Category: US Housing
The analysis published under this category are as follows.
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
U.S. Home Owners Drowning in the American Dream / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: Raul_I_Meijer
According to a new Zillow report, 40% of all US mortgage holders can’t afford to sell their homes. That is 20 million Americans homeowners, 10 million who are downright underwater and another 10 million who are so close to being there that they don’t have the money to cover the cost of selling. And those are still numbers across the spectrum; things are far towards the bottom. ’30% of homes in the bottom price tier are in negative equity, while 18.1% of homes in the middle tier and 10.7% in the top tier are underwater’. If we assume that at the bottom, like across the spectrum, as many people are close to being submerged as those who already are, that would mean 60% of bottom tier borrowers are too poor to sell their homes (i.e. have less than 20% equity).
Saturday, May 17, 2014
U.S. Homeowners Become Renters - Welcome to the Third World America / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: John_Rubino
This morning’s housing report was huge. As one representative headline put it: “Housing starts up sharply; permits highest since 2008″.
Dig just a little deeper and it’s still huge, though in a different way. Turns out that all the increase was in apartment building, while single family homes — the linchpin of what used to be thought of as the American Dream — actually fell yet again. Here’s a brief but on-point analysis from the New York Times:
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Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Are Homebuilder Stocks a Buy Ahead of the Spring? / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: Investment_U
David Becker writes: Homebuilding stocks are down nearly 5% so far in 2014, but as spring approaches, an increase in sales could just be the remedy these shares need. Unfortunately, homebuilders generally underperform in May and June, and higher housing prices and recent disappointing sales data could further erode the prices of homebuilder stocks.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
The Mortgage Is Due for Fannie and Freddie / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: Money_Morning
Shah Gilani writes: You can call it a bailout, a rakeover – I mean, takeover – or socialism for cash. It’s all that and more.
But, whatever you call it, it’s not going to last.
The $187.5 billion bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back in 2008 was absolutely necessary. Before you tell me I’m crazy, let me tell you why…
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Thursday, May 08, 2014
Profitable Investment Opportunities in a Fragile U.S. Housing Market / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: DailyGainsLetter
George Leong writes: The housing market continues to hold. But there are some warning signs. Famed investor Warren Buffett suggested the housing market was overvalued and due for an adjustment.
Now, while there are some indications of an overhyped housing market, I’m not convinced it’s bubble-like quite yet. But be warned: mortgage rates and interest rates are heading higher. This means it will become more expensive to finance mortgages going forward.
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Monday, April 28, 2014
Why U.S. Housing Market Has Stalled — And Why Everything Else Will Follow / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: John_Rubino
It’s not easy being a mainstream economist. You spend your life building models that become your professional identity. And when those models fail to describe and predict reality, you’re left wondering about the meaning of it all.
The latest case in point is US housing. Keynesian economic models say that if you lower mortgage rates you get more houses bought, sold and built. A nice, simple piece of cause and effect. But today’s mortgage rates are at levels that would have incited a buying frenzy a generation ago, employment is rising — and home sales, home building and mortgage originations are all flat-lining.
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Sunday, April 27, 2014
US Housing Market Is Down For The Count / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Recent news, graphs and data confirm what we have long said would inevitably become clear: the entire global economy appears to have “functioned” through an orgy of refinancing, LBO and M&A lately. That is to say, zombie money has been enthusiastically slushed and re-slushed around to provide commissions, bonuses etc. to bankers and brokers, a process enabled by central bank and government policies in which large amounts of credit were thrown against the wall like so much Jello, hoping – but not demanding – that some would stick. Zero bound interest rates made this process all the more attractive, since it was crucial to lure mom and pop back in. But now, if our eyes don’t receive us, it is reaching its inherent limits. And that’s going to hurt something bad.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Fed Follies, U.S. Housing Market Fiasco / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: LewRockwell
So far we have experienced 7 million foreclosures. Beyond that there are still 9 million homeowners seriously underwater on their mortgages and there are millions more who are stranded in place because they don’t have enough positive equity to cover transactions costs and more stringent down payment requirements.
And that’s before the next downturn in housing prices—a development which will show up any day. In fact, another downward plunge is a positive certainty now that the buy-to-rent LBO speculators are rapidly pulling out of those “flash” bull markets in Arizona, California, Los Vegas, Florida and elsewhere. The latter were merely short-lived price eruptions which were an artifact of the Fed’s free money policies.
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Monday, March 31, 2014
How to Turn Disappointing U.S. Housing Market Data into Greater Returns / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: DailyGainsLetter
John Paul Whitefoot writes: Since the beginning of 2012, the U.S. housing market has been considered one of the bright spots in an otherwise uneven economic environment. Between 2007 and the end of 2011, the U.S. housing market fell 33%—since then, it has rebounded, climbing roughly 22%.
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Thursday, March 27, 2014
Winding Down Fannie and Freddie the Economic Scam of the Century / Politics / US Housing
By: Mike_Whitney
The leaders of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Tim Johnson (D., S.D.) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R., Idaho), released a draft bill on Sunday that would provide explicit government guarantees on mortgage-backed securities (MBS) generated by privately-owned banks and financial institutions. The gigantic giveaway to Wall Street would put US taxpayers on the hook for 90 percent of the losses on toxic MBS the likes of which crashed the financial system in 2008 plunging the economy into the deepest slump since the Great Depression. Proponents of the bill say that new rules by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) –which set standards for a “qualified mortgage” (QM)– assure that borrowers will be able to repay their loans thus reducing the chances of a similar meltdown in the future. However, those QE rules were largely shaped by lobbyists and attorneys from the banking industry who eviscerated strict underwriting requirements– like high FICO scores and 20 percent down payments– in order to lend freely to borrowers who may be less able to repay their loans. Additionally, a particularly lethal clause has been inserted into the bill that would provide blanket coverage for all MBS (whether they met the CFPB’s QE standard or not) in the event of another financial crisis. Here’s the paragraph:
Monday, March 24, 2014
What’s Handicapping First-Time U.S. Homebuyers? / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: DailyGainsLetter
John Paul Whitefoot writes: For months and months now we’ve been pointing to seemingly obvious economic data to prove that the U.S. housing market is in trouble because of the weak U.S. economy. Those in the “know”—economists and the real estate board—have been waxing eloquence on how the weather is the main culprit behind the disappointing U.S. housing market numbers.
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Saturday, March 22, 2014
U.S. Housing Market One Chart Says it All / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: Mike_Whitney
Get a load of this chart from DataQuick’s National Home Sales Snapshot. It’ll tell you everything need to know about housing.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Fannie and Freddie reform is necessary, but not at expense of private sector investment / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: Ronan_Keenan
Private investors and the government don’t always make easy bedfellows and nothing exemplifies this more than the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. After verging on collapse in 2008, the government-backed mortgage groups are now turning significant profits, but investors are not happy.
Since their inception, the structure of Fannie and Freddie has been a point of contention. Established by government charter, the entities are owned by private shareholders and guarantee the vast majority of US mortgages, buying and selling loans from financial institutions to provide money for the banks to facilitate lending to home buyers. For much of their existence the groups’ configuration has drawn criticism as private investors enjoyed the profits while losses were felt by taxpayers. Things have changed since then.
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Wednesday, March 05, 2014
Has the U.S. Housing Market Hit the Wall? / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: Carl_R_Tannenbaum
The housing market began 2013 with a great deal of momentum, but recent data on this sector has moderated considerably. It would be easy to blame this trend on the weather, but there may be more to the housing story. The contribution of this sector to economic growth going forward may not be as robust.
Construction and sales fell to a very low base level during the depth of the recession, and therefore were able to show outsized gains as the recovery began. Residential investment was one of the biggest contributors to gross domestic product growth in 2011 and 2012.
Wednesday, March 05, 2014
The Securitization Fraud That Collapsed the U.S. Housing Market - JPMorgan Chase Mortgage Fraud / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: Ellen_Brown
In a nearly $13 billion settlement with the US Justice Department in November 2013, JPMorganChase admitted that it, along with every other large US bank, had engaged in mortgage fraud as a routine business practice, sowing the seeds of the mortgage meltdown. JPMorgan and other megabanks have now been caught in over a dozen major frauds, including LIBOR-rigging and bid-rigging; yet no prominent banker has gone to jail. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of all mortgages nationally remain underwater (meaning the balance owed exceeds the current value of the home), sapping homeowners’ budgets, the housing market and the economy. Since the banks, the courts and the federal government have failed to give adequate relief to homeowners, some cities are taking matters into their own hands.
Friday, February 28, 2014
How to Profit from the Weakening U.S. Housing Market / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: DailyGainsLetter
John Paul Whitefoot writes: It doesn’t take much to get the bulls excited when it comes to the U.S. housing market. Solid new-home sales data seems to have erased everyone’s memory of the raft of negative housing market numbers that have been flowing in for months.
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Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Warren Buffett - What You Can Learn From My Real Estate Investments / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: John_Mauldin
It does not hurt to be reminded once in a while about what it means to be a “true investor,” and who better to remind us than Warren Buffett? Today’s Outside the Box comes to us from the pages of Fortune magazine (hat tip to my good friend Tom Romero of Capital Research Partners, who is a pretty fair investor in his own right).
Fortune seems to have had the inside scoop on Mr. Buffett’s pronouncements over the years. I still keep some old Fortune magazines with interviews of Mr. Buffett to remind myself about the basics. For whatever reason I was up at 5 o’clock this morning and began reading this piece, and it functioned just as well as coffee as a wake-up call.
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Saturday, February 22, 2014
U.S. Housing Market Mortgage Purchase Applications Running Out Of Time / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: PhilStockWorld
Courtesy of Doug Short: For 2013, one of the main stories in housing was the cool down in existing home sales numbers over the second half of the year, in spite of the relative strength in GDP.
What was the main reason for this? Follow the data and the answer appears. When interest rates spiked we did not see the mythical sideline home buyer rush to the market place. Rather what we saw was a collapse of the mortgage purchase application index.
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Friday, February 21, 2014
Why Analysts Can’t Just Blame the Weather for Poor U.S. Housing Market Numbers / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: DailyGainsLetter
John Paul Whitefoot writes: No matter where you turn, bad earnings or economic indicators are being blamed on the cold weather. Weak January car sales figures were blamed on the weather; disappointing January housing data was blamed on the weather; Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE/WMT) revised its earnings guidance lower because of the weather; and even Panera Bread Company (NASDAQ/PNRA) says the cold weather negatively impacted its results.
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Monday, February 17, 2014
U.S. Housing Market Foreclosure Filings Jump as Investors Eye Exits / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: Mike_Whitney
Read full article... Read full article...“Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.” -John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money