Yesterday the FHFA released a report entitled, The State of the U.S. Housing Market: Removing Barriers to Economic Recovery. The title is somewhat misleading.  This prepared congressional testimony is more about how the FHFA proposes to manage the next phase of its conservatorship, and doesn’t really address removing barriers to economic recovery.  By the way, the report had to be among the most redundant I’ve ever read.  If you eliminated all the repetitive bits, the nine page statement with 25 pages of supporting documentation probably could have been reduced by nearly half.  But in spite of that there was a lot…
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Yesterday the National Association of Realtors announced that Pending Home Sales are up.  Sales may be up, but prices continue to go down:  [Thanks L!] U.S. home prices fell in December from a month earlier, ending 2011 at the lowest levels since the housing crisis began in mid-2006, according to Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller home-price indexes. During the fourth quarter, home prices reached new lows, falling 3.8% sequentially and 4% year-to-year. Prices are down 33.8% from their peak in the second quarter of 2006. “While we thought we saw some signs of stabilization in the middle of 2011, it appears…
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As I was surfing the internet last night, I ran across one more article (Out of who knows how many) that asked “Has the U.S. housing market finally bottomed?”  Invariably these articles go on to indicate that somehow “bottom” = “recovery”.  For instance, last night’s article said: With building activity and builder confidence increasing, and mortgage rates close to record lows, the overall trajectory is clearly upwards. In fact, there really is no “trajectory” at the moment.  Even Warren Buffett, who’s been bullish on the housing market for years, admitted this week he was wrong about an early recovery and…
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There has been a distinct upward trend in the National Association of Realtor’s Pending Home Sales Index: Pending home sales are on an upward trend, which has been uneven but meaningful since reaching a cyclical low last April, and are well above a year ago, according to the National Association of Realtors®. The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward-looking indicator based on contract signings, rose 2.0 percent to 97.0 in January from a downwardly revised 95.1 in December and is 8.0 percent higher than January 2011 when it was 89.8. The data reflects contracts but not closings. The January index is…
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Earlier this month, an agreement was reached between the states attorneys general and the nation’s major lenders on a $25 billion dollar settlement that is supposed to compensate homeowners hurt by inappropriate lending practices.  We all know however, that $25 billion won’t solve the problem.  As one real estate agent so aptly put it: “The latest mortgage settlement will have little to no impact on the current real estate market. It is limited to non-government backed loans, which accounts for less than 40 percent of the existing loans. If homeowners can’t afford their homes today the majority won’t be able…
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Back in 2008 Warren Buffett predicted a quick turnaround in housing.  Here at Doom we were skeptical about his prediction. Turns out that time around our crystal ball was better, and Buffett admits his predictions were off: OMAHA, Neb. — Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said Saturday that he was “dead wrong” with a prediction that the U.S. housing market would begin to recover by now, but he remains optimistic about the nation’s economy. In his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Buffett said he is sure housing will recover eventually and help bring down the nation’s unemployment rate. But he…
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I was thinking earlier this week how much I missed the late “Tanta” of Calculated Risk.  She had a better understanding of the mortgage securitization  market than anyone I know.  Sadly, she passed away in 2008, leaving a hole in the economic and housing blogging world. On the lighter side, I enjoyed her “Saturday Rock Blogging”.  I thought in honor of those old Rock Blogging posts, I’d share my favorite Saturday song from Cat Stevens (Josef Islam).  

Another snoozer from our statistical friends at the FRBNY.  The Fed’s own holdings of MBS rose again by $5.239 billion, a bit less than a half of last week’s big add, and foreign cenbanks continued their counter-cyclical growth in holdings of US obligations. This week’s Reuters report1 is, as usual, based on the weekly update from the NY Fed’s H.4.1 table site.2 Here is Doom’s updated CSV version3 of the agencies and treasuries foreign central bank holdings data set. Treasuries winning streak continues, but at a radically reduced $2.095 billion this week.  Interestingly, the yellow line has been fluctuating in…
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Back in 2003 Phoenix had one of the nation’s highest homeownership rates, but the housing bust has changed that.  According to the 2010 Census, Phoenix homeownership rates dropped to their lowest level since 1997, and that still might be overestimating the case: But the measurement accounts only for occupied homes. Calculate owner-occupied homes as a portion of all homes – including vacant ones – and the actual homeownership rate would be far lower. The number of vacant homes in the Valley – those that are not second homes or vacation properties – has climbed by nearly 200,000 since the last…
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I was really surprised yesterday when I did a Google News search on the Austin, TX real estate market.  I can usually find a selection of articles describing how the Austin market is so much more stable than the rest of the nation.  I was surprised when I found only one article that said Housing Market In Austin Continues Upward: Austin saw a big jump in home sales last month, according to a report today from the Austin Board of Realtors. Home sales were up 10 percent last month from January 2011. Eldon Rude with the real estate tracking firm…
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If you are frustrated because taxpayer money is bailing out the GSEs due to mortgages losses, how do you feel about taxpayer money defending former Fannie/Freddie execs? [Thanks L!] A watchdog agency said Wednesday that the legal tab for former leaders of mortgage finance giantsFannie Mae and Freddie Mac is at least $110 million. And taxpayers have paid at least $47 million of it, according to an Office of Inspector General of theFederal Housing Finance Agency report.  And the total bill could be even higher since the inspector general report focused on only one particular legal case against Fannie Mae, and isn’t an exhaustive…
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The establishment of a false religion may be part of the natural process of a society destroying itself.  Looks like, anyway. Last year IHOP jerked Shrove Tuesday back a week, this time they’ve yanked it forward seven days.  What’s next, a Thursday? in August?  Meanwhile Google News Search’s completion algorithm has embargoed Ash Wednesday and Lent, although the terms both complete in general Google Search.  Traditional Christian congregations are dying like flies and although Christmas is bigger than ever CHANGE has driven us into a strange and novel situation.  Religion is at the heart of the 2012 US presidential election…
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Advances in tease-ware succeeded in sucking a lot of the fun out of online browsing over the weekend.  Google News brings up a promising candidate for a link to Doom’s sidebar and I click-through and start on the article.  Eleven seconds in (that eleven courtesy of $millions of research by a psychology profession industry that surely has better things to do) I get something a bit unexpected: PAYWALL PUBS HOPES YOU HAVE ENJOYED READING YOUR LAST FEW FREE PREMIUM CONTENT ARTICLES — BUT NOW IT IS TIME TO CASS NUDGE THAT CREDIT CARD NUMBER OUT OF YOUR RIGHT PANTS POCKET…
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Bloomberg (2/17 ’12): “Record $6 Trillion of Fake U.S. Bonds Seized” Italian anti-mafia prosecutors said they seized a record $6 trillion of allegedly fake U.S. Treasury bonds, an amount that’s almost half of the U.S.’s public debt. OK, enough fun, as Doom returns to the real fake bonds The “Fred” wolfed down $11.776 billion of new MBS holdings and foreign central banks in the aggregate consumed lots of new US obligations. Weird. This week’s Reuters report1 is, as usual, based on the weekly update from the NY Fed’s H.4.1 table site.2 Here is Doom’s updated CSV version3 of the agencies…
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Earlier this month the Obama administration released their latest plan to speed the housing recovery by allowing underwater borrowers to refinance.  While this will undoubtedly help a few people, in the long run, it will do nothing more than make it look like the administration is doing “something”. After all the schemes we see coming out of Washington, I thought it interesting that the best housing economic theory I’ve seen in print recently comes from a cartoon that was published in the Deseret News in 1935: [Hat tip to Mr. Twist]   It’s too bad that the artist who drew…
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