.
Of course, one can counter just how smaller – and far less relevant – the Chinese stock market is in comparison to the S&P500, which is also the basis for the vast majority of household net worth for Americans, and global investors (whereas in China, it is the local housing that is far more critical and accounts for roughly 70% of household net worth).
But it’s not just the stock market that shows why China should tread very lightly in its ongoing negotiations with Trump, or why the US president has decided suddenly to re-escalate. Below we lay out [ ] charts showing just why the US indeed continues to have the upper hand in negotiations with China, starting with the relative importance of the US and European economies to China rather than vice versa.
As the first chart below from Deutsche Bank shows, the US and Europe are “much more important for China than China is for US and Europe” as China remains the nation with the highest beta, or the highest relative impact, from a 1% move in either direction for either the US or the Euro area.
Second, whereas the US is now actively contemplating the launch of MMT, and exploding the US twin deficit by issuing virtually unlimited amounts of debt – which it ostensibly can do as long as the US Dollar is the world’s reserve currency – China is already near its leverage peak. In fact, as shown in the chart below, both China’s willingness and ability to lever up is now quite limited according to Deutsche Bank’s Torsten Slok.
Last, and certainly not least, is what we saidback in January representeda “tectonic shift” in China’s economy, when we observed that this year, for the first time in history, China’s current account deficit will turn negative meaning that China will henceforth need financing from the rest of the world, and specifically the US. Which is why, as we said five months ago, it is not Beijing that has leverage over the US, but rather the US whose ability – and desire – to allocate capital to China could mean all the difference for China’s economic growth, or lack thereof.
Finally, and tangentially, assuming trade talks collapse and Trump follows through on his threat of hiking taxes on Chinese imports, it would, as Torsten Slok shows in his latest chart, push US tariffs – which are already higher than most advanced economies – higher than many emerging market countries making the US one of the leading protectionist countries in the work.
That alone would cripple China’s economy, and is perhaps the main reason why Trump decided to once again flex his muscles, if so far only on twitter.
So much for months and months of constant leaks, headlines, tweets, and press reports that US-China trade talks are going great, and are imminent amid an ocean of “optimism” (meant solely to sucker in amateurs into the most obvious bull headfake since 1987).
Just after noon on Sunday, President Trump tweeted that 10% tariffs paid by China on $200 billion in goods will rise to 25% on Friday, and that – contrary to what he himself and his chief economist, Larry Kudlow has said for months, talks on a trade deal have been going too slowly.
And, just to underscore his point, Trump also threatened to impose 25% tariffs on an additional $325 billion of Chinese goods “shortly.”
….of additional goods sent to us by China remain untaxed, but will be shortly, at a rate of 25%. The Tariffs paid to the USA have had little impact on product cost, mostly borne by China. The Trade Deal with China continues, but too slowly, as they attempt to renegotiate. No!
With the tariff rate on numerous goods originally set at 10% and set to more than double in 2019, Trump postponed that decision after China and the US agreed to sit down for trade talks; following Trump’s tweet it is now confirmed that trade talks have hit an impasse and that escalation will be needed to break the stalemate.
It was as recently as Friday that Vice President Mike Pence told CNBC that Trump remained hopeful that he could strike a deal with China (at the same time as he was urging for a rate cut from the Fed).
Curiously, on Wednesday, the White House – clearly hoping to sucker in even more naive bulls to buy stocks at all time highs – said the latest round of talks had moved Beijing and Washington closer to an agreement. Press secretary Sarah Sanders said, “Discussions remain focused toward making substantial progress on important structural issues and re-balancing the US-China trade relationship.”
In recent weeks there were multiple reports that China and U.S. were close to a trade deal, and an agreement could come as soon as Friday. Major sticking points the U.S. and China have been intellectual property theft and forced technology transfers. There has also been disagreement as to whether tariffs be removed or remain in place as an enforcement mechanism.
While it was not clear why Trump has decided to escalate his tariff policy, the most obvious explanation is that for a White House, which has been obsessed with pushing the S&P to record levels, this was the last lever it had at its disposal. And now that the S&P is back at all time highs, the lies can end, if only for the time being.
Steven Mnuchin better have the PPT on speed dial tonight…
Charon took the newly dead across the river Acheron or Styx if they had an obolus to pay for the ride. Those who could not had to wander the banks of the Acheron for one hundred years. Corpses in some regions in ancient Greece were buried or burned with 2 gold coins, called an aureus on their eyes to pay the fare.
“See, a time is coming—declares Hashem—when the city shall be rebuilt for Hashem from the Tower of Hananel to the Corner Gate;”Jeremiah 31:37 (The Israel Bible™)
Tower of Babel (left) and proposed Azrieli tower.
One of the largest real-estate developers in Israel revealed plans for the soon-to-be tallest building in Israel that looks surprisingly similar to images of what the Tower of Babel may have looked like. But a closer look reveals the new building may be much more, what one rabbi thinks could be adry-run for building the Third Temple.
The Azrieli Group, an Israeli real estate and holding company, announced their plan to build Israel’s tallest building as an addition to their already impressive Azrieli Center Complex in Tel Aviv. Topping out at 91 stories and reaching 1,150 feet toward the heavens, it is estimated that the Spiral Tower will take six years to complete at an estimated cost of $666 million. The new tower will take its place next to the iconic circle, square and triangle towers that make up the Azrieli Complex. By building the Spiral Tower, the Azrieli Group will outdo itself as they built the current tallest building in Israel, The Azrieli Sarona Tower which stands 782 feet high with 53 floors, just two years ago.
The plans are ambitious, with around 150,000 square meters containing commercial space, offices, residences, and a hotel. Six underground parking levels, covering an area of 45,000 square meters, will be built at the base of the structure, in addition to a commercial floor connected directly to the light rail. The tower’s peak will include space for conferences and meetings, recreational space, and a 360-degree view of Tel Aviv and the surrounding area. it is predicted that approximately 100,000 people will pass through the center every day.
The unique design was produced by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF), a New York-based architecture firm which is responsible for five of the 10 tallest skyscrapers in the world. According to the press release, the architects took their inspiration from nature as well as Jewish heritage.
“The tower was planned and developed in a unique geometric shape, never before seen in Israel, which captures the eye and the imagination. The main challenge for the initiators and architects was to create harmony between the three iconic towers that form Azrieli Center and the new tower, an impressive, one-of-a-kind structure which stands on its own. The tower’s design takes inspiration from the twists of a snail’s shell, attempting to imitate their natural form. The design also draws inspiration from ancient biblical scrolls and the way they unfurl upwards.”
More cynical critics of the design might draw a comparison between the elegant design presented by the developers and certain depictions of the Biblical Tower of Babel. Though the Biblical account contains no details other than it builders aspirations for it to reach great heights.
And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”Genesis 11:4
Traditional Jewish sources provide additional details. Midrash (homiletic teachings) described “an idol on the top holding a sword, so that it may appear as if it intended to war with God.” The Midrash also described a structure built on tall columns designed to protect the tower from another divine flood.
Some modern scholars have associated the Tower of Babel with known structures, notably the Etemenanki, a ziggurat dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Marduk built by Babylonian King Nabopolassar in 610 BCE. Indeed, the Spiral Tower Design closely resembles a ziggurat, an ancient structure from the Middle East built as a terraced compound of successively receding stories or levels. at the top of each ziggurat was a shrine. Also, similar to the Azrieli Towers, each ziggurat was part of a larger complex that included a courtyard, storage rooms, bathrooms, and living quarters, around which a city was built.
Yisrael Rosenberg is an author who has a powerful connection to the spiritual implications of construction. His daytime job is as a tour guide for theWestern Walltunnels.
“The main sin connected to the Tower of Babel was not in their action but in their intention. The bottom line is that the intent of the builders and the architects of the Azrieli tower is l’shem shamayim (in the name of heaven). The fact that they envisioned a Torah scroll while designing the building is remarkable. Even if it was just for beauty, beauty can be to praise God’s creation.”
Rosenberg noted that the builders of the Tower of Babel came together to challenge heaven, hence their punishment was to be divided and scattered.
“Tel Aviv needs high towers since it is becoming densely populated,” he said. “This is a Tikkun (fixing) for what happened after the Tower of Babel. It allows people to be together in Israel.”
He also noted that for the 2,000 years of exile, Jews excelled in many fields but were less represented in architecture and land development.
“Everything we learn about construction in Israel is just one step away from the Beit Hamikdash,” Rosenberg said. “Just like Solomon’s Temple, the Third Temple will be with the agreement and blessings of every nation in the world and it will be the greatest construction project ever seen. We need to learn how to lead the world in this project.”
A larger volume of CMBS loans are being issued with interest-only (IO) structures, but this rise may put the CMBS market in a dicey position when the economy reaches its next downturn. To put things in perspective, interest-only loan issuance reached $19.5 billion in Q3 2018, six times greater than fully amortizing loan issuance. In comparison, nearly 80% of all CMBS issued in the FY 2006 and FY 2007 was either interest-only or partially interest-only loans.
In theory, the popularity of interest-only loans makes sense, because they provide lower debt service payments and free up cash flow for borrowers. But these benefits are partially offset by some additional risks in the interest-only structure, with the borrower’s inability to deleverage during the loan’s life perhaps being the biggest concern. Additionally, borrowers who opt for a partial interest-only structure incur a built-in “payment shock” when the payments switch from interest-only to principal and interest.
Why are we seeing a spike in interest-only issuance if the loans are inherently riskier than fully amortizing loans? Commercial real estate values are at all-time highs; interest rates are still historically low; expectations for future economic and rent growth are fundamentally sound, and competition for loans on stabilized, income-producing properties is higher than ever. Furthermore, the refinancing pipeline is miniscule compared to the 2015-2017Wall of Maturities, so more capital is chasing fewer deals. This causes lenders to augment loan proceeds and loosen underwriting parameters, including offering more interest-only deals.
Then and Now: Why the Rise in 10 Debt Has Raised Concerns
Between Q1 2010 and Q1 2012, fully amortizing loans dominated new issuance, with its market share amassing as much as 80.4% (Q1 2012). Interest-only issuance was nearly equal to the fully amortizing tally by Q3 2012, as interest-only debt totaled $5.10 billion, only $510 million less than fully amortized loans. Interest-only issuance would soon overtake fully amortizing loan issuance by Q2 2017, as its volume skyrocketed from $5.3 billion in Q1 2017 to $19.5 billion in Q3 2018.
Prior to the 2008 recession, the CMBS market experienced a similar upward trend in interest-only issuance. By 02 2006, interest-only loans represented 57.6% of new issuance, outpacing fully amortizing notes by 38.86%. The difference in issuance between interest-only and fully amortizing loans continued to widen as the market approached the recession, eventually reaching a point where interest-only debt represented 78.8% of new issuance in 01 2007. Even though the prevalence of interest-only debt is mounting, why would this be a concern in today’s market?
IO Loans Are More Likely to Become Delinquent
Interest-only loans have historically been more susceptible to delinquency when the economy falters. Immediately following the recession, delinquency rates across all CMBS loans moved upward. Once the economy began to show signs of recovery, the delinquency rate for fully amortized loans began to decline, while interest-only and partially interest-only delinquencies continued to rise. In July 2012, the delinquency rate for fully amortizing loans was sitting at 5.07% while the interest-only reading reached 14.15%. The outsized delinquency rate for interest-only loans during this time period is not surprising, since many of the five-year and seven-year loans originated in the years prior to the recession were maturing. Many of the borrowers were unable to meet their payments due to significant declines in property prices paired with loan balances that had never amortized.
Over time, the stabilization of the CMBS market led to subsequent declines in the delinquency rates for both the interest-only and partial interest-only sectors. The delinquency rate for interest-only loans clocked in at 3.17% in December 2018, which is down nearly 11 % from its peak. Delinquency rates across all amortization types have failed to return to pre-crisis levels.
Just because a large chunk of interest-only debt became delinquent during the previous recession does not mean the same is destined to happen in the next downturn.
Measuring the likelihood of a loan turning delinquent is typically done by calculating its debt-service coverage ratio (DSCR). Between 2010 and 2015, the average DSCR across all interest-only loans was a relatively high 1.94x. Since 2016, the average DSCR for interest-only debt has fallen slightly. If the average DSCR for interest-only loans continues to decline, the inherent risk those loans pose to the CMBS market will become more concerning.
The average DSCR for newly issued interest-only loans in March 2019 registered at 1.61 x, which is about 0.35x higher than the minimum DSCR recommended by the Commercial Real Estate Finance Council (CREFC). In 2015, CREFC released a study analyzing the impact of prudential and securities regulation across the CRE finance sector. In the study, CREFC cited a 1.25x-DSCR as the cutoff point between relatively healthy and unhealthy loans. The value was chosen through loan-level analysis and anecdotal information from conversations with members.
The figure below maps the DSCR for both fully amortizing and interest-only loans issued between 2004 and 2008. Notice that toward the end of 2006, the average DSCR hugged the 1.25x cutoff level recommended by CREFC. Beyond 2006, the average DSCR for interest-only loans oscillated between healthy and concerning levels.
The second figure focuses on CMBS 2.0 loans, where a similar trend can be spotted. After roughly converting interes-tonly loan DSCRs to amortizing DSCRs using underwritten NOI levels and assuming 30-year amortization, the average DSCR for interest-only loans issued between 2010 and mid- 2014 (2.04x) is much greater than that for fully amortizing issuance (1.78x). While part of this trend can be attributed to looser underwriting standards and/or growing competition, the other driver of the trend is due to selection bias. Lenders will typically give interest-only loans to stronger properties and require amortization from weaker properties, so it makes sense that they would also require less P&I coverage for those interest-only loans on lower-risk properties.
What Lies Ahead for the IO Sector?
Rising interest-only loan issuance paired with a drop in average DSCR may spell for a messy future for the CMBS industry if the US economy encounters another recession. At this point, CMBS market participants can breath a little easier since interest-only performance has remained above the market standard. However, this trend is worth monitoring as the larger volume could portend a loosening in underwriting standards.
Since the end of the great recession, home prices in America have rebounded substantially. Since the dark days of 2009, prices have steadily climbed and areup over 50% on averagefrom the lowest point.
This is great news for homeowners whose homes may be worth more than their pre-recession values, but less great news for homebuyers who can afford less house for the dollar. What’s more is that in some places, home prices have spiked much faster than average, while in other places, home prices have remained depressed.
So where in America are home prices increasing the fastest and the slowest? In light of fluctuating mortgage interest rates, tax reform that’s limited many homeowner deductions, and an affordability crisis in many urban areas, along with Priceonomics customer RefiGuide.org thought we’d dive deeper into the home price data published, aggregated and made available by Zillow.
Over the last year, the median home prices increased the fastest at the state level in Idaho, where prices increased by a staggering 17.2%. In just two states did home prices actually fall last year (Alaska and Delaware). The large cities with the fastest home appreciation were Newark, Dallas, and Buffalo where prices increased more than 15% in each place. The large city where prices decreased the fastest was Seattle, where home prices actually fell 2.4%.
Lastly, we looked at the expensive markets (where homes cost more than a million dollars) that had the highest price appreciation. St. Helena, CA, Quogue, NY and Stinson Beach, CA all had prices increase over 20% last year.
***
For this analysis, we looked at data from the beginning of March 2019 compared to prices one year earlier. We looked at Zillow’s seasonally adjusted median price estimate as published byZillow Research Data.
Nationally, home prices increased 7.2% last year or about $15,000 more than the year before. However, in some states prices spiked much more than that.
Idaho leads the country with home prices increasing by 17.2% last year,driven bystrong demand in the Boise market. In Utah the impact of athriving economyand growing population is that prices increased 14% in just one year. Nevada, likewise is seeingstrong home price growthas people migrate from California and the state’s low taxes are more favorable under the most recent tax reform. Alaska and Delaware have the distinction of being the only states where home prices fell over the last year.
Next, we looked at home prices in the top one hundred largest housing markets, as measured by population. Which cities were experiencing rapid home equity appreciation and which ones are not?
At the city level, home prices have increased the fastest in Newark, NJ where prices have increased more than 17% as buyers who arepriced outof New York City have purchased in this area. Dallas, a city with a strong economy and low taxes has seen home prices increase nearly 17% as well.
Notably, some of the most expensive and desirable cities like Seattle, Oakland and Portland have seen their prices decrease in the last year. Each of these locations has experienced price appreciation during this decade, however.
Were there any smaller cities and towns that experienced home prices rising faster than the big cities? Below shows the fifty places in the United States where home prices increased the most this last year:
Across the Midwest and South, numerous smaller cities experienced price appreciation much greater than 25% last year. In Nettleton, MS prices increased 49% in just one year! Notably, almost none of these high-price growth cities are located on the coasts.
Lastly, what are expensive places to buy a home in America that are just getting more expensive? To conclude we looked at locations where the median home price was over one million dollars and the prices keep rising:
In this rarefied group, prices increased the most in Saint Helena, CA. In this tony town in Napa Valley, prices increased over 25% last year. In second place was Quogue, NY a town in the Hamptons. In fact, 9 out of the top 10 expensive cities with high price appreciation are in California or New York. More specifically, many of these locations are in the vicinity of San Francisco and New York City, the two very large economic engines that are driving home prices.
***
After nearly a decade of vibrant stock market and real estate returns, this year home prices have continued to climb at a steady clip. In only two states in America did prices actually fall, and in five states prices grew more than 10% in a year. As the economy has continued roaring, places that were once known for being affordable like Idaho, Utah, and Nevada have seen home prices spike. While expensive cities like Seattle, Portland and Oakland have seen prices level off in the last year, and places like Newark, Dallas and Buffalo have become less affordable. In this stage of American economic expansion, the once affordable places are seeing their prices escalate.
With a 20% down payment and a 4.90% mortgage rate, and taking into account what’s needed to pay principal, interest, taxes, and insurance (PITI) on the home, it would mean a prospective buyer would need to have $61,453.51 in salary to afford such a purchase.
However, based on your frame of reference, this national estimate may seem extremely low or quite high. That’s because the salary required to buy in different major cities in the U.S. can fall anywhere between $37,659 to $254,835.
The 10 Lowest Cost Metro Areas
Here are the lowest cost metro areas in the U.S., based on data and calculations fromHSH.com:
After the dust settles, Pittsburgh ranks as the cheapest metro area in the U.S. to buy a home. According to these calculations, buying a median home in Pittsburgh – which includes the surrounding metro area – requires an annual income of less than $40,000 to buy.
Just missing the list was Detroit, where a salary of $48,002.89 is needed.
The 10 Most Expensive Metro Areas
Now, here are the priciest markets in the country, also based on data fromHSH.com:
Topping the list of the most expensive metro areas are San Jose and San Francisco, which are both cities fueled by the economic boom in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, two other major metro areas in California, Los Angeles and San Diego, are not far behind.
New York City only ranks in sixth here, though it is worth noting that the NYC metro area extends well beyond the five boroughs. It includes Newark, Jersey City, and many nearby counties as well.
As a final point, it’s worth mentioning that all cities here (with the exception of Denver) are in coastal states.
Notes on Calculations
Data on median home prices comes from the National Association of Realtors and is based on 2018 Q4 information, while national mortgage rate data is derived from weekly surveys by Freddie Mac and the Mortgage Bankers Association of America for 30-year fixed rate mortgages.
Calculations include tax and homeowners insurance costs to determine the annual salary it takes to afford the base cost of owning a home (principal, interest, property tax and homeowner’s insurance, or PITI) in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas.
Standard 28% “front-end” debt ratios and a 20% down payments subtracted from the median-home-price data are used to arrive at these figures.
It was yet another dismal month for US auto sales in April, continuing a recessionary trend that has been in place not only in the US, but globally, for the better part of the last 12 months and certainly since the beginning of 2019. The nonsense-excuse-du jour for this month’s disappointing numbers is being placed on the weatheron seasonality on rising car prices, which easily pushed away an overextended, broke and debt-laden U.S. consumer.
In a nutshell, US auto sales in April tumbled by 6.1% – the biggest monthly drop since May 2011 – to just 16.4 million units, the lowest since October 2014. Aside for an incentive-boost driven rebound in March, every month of 2019 has seen a decline in the number of annualized auto sales. Furthermore, as David Rosenberg notes, the -4.3% Y/Y trend is the weakest it has been for the past 8 years.
Adding “fuel to the fire”, the average price of a new car in April came in at $36,720, the highest ASP so far this year, according toThe Detroit News. It comes at a time where interest rates remain above 6% on average, further pressuring sales.
Edmunds analyst Jessica Caldwell said: “April sales were a bit dampened by the harsh financing conditions we’ve been seeing in the new-car market. Shoppers are really starting to feel the pinch as prices continue to creep up and interest rates loom at post-recession highs.”
Brian Irwin, Accenture Plc’s managing director for North American automotive, said simply: “We are disappointed with how sales turned out.”
Across the board, almost all major names missed estimates, especially as passenger vehicle sales continued to collapse. Nissan was the one manufacturer that was able to buck the trend for the month. Some additional details, according toBloomberg:
Ford’s U.S. sales fell 4.7 percent, according to Automotive News. That was steeper than the 4 percent drop predicted by analysts. The Ford brand fell 4.7 percent, while Lincoln dropped 6.2 percent, the publication reported.
Fiat Chrysler deliveries fell 6.1 percent, its third straight monthly U.S. sales decline. Chrysler sales fell 37% while Dodge slipped 24%. FCA’s Fiat brand saw a 34% dip in sales last month while Alfa Romeo was down 14%.
Honda eked out a gain of0.1 percent, as the new Passport sport utility vehicle helps offset declines for cars including the Accord sedan. Honda’s passenger car sales fell 2.4%, driven down by an 11.5% drop in Accord deliveries.
Toyota sales fell 4.4 percent, while the Corolla sedan saw a 32.8% drop in deliveries and its Camry fell 2.1%.
Nissan, whose total sales rose9 percent, credited cut-rate financing offers with helping boost its redesigned Altima sedan in April, and the automaker is expanding that program to its Rogue SUV this month.
Nissan’s success came from offering a better rate, proving that much of what is keeping the consumer away has been a financial burden. Billy Hayes, a division vice president for Nissan North America, said: “Offering a special rate has done well for us.”
On top those poor results, another one of Detroit’s “Big Three” has said that it will no longer be reporting sales on a monthly basis. FCA said Wednesday it will switch to quarterly sales reports, following the lead of both Ford and General Motors. It said it would begin quarterly reports on October 1 and will provide monthly reports up until that time.
FCA’s Chief Communications Officer Niel Golightly said: “A quarterly sales reporting cadence will continue to provide transparency of our sales results while at the same time aligning with where industry practice is heading.”
More transparency from less reporting – got it. We’re sure it has nothing to do with the fact that FCA’s year-to-date sales are down 4%.
FCA’s U.S Head of Sales Reid Bigland, who has been making excuses for the automaker’s sluggish sales all year, said: “April marks the start of the spring selling season and we anticipate strong consumer spending as we move through May. The industry may be shaking off the first-quarter sluggishness, but shoppers are coming into showrooms and buying.”
FCA’s Ram truck brand was one of the only six brands to post an increase in sales last month, up 25%. The Ram pickup posted a 25% gain with 49,106 units sold and is up 22% for the year. Jeep sales were lower by 8% in April, catalyzed by a 25% drop in Wrangler sales and a 13% drop in Cherokee sales. Ram had also bucked the trend last month:
And it’s no coincidence that the biggest failsafe for auto sellers – fleet sales – which can sometimes allow sellers to stuff the channel to meet numbers, have finally cooled.
Zo Rahim, an analyst for Cox Automotive said: “Fleet sales in April appear to have cooled from their impressive run in the first quarter. With overall sales down and fleet moderating, softness in vehicle sales still stems from weakness in the retail market. Affordability concerns coupled with attractive supply in the used-vehicle market might suggest retail sales might not bottom out for the foreseeable future.”
In February, auto sales plunged to 18 month lows as SUV demand hit a brick wall. SUVs were, until this February, one of the sole remaining bright spots in the rapidly slowing U.S. auto market. Despite the fact that they were crippling traditional sedan sales, Americans’ transition to SUVs was seen as a silver lining, prompting many automakers to make infrastructure changes to account for the change in demand. That silver lining looks to have all but completely disappeared at this point.
In January, auto companies set the tone for the year,starting2019 just as miserably as 2018 ended, with major double digit plunges in sales from manufacturers like Nissan and Daimler.
Rich people are picking up sticks and getting out of dodge, according to Johannesburg-based research firm New World Wealth, which notes that around 108,000 millionaires migrated across borders in 2018 – a 14% increase over 2017 and more than double the level in 2013.
The top destinations? Australia, the United States and Canada, reportsBloomberg. Around 3,000 of the millionaires left the UK last year – with Brexit and taxes cited as possible motivations.
Present conditions such as crime, lack of business opportunities or religious tensions are key factors, according to the report – which can also serve as key future indicators according to Andrew Amoils, New World Wealth’s head of research.
“It can be a sign of bad things to come as high-net-worth individuals are often the first people to leave — they have the means to leave unlike middle-class citizens,” says Amoils.
Top destinations
According to New World’s report, Australia tops most “wish lists” for immigrants due to its perceived safety (deadly bugs and animals aside, we assume). There is also no inheritance tax down under, and the country has strong business ties to Japan, China and South Korea. Moreover, Australia “also stands out for its sustained growth, having escaped the financial crisis largely unscathed and avoided recessions for the past 27 years,” according to Bloomberg.
The second most popular country was the United States – and in particular the cities of Los Angeles, New York, Miami and the San Francisco Bay as preferred options.
Fleeing China and India
Due to China’s strict regulations on capital outflows in recent years, many of the country’s wealthy are subject to hefty taxes. In response, assets are shifting as rich Asians move to more developed countries.
The outflow of high-net worth individuals from China and India isn’t particularly concerning from an economic standpoint as far more new millionaires are being created there than are leaving, New World Wealth said.
“Once the standard of living in these countries improves, we expect several wealthy people to move back,” Amoils said. –Bloomberg
Turkey, meanwhile, lost 4,000 millionaires last year – the third straight year of losses, while around 7,000 Russian millionaires have left the country amid crippling sanctions related to the annexation of Crimea.
Even at a time of low interest rates and rising wages, Americans simply can’t afford a home in more than 70% of the country, according toCBS. Out of 473 US counties that were analyzed in a recent report, 335 listed median home prices were more than what average wage earners could afford. According to the report from ATTOM Data Solutions, these counties included Los Angeles and San Diego in California, as well as places like Maricopa County in Arizona.
New York City claimed the largest share of a person’s income to purchase a home. While on average, earners nationwide needed to spend only about 33% of their income on a home, residents in Brooklyn and Manhattan need to shell out more than 115% of their income. In San Francisco this number is about 103%. Homes were found to be affordable in places like Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia.
This news is stunning because homes are considerably more affordable today than they were a year ago. Although prices are rising in many areas, they are also falling in places like Manhattan. Unaffordability in the market has been the result of slower home building and owners staying in their homes longer. Both have reduced the supply of homes in the market.
And the market may continue to create better conditions for buyers. Affordability could improve because of the fact that homes are out of reach for so many seekers, according to Todd Teta, chief product officer at ATTOM Data Solutions. Today’s market is also more affordable than it was a decade ago, before the crisis. Home prices were about the same prior to the crisis, even though income adjusted for inflation was lower.
“What kept the market going was looser lending standards, so that was compensating for affordability issues,” Teta said. Since then, standards have toughened (for now, at least).
We recentlywrote aboutresidents of New York City who simply claimed they couldn’t afford to live there.
More than athird of New York residentscomplained that they “can’t afford to live there” anymore (and yet they do). On top of that, many believe that economic hardships are going to force them to leave the city in five years or less, according to a Quinnipiac poll published a couple weeks ago. The poll surveyed 1,216 voters between March 13 and 18.
In total, 41% of New York residents said they couldn’t cope with the city’s high cost of living. They believe they will be forced to go somewhere where the “economic climate is more welcoming”, according to the report.
Ari Buitron, a 49-year-old paralegal from Queens said: “They are making this city a city for the wealthy, and they are really choking out the middle class. A lot of my friends have had to move to Florida, Texas, Oregon. You go to your local shop, and it’s $5 for a gallon of milk and $13 for shampoo. Do you know how much a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment is? $1700! What’s wrong with this picture?”
San Francisco Bay Area homes declined last month on a y/y basis for the first time in seven years,according to CoreLogic.
The median price paid for an existing home in the nine counties (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma) was $830,000, down 0.1% compared with March 2018.
The last time prices fell on a y/y basis was March 2012. After that, the Federal Reserve injected several more rounds of quantitative easing that sent home prices soaring for 83 consecutive months. In March 2018, the median home price gained 16.2% over March 2016.
In 2H18, the appreciation rate dramatically slowed due to quantitative tightening, mortgage rate increase, and the start of a synchronized global slowdown.
“It’s not that surprising that we hit the wall, at least in terms of a pause,” said Andrew LePage, a CoreLogic analyst, wrote in a release.
Glen Bell, a real estate broker with BetterHomes and Gardens Reliance Partners in the East Bay region, said home sales and prices tend to accelerate between February and March as buyers prepare to move before the summer months. He said there was a slight pick up in activity, “but not as strong as last year.”
“It reflects a trend that began in mid-2018 when home sales slowed and inventory grew, forcing sellers to be more competitive,” LePage said.”The year-over-year increase in the region’s median sale price was 16.2% in March last year. But after that, the gains in the median gradually decreased each month and fell to the 2 to 3% range early this year and then disappeared this March.”
Sales of homes in the nine counties were 15% lower in March when compared with last year. It was the lowest March in terms of sales in 11 years. Sales have been slowing on a y/y basis for the last 10 months – an ominous sign that not just the top is in, but a quick reversal in price is immient.
Santa Clara County noticed the most significant y/y median home price declines, falling 10% to $1.08 million in March. It was one of the hottest markets on the West Coast, if not the entire country last year – has fallen into a dangerous slump where prices are crashing.
“We’ve definitely seen some softness and some slowing,” said Michael Repka, chief executive and general counsel of DeLeon Realty in Palo Alto.
The total number of homes sold in the nine counties hit 6,124, up 39% from Feburary, but down 14.8% y/y, CoreLogic reported.
The slowdown in home sales and a decline in price last month “mainly reflect buyers purchasing decisions in Feburary,” LePage said in the press release. In early 1Q19, the market was recovering from a slowdown in the economy and a volatile stock market from Christmas.
Since Feburary, stock market volatility has dropped, mortgage rates are much lower, and since mid-March, IPOs have been debuting, which could bring more buyers to the market in the coming months.
Jason Nelson, an agent with Alain Pinel/Compass in Mill Valley, said that in Southern Marin, “there might be a slowdown in the market especially on the higher end.”
S&P Dow Jones Indices published S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Indices Tuesday, indicating that the decline in home prices wasn’t just centered in the San Francisco Bay Area, but rather seen across the entire US.
(Los Angeles Times) It’s hard to overstate the opulence showcased in developer Bruce Makowsky’s $150-million spec house, dubbed “Billionaire.” Perched above Bel Air, the four-story mansion offers a world of pure imagination within its walls.
A Bel-Air mansion built on speculation is at the center of a legal dispute after a Zillow listing for the $150-million home was hijacked by an unknown user. (Berlyn Photography)
Jockeying for attention across 38,000 square feet are 12 bedrooms, 21 bathrooms, three kitchens, 130 artworks, a 40-seat movie theater, a $30-million fleet of exotic cars, two wine cellars stocked with Champagne, a four-lane bowling alley and a candy room filled with towering cylinders of sweets.
Image is everything when seeking nine figures for a single estate. What, then, happens when that image is allegedly tainted? That’s what a lawsuit filed by the self-assured, suede-jacket-wearing Makowsky against real estate company Zillow aims to find out.
Earlier this year, Zillow falsely showed that the mega-mansion sold for tens of millions less than its asking price. Makowsky sued for $60 million in damages, citing permanent harm to the property’s perception.
On April 19, Zillow filed to dismiss the suit, chiefly citing a section of the Communications Decency Act that protects web operators from being responsible for information published by its users. The hearing is set for June 24.
The sham began in February, when an unknown user with a Chinese IP address and fake phone number side-stepped Zillow’s security measures and toyed with the sale prices displayed on the mansion’s listing.
Zillow displays pages for roughly 110 million homes in the U.S., and it allows owners to go in and change information about their home when necessary. Usually, that means noting a recent remodel or added square footage that may affect a home’s value, but the feature also opens the door for false information.
On Feb. 4, Zillow showed that Makowsky’s home — which is on the market for $150 million — sold for $110 million. It never did. Over the course of the next week, the real estate site falsely reported sale prices of $90.54 million and $94.3 million, as well as a phantom open house that never took place.
Soon after, Makowsky’s attorney Ronald Richards pointed out the falsities to Zillow’s legal team in an email. After some back and forth, included in the lawsuit, Kim Nielson, senior lead counsel for Zillow Group, responded with this:
“Any home on our website can be claimed by the homeowner. There are a series of questions that must be answered, but if someone attempts to claim it enough times, they will know the questions asked (and be able to figure out what information they need to verify their identity).”
She added that not all claims are manually reviewed, which allowed the user to manipulate the listing details without proving their identity.
Later that month, a limited liability company owned by Makowsky filed the lawsuit seeking $60 million in damages. It claims that Zillow “admittedly published false information” and destroyed the property’s perception as an elite listing worth more than $100 million.
Makowsky himself has axed the price twice since bringing the spec house to market for $250 million two years ago. He most recently trimmed the tag to $150 million in January, saying that he was just trying to be realistic.
Makowsky made his fortune selling handbags on QVC before shifting to high-end real estate about eight years ago as the head of BAM Luxury Development Group. (Cindy Ord / Getty Images)
Taking aim at Zillow’s security process, the lawsuit alleges that Zillow has no safeguards in place to stop trolls or criminals from claiming a property and posting false information.
A spokeswoman for Zillow declined to comment on the pending litigation but stressed that it goes to great lengths to display current and accurate data on its website, which is largely sourced from public records.
The complaint also stresses Zillow’s market power. The website leads the real estate industry with an estimated 36 million unique monthly visitors, and Makowsky said multiple colleagues called to congratulate him on a sale that never happened.
But of those millions of monthly visitors to Zillow, few are searching for homes priced in the nine figures other than for aspirational reasons. Fewer have the actual means to afford it.
Only a handful of local L.A. residents, and a small market outside of that, have the ability to buy homes listed for north of $100 million. As of 2017, there were 680 billionaires in the U.S, according to the research firm Wealth-X, and about 2,750 worldwide.
Jerry Jolton, an agent with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, said three things need to come together to sell a home in the $100-million arena: luck, timing and the right client.
“We’re dealing with a very exclusive group of people who’ve attained such wealth,” he said.
Oftentimes, developers eye international wealth when floating a nine-digit listing. However, Jolton said foreign buyers account for only around 21% of L.A.-area homes sales over $20 million.
Beyond visitors to online listing services, Makowsky faces another challenge in his pursuit of a high-dollar deal: comparable sales in the tony Westside area.
Michael Sahakian, also with Coldwell Banker, sold the property that now holds Makowsky’s mansion back in the ’90s. While noting the estate’s opulence, he said its placement in East Gate Bel Air — one of the city’s most exclusive and pricey pockets — will make selling it a challenge.
Most homes there sell for around $2,000 to $3,000 per square foot. For context, Makowsky’s estate is on the market for $3,947 per square foot.
Still, because an acre of East Gate goes for around $20 million, it’s rare for a home larger than 30,000 square feet to go up for sale.
Makowsky, in his early 60s, made his fortune selling handbags on QVC before shifting to high-end real estate about eight years ago as the head of BAM Luxury Development Group.
His development brand is largely a reflection of his own extravagant interests and tastes; many of the lavish furnishings, finishes and other accouterments incorporated into his projects are sourced from his travels around the world. Custom furnishings produced by high-end brands such as Fendi, Bentley and Louis Vuitton often play an integral role in his homes.
Among his notable projects was a testosterone-infused showplace in Beverly Hills that featured a $200,000 sculpture of a giant blue hand grenade and a replica of James Dean’s motorcycle. Originally listed at $85 million, the 23,000-square-foot house sold in 2014 to Minecraft creator Markus Persson for $70 million.
“Given that the economy is now totally and completely dependent on inflating asset bubbles, it makes no sense to invest for the long-term” – Charles Hugh Smith
Beneath the endlessly hyped expansion in gross domestic product (GDP) of the past two decades, the economy has changed dramatically. The American Dream boils down to social and economic mobility, a.k.a. getting ahead through hard work, merit and wise investments in oneself and one’s family.
The opportunities for this mobility in the post World War 2 era broadened as civil rights and equal rights expanded. The 1970s saw a disruption of working-class mobility as high-paying factory jobs disappeared, leaving services jobs that paid less or required more training, i.e. a college degree.
The U.S. economy took off in the 1980s for a number of reasons, including computer technologies, federal stimulus (deficit spending) and financialization (a topic I’ve covered many times). With millions more college graduates entering the workforce and the Internet creating entire new industries, the opportunities to “get ahead” increased across the social and economic spectrum.
But something changed in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble bursting.The fruits of financialization–highly leveraged debt gambled for short-term gains in markets–were extended to everyone with a job (or a willingness to lie) via liar loans, no-document loans and subprime mortgages.
Just like bigshot financiers on Wall Street, J.Q. Citizen could leverage a couple thousand dollars in cash (or even better, borrow the closing costs via a 105% of value mortgage and put nothing down) and buy a McMansion worth $250,000 or even $500,000.
The only difference between bigshot financiers and J.Q. Citizen was the scale of the leverage and gamble: J.Q. Citizen could leverage a few grand into hundreds of thousands, while the financier could leverage a bit of collateral into mega-millions.
The goal wasn’t homeownership, the purported “official” goal of subprime mortgages: it was short-term speculative gains via “flipping” the house in a few months. Just like the bigshot financiers, the subprime mortgage market enabled marginal borrowers to take control of assets far in excess of their actual capital and sell them to a greater fool for a quick profit far in excess of their earnings.
Wall Street loved this distribution of financialization to the masses because Wall Street made a fortune packaging (securitizing) this toxic debt and selling it to unwary, credulous investors as “low risk” (heh) assets.
After the mortgage-securitization-fraud-housing bubble popped, a secular trend– wages for the bottom 95% of wage earners stagnating–accelerated. “Getting ahead” via earning a college diploma, working hard and counting on merit no longer worked; families with privileges and capital got wealthier, and everyone else found the purchasing power of their earnings declined even as stocks and housing soared.
The only way to “get ahead” in a globalized, financialized economy is either 1) earn at least $200,000 a year from one’s labor or 2) gamble in the inflating bubbles of stocks and housing. In high-cost regions, even $200,000 isn’t enough to get ahead (i.e. buy a crumbling bungalow on a tiny lot for $800,000) if the wage-earner has student loans and/or children; the household needs two earners making top 5% salaries.
The more money the central banks throw at stock-housing asset bubbles, the higher they loft, a process that has pushed housing in high-cost regions out of reach of all those with average jobs and incomes. So much for “getting ahead.”
The economy has changed dramatically for the worse: getting a graduate degree no longer guarantees getting ahead (millions of other workers globally have the same credentials); working hard is equally iffy, and traditional investments in one’s family either no longer yields gains (higher education) or they are gambles in the guise of “investments” (housing).
Given that the economy is now totally and completely dependent on inflating asset bubbles, it makes no sense to invest for the long-term: a short-term gambling mentality is required to avoid getting destroyed when the bubble-du-jour pops.
Everyone who believes bubbles never pop, they only expand forever and ever, has never looked at a chart of the S&P 500 (SPX), which illustrates that bubbles always pop, destroying the capital of all who neglected to sell at the top.
If “getting ahead” depends on playing asset bubbles, it’s not getting ahead, it’s gambling.
New home sales were expected to retrace some of February’s gains but in a reversal of yesterday’s dismal drop in existing home sales, new home sales in March soared 4.5% higher MoM (and February was revised stronger from +4.9% MoM to +5.9% MoM).
This is the 3rd straight month of rising new home sales.
The 692k SAAR is the highest since Nov 2017 – near the post-crisis highs.
The reason – among others – is simple – median new home prices plunged to their lowest since Feb 2017 (a 9.7% from a year earlier to a two-year low of $302,700)….
A mixed picture across regions with Northeast March new home sales plunging to 28K, down 22.2% from February, but Midwest surged from 74K to 87K, up 17.6%.
The supply of homes at the current sales rate decreased to six months from 6.3 months in February. The number of new homes for sale in the period was little changed at 344,000.
New-home purchases account for about 10 percent of the market and are calculated when contracts are signed. They are considered a timelier barometer than purchases of previously-owned homes, which are calculated when contracts close.
Let’s just hope the recent resurgence in mortgage rates doesn’t last…
The forced flight from unaffordable and dysfunctional urban regions is as yet a trickle, but watch what happens when a recession causes widespread layoffs in high-wage sectors.
(Charles Hugh Smith) For hundreds of years, rural poverty has driven people to urban areas: cities offer paying work and abundant opportunities to get ahead, and these financial incentives have transformed the human populace from largely rural to largely urban in the developed world.
Now a new set of financial pressures are forcing a migration of urban residents out of cities which are increasingly unaffordable and dysfunctional. As highly paid skilled workers and global capital have flooded into high-job-growth regions, living costs and the costs of doing business have skyrocketed: where not too long ago $1,000 a month would secure a modest one-bedroom apartment in major urban job centers, now it takes $2,000 or $3,000 a month to rent a modest flat.
Wages for the average worker have not doubled or tripled, and this asymmetry between soaring living costs and stagnant incomes is driving the exodus out of cities that are only affordable to the top 10% of wage earners, or those who bought a house decades ago and have locked in low property taxes.
Gordon Long and I discuss thisforced migrationin a new video program. It’s important to note that we’re not talking about economy-wide inflation or the general rise in the cost of living; we’re talking about the hyper-drive cost increases that characterize high-cost urban areas.
I’ve addressed economy-wide real-world inflation many times,for example:
In high-cost urban regions, burritos aren’t $7.50; they’re $10 or $12. Parking tickets aren’t $15, they’re $60, and so on.
Consider this chart of rents in the San Francisco Bay Area: unless the household’s income has shot up in parallel with rents, this cost of living is simply unaffordable.
Here are the dynamics driving this financially forced flight, which hits the young especially hard: who can afford to buy a house when cramped, decaying 100-year old bungalows are $900,000 and property taxes are $15,000 or more? Who can afford to have kids when childcare costs a small fortune?
The elderly retired who don’t own a house free and clear are also being priced out of these regions.
1. Household income is stagnating as real-world inflation erodes the purchasing power of income: rent, housing, childcare, healthcare, dining out are all rising far faster than “official” inflation of 2% annually.
2. Prices in high-cost urban zones are increasing faster than in less pricey regions. Areas with job growth are experiencing supply-demand imbalances in rent and housing. Only top earners can afford to buy a home.
3. Young households are burdened with student loan debt, making it financially difficult to buy a home in a pricey urban zone and start a family. The only way to afford a home and children is to move to a region with affordable housing and living costs.
4. Income in high-cost urban areas is more heavily skewed by “winner take most” dynamics of finance and technology; the Pareto Distribution of 20% earn 80% of the income is extended so the top 4% take 64% the income. Even above-average incomes are not enough to support a traditional middle-class lifestyle.
5. Local government services cost more in high-cost urban areas, and so cities and municipalities are relentlessly increasing taxes, fees and licensing, pressuring all but the top tier of households.
6. The sacrifices required to live in high-cost urban areas are no longer worth it: traffic congestion, long commutes, high-stress jobs, homelessness and decaying infrastructure are outweighing the benefits of hipster urbanism.
Although it’s verboten to mention this in the we’re so fabulous local media, many of these high-cost urban regions are hopelessly dysfunctional. Taxpayers have ponied up billions of dollars in new taxes, fees and bond measures, and yet none of the problems that make daily life miserable ever get better.
At some point, the urban hipsterism that seemed so cool and appealing becomes just another example of the Haves and Have-Nots: how many households can afford $200+ for a meal and drinks at the latest foodie-fusion bistro? What level of sainthood is required to tolerate the traffic or crowded public transport to get to the hipster paradise, including avoiding the bodies, needles and other detritus of the entrenched homeless on the sidewalks?
The forced flight from unaffordable and dysfunctional urban regions is as yet a trickle, but watch what happens when a recession causes widespread layoffs in high-wage sectors and suddenly the hipster bistro that was always jammed is empty, and then shuttered. To replaced the taxes lost to layoffs and closed businesses, the political class will have no choice but to launch a frenzy of higher taxes, fees and surcharges on those left behind.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-761605237-5c0c7d21c9e77c0001e27529.jpg)
Easy Money Martin 
You must be logged in to post a comment.