Thursday, December 27, 2007

Single-family housing market `remains grim,' index official observes

Leo (July 23 — Aug. 22)

Some days the wind blows in the right direction at just the right speed. Those good days will soon return.



U.S. home prices post their biggest drop ever
Single-family housing market `remains grim,' index official observes
December 27, 2007

NEW YORK–U.S. home prices fell in October for the 10th consecutive month, this time posting the biggest drop ever, according to a key index.

The record 6.7 per cent slide in the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home-price index also marked the 23rd consecutive month that prices either fell or grew more slowly than the month before.

"No matter how you look at these data, it is obvious that the current state of the single-family housing market remains grim,'' Robert Shiller, who helped create the index, said yesterday.

The October decline surpassed the previous record of 6.3 per cent in April 1991. The index tracks prices of existing single-family homes in 10 metropolitan areas.

The index is considered a strong measure of home prices because it examines price changes on the same property over time, instead of calculating a median price of homes sold during the month.

Home prices could fall another 10 per cent over the next 12 to 18 months before bottoming out, said Patrick Newport, an economist with financial consultancy Global Insight.

Newport said four of the largest groups currently trying to sell homes – banks holding foreclosed properties, home builders, speculators and unemployed consumers – are typically flexible about lowering house prices.

Sales of homes will probably start to rebound late in 2008, with price appreciation to follow, Newport said.

A second, broader Case-Shiller index, which measures 20 metropolitan areas, fell 6.1 per cent in October.

Among the 20 areas used in the broader index, 11 posted record year over year declines and all 20 declined in October compared with September.

Leading the index lower was Miami, where prices fell 12.4 per cent in October compared with the same month last year. Tampa was the next-worst-performing city with a year over year loss of 11.8 per cent.

Besides those two cities, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix and San Diego also posted double-digit declines.

Atlanta and Dallas, where prices had previously risen, fell a little in October at 0.7 per cent and 0.1 per cent respectively.

Only three areas – Charlotte, N.C.; Portland, Ore.; and Seattle – posted year over year appreciation in October. Charlotte posted the largest gain at 4.3 per cent.

Among the three, only Charlotte is likely to avoid declining house prices within the coming few months, Newport said. The area has not had the periods of rapid appreciation other markets have experienced.

Kevin Johnson, co-founder of Homes of the South Inc. in Charlotte, agreed.

"We never jumped very high like other areas," Johnson said, so the city won't ``have a hard fall ... "

Bob Morgan, president of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, said the area's strong economy is also playing a role in supporting prices. Preliminary numbers show more than 14,000 jobs were created in the Charlotte area in 2007, he said, up from more than 12,000 in 2006.

The job growth is coming from a "pretty healthy" variety of sectors, including the financial industry, Morgan said. Charlotte is home to two of the country's four largest banks, Bank of America Corp. and Wachovia Corp.

Carole Brake, sales manager at Bissell Hayes Realtors SouthPark Office in Charlotte, said prices are still up despite an increase in inventory.

"Sellers are not in a mode to reduce their prices. They want a fair market price for their home," Brake said.


Associated Press

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Anatomy of a credit crunch

SHUTTERSTOCK PHOTO ILLUSTRATION

A worldwide credit crunch tied to U.S. “subprime” mortgages began in August.

The U.S. credit crunch timeline

Year-end 2006: The value of all U.S. homes, excluding rentals, peaks at 153 per cent of GDP, the highest level in at least six decades.

June 22, 2007: New York brokerage Bear Stearns Cos. spooks Wall Street in saying it will bail out one of its hedge funds due to subprime-mortgage losses. On July 18, the firm reports that its two hedge funds that invested heavily in subprimes are essentially worthless, having lost more than 90 per cent of their value, or $1.4 billion (U.S.)

Aug. 9: French bank BNP Paribas SA suspends three of its funds with U.S. subprime exposure.

Aug. 16: Troubled Countrywide Financial Corp., the U.S. No. 1 mortgage lender, draws down $11.5 billion from its credit lines to stave off insolvency.

Aug. 22: Reports show U.S. home foreclosures were up 93 per cent in July 2007 over July 2006. There were 179,599 foreclosure filings in July, up from 92,845 the previous year.

September: The Bank of England injects $55 billion into Northern Rock PLC to rescue Britain's No. 5 mortgage lender. A run on the firm by depositors is the first in memory.

Sept. 30: U.S. house prices begin to drop, a trend certain to continue as unsold homes proliferate and foreclosure rates rise.

Oct. 25: Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. records an $8.5 billion writedown, mostly on consumer loans including subprime mortgages. CEO Stanley O'Neal is fired days later.

Nov. 5: Citigroup Inc. says subprime mortgages and related securities lost as much as $11 billion of their value in the previous month. CEO Charles Prince is forced out.

Dec. 7: CIBC discloses a whopping $9.8 billion exposure to the U.S. subprime market.

Dec. 12: Five central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada and the European Central Bank, agree to inject $40 billion into the global financial system, with an additional $24 billion set aside for European buyers of scarce U.S. dollars.

Who would have thought questionable loans to Sacramento trailer-home buyers could someday trigger a global credit crisis
December 16, 2007

Business Columnist

The cavalry rode to the rescue of the global financial system last week. We hope this unprecedented bailout works, because nothing else has since a worldwide credit crunch tied to U.S. "subprime" mortgages began in August.

The U.S. Federal Reserve Board has cut its key federal funds rate three straight times, or a full percentage point. Henry Paulson, the U.S. treasury secretary, is trying to cobble together a superfund to quarantine the big banks' soured loans, and last week unveiled a bailout plan for homeowners who can't make their mortgage payments. Retiring Bank of Canada governor David Dodge has been trying to repair a troubled financial sector – non-bank asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) in a deal Canadian banks completed Friday. And so-called "sovereign funds," owned by state governments hailing from Dubai and Singapore, have injected capital into ailing Citigroup Inc. and Swiss banking giant UBS AG.

That's not sound and fury signifying nothing, but it might as well be. Restorative efforts to date have failed to arrest the low-grade panic on Wall Street and in other global financial centres, where expectations of further massive losses run high. Banks, brokerages and other major financial institutions bracing for an estimated $400 billion (U.S.) in subprime mortgage losses are so gun-shy they've even stopped lending to each other, and are turning away credit-worthy prospective consumer and commercial borrowers in order to shore up their balance sheets. A sustained credit freeze of this magnitude could steer the U.S. and Canada into a recession, perhaps a severe one, by the first half of next year if the financiers' confidence in their own system isn't promptly restored. Apart from the financial wreckage, an estimated 2 million Americans risk losing their homes in the next year.

"What we are witnessing is essentially the breakdown of our modern-day banking system," Bill Gross, managing director at Pacific Investment Management Co. LLC (Pimco), writes in his latest client note. Pimco manages close to $1 trillion, and the investing acumen of Gross rivals that of Warren Buffett. His latest commentary only added to fears on Wall Street that the worst of the bad-loan reporting isn't over, even after staggering writedowns declared by blue-chip financial houses including UBS, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. Last week, Bank of America Corp. and Wachovia Corp., the No. 5 U.S. bank, declared or warned of large subprime-related losses. Canadian banks have so far taken a $1.3 billion hit.

"Credit contraction, with its inevitable companion of asset destruction," Gross writes, "is spreading with the speed of an infectious disease."

To halt the contagion, five central banks – the U.S. Fed, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Swiss National Bank – joined Wednesday to inject as much as $64 billion of liquidity into the world financial system.

The funds will be distributed in four auctions, beginning tomorrow and stretching into January. Twenty-four billion dollars of the amount represents greenbacks the Fed is making available to the ECB and the Swiss National Bank for European clients who've coped most of this year with a scarcity of U.S. dollars. It's the biggest central-bank intervention in the global system since the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and is described by one U.S. analyst as "revolutionary" for the impressive degree of co-operation among the central banks.

"As always with central banking, the most important message is in the signal that central banks are sending," Bruce Kasman, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co. wrote in his blog Wednesday. "They are telling us they are now prepared to take an aggressive and co-ordinated approach to dealing with this issue."

To get the banks lending again, the U.S. Fed-led initiative will lend money to banks at discount rates and, in an unorthodox move, accept as collateral a wide range of assets including securities not backed by government entities. "More than lowering rates in the economy, just having this banking system liquefied will make a huge difference," Wachovia CEO Ken Thompson said in a Wednesday conference. Financiers "are still fearful of each other, and everybody is worried about counter-party risk and so [banks] are hoarding their balance sheets, and this will help that."

Financiers have had ample grounds for fear. Write-down announcements by the world's biggest financial institutions have been a bad penny for months. UBS has alarmed the market more than once with fresh revelations of soured mortgage-related loans on its books. Banks thought to be free of the contagion, including London-based giant HSBC Holding PLC, have dismayed rivals with news of subprime-infected balance sheets. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce stunned Bay Street on Dec. 7 by revealing its $9.8 billion exposure to the U.S. subprime market.

The deep-seated problem is that no one knows exactly where the debt is, in what amount, and in what state of repair. Since the U.S. housing bubble began to inflate in 2004, something like $2 trillion worth of mortgages have been granted, in many cases to "ninjas" (no income, no job, no assets). In the case of low-income borrowers with spotty credit histories, mortgages were sold at "teaser" rates as low as 7 per cent that would eventually "reset" at as much as 13 per cent.

Foreclosures are now mounting, as the dubious mortgages begin to reset. The toxic loans, which should have been labeled "junk mortgages" yet inexplicably bore Triple-A ratings from credulous credit-rating agencies, were bundled into packages of $100 million or more and labeled ABCP and "collateralized debt obligations" (CBOs). They were then swapped and re-swapped among global banks, brokerages, hedge funds and other investors who each garnered a fee as the hot potatoes made their way around the globe.

The outcome has been one of the biggest fiascos in the financial system in modern times. "What is happening in credit markets today is a huge blow to the credibility of the Anglo-Saxon model of transactions-oriented financial capitalism," veteran money-market observer Martin Wolf wrote last week in the U.K. Financial Times. "A mixture of crony capitalism and gross incompetence has been on display in the core financial markets of New York and London."

The system itself appears long ago to have grasped the enormity of its troubles, and thus failed to react positively to the remedial actions preceding last week's dramatic central-banks bailout scheme. As recently as the day it was announced, Wall Street initially jumped for joy, pushing the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 270 points, before coming to its senses and closing the day up just 41 points, or 0.3 per cent.

The jolt has had some salutary effects, in the realm of central-bank practices. The stigma of the Fed's "discount window" has kept banks from borrowing there for fear of appearing desperate. Under last week's bailout scheme, banks are encouraged to borrow at discount rates knowing their identities won't be revealed.

Regional lenders far smaller than the New York-based "money-centre" banks will be urged to deal directly with the Fed for the first time, bypassing intermediaries. A humbled Fed is adopting tools used by the European Central Bank and the Reserve Bank of Australia, which include lending to a much wider variety of institutions and accepting a more diverse range of collateral.

Both the Fed and the Bank of Canada have hinted strongly that assistance will continue beyond January if necessary. That's not enough to satisfy Gross, who says a federal funds rate cut to 3 per cent from the current 4.25 per cent is required to head off a recession. And when the system is able finally to exhale, there will be a need to debate regulatory and other reforms – including more transparency about the quality of assets on bankers' books.

The current calamity arises from a systemic failure over, of all things, home mortgages – one of the most dead-simple financial transactions in existence. When the housing bubble was gaining altitude, lenders, regulators, debt-rating agencies, buyers of bundled mortgages and central bankers couldn't imagine that questionable loans to Sacramento trailer-home buyers could someday trigger a global credit crisis.

Even those relatively few optimists about last week's dramatic bailout efforts are counseling patience about recovering from a catastrophic blunder that has come close to crippling the global financial system.

"The big, big picture is that a bunch of people basically accepted much more debt than their balance sheets could afford," Jeff Bronchick, chief investment officer at Reed Conner Birdwell, a Los Angeles money management firm, told the Wall Street Journal last week.

"That has to be cured and it can only be cured with time."


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