Housing Doom

Well I think at some point we’re going to have a government in power that’s going to make a choice between the American people and our creditors, who are predominantly foreign. And I think that choice will involve letting the dollar depreciate. I don’t think we’ll ever actually repudiate our debts, as long as we can print more dollars. But I think that’s the fundamental political issue that faces our entire society … - Chris Whalen

Doom Transcripts: Index & Guide

Housing Doom is pleased to present a eighth and final selection from our under-construction transcript of the American Enterprise Institute’s October 22, 2009 event "The Deflating Bubble, Part VI: The Lessons of the Bubble and Crisis".¹

The event site has a number of resources, including an audio and video of the proceedings. There is as yet no official transcript.

The lively Question and Answer session that closed the conference featured everything from Roubini’s lurid medium term scenarios to Zimmernan’s surprising advice that Re-remics, along with just about any other recent real estate securitizations, are perfectly safe to buy.

Alex Pollock: [1:31:26] Let me come to our questions. We’re going to, we have microphones, a microphone in the back. Please remember how this works. Wait for the microphone, please tell us your name and your affiliation, and then ask your question. For those of you who may feel the urge to make an assertion in addition to your question, may I ask you to keep your assertion short and to the point, otherwise I’ll feel compelled to ask you to come to your question. … I have a hand way in the back, here. … Oh, it’s Bert [laughs] …

Bert Ely: I was hiding on you, Alex. Bert Ely, banking consultant. A suggestion and a question. In terms of describing the kind of recovery you have, let me offer another suggestion to you that I’ve been using. I call it a washboard recovery. Slow and very bumpy over the next few years.

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To that end, FHFA has informed Fannie Mae that a possible transfer of a portion of its LIHTC investments to unrelated third-party investors is consistent with FHFA’s ongoing efforts to conserve Enterprise assets and with the Enterprise’s multifamily housing mission. … FHFA Acting Director Edward J. DeMarco, November 5, 2009¹

Many thanks to twist for data-mining that gem from the dark recesses of the DC bureaucracy. So in all the turbulence going around, the most urgent crisis facing America is …

• Swine Flu? not even in the top 10
• Recession? OVER! OVER! OVER!
• CMBS Tsunami? way out in the offing, won’t hit for weeks
• Looming Shortage of "Dow 10K" Party Hats? not even that …

America’s most urgent crisis is the fallout from October 23, 2008, when DeMarco’s predecessor Jim Lockhart testified in Congress and mentioned the word explicit.²

Once a week³ ever since, the OMB’s most consistently optimistic analyst (let’s just call him "Phineas Q. Pangloss") has come back from a long lunch, taken a deep breath, and circulated a research note to the effect that …

… Yeah sure guys, no problem. Treasury can cut off their support⁴ to the GSEs any time they want to. And holders of Agency Debt would be, like, totally cool with the resulting haircut. After all, every piece of senior debt ever issued by Freddie, Fannie and the gang came stamped with a nice big notice that "This Ain’t No Sovereign Obligation of No USA!"

And the reason this happens every week without fail is that should the OMB ever come to the same conclusion as Mr. Market (that there’s no way in Hell that Geithner’s ever going to throw the agencies holders under the bus) they would have no choice but to immediately double the nominal value of the US National Debt.

But there’s one small problem. Fannie & Freddie are being used as a couple of cudgels to beat back the housing recession, and so their balance sheets are swelling by the day with more and more toxic MBS. Profitable? Probably never as they’re situated, but if the farce of conservatorship ends and they revert to the pre-1968 world where Fannie was an actual Federal Government department like Ginnie, you trigger the above disaster.

Enter LIHTC. If Fannie requests another $15 billion (like they did yesterday) too often, even Pangloss will have to recognize the evident truth that

1. Fannie’s a basket case; and,
2. Treasury is their explicitly dependable sugar daddy.

So the GSEs and their regulator, the FHFA, are going to use every trick they can think of to keep up the pretense that the Enterprises are going concerns.

Now LIHTC is tax-reduction credits, many $billions worth, but Fannie isn’t going to have a bit of taxable income for many, many years. So to achieve a benefit for its own balance sheet, they have to find someone else with $billions of fresh profit who will buy the credits at a discount so they can reduce their taxes. Hello, Goldman⁵ and Mr. Buffett.⁶

But in real life, Fannie and the US Treasury are two pockets on the same pair of pants. The net effect of this exploit would be to give a direct government gift of billions of dollars to some of America’s most flush companies so that Fannie can put off for a couple of months formally going back to Geithner for their next infusion of cash. What’s Wrong with This Picture?

So at any rate, Doomers will I’m sure be ecstatic at the heart-warming news that response-times to aid the needy have reduced considerably since Katrina. Guy Fawkes’ fireworks have barely cooled down and already WSJ⁷ is reporting FHFA approval for selling $2.6 billion-worth of the credits to unnamed, but surely deserving counterparties. Would that FEMA could start dropping relief packages as expeditiously.

UPDATE: The plot thickens.¹¹

If you were curious about the recent news regarding Goldman Sachs’ (GS) and Warren Buffett’s (BRK.A) interest in acquiring the tax losses of Fannie Mae (FNM), the details are in Fannie’s 10-Q.

This deal was agreed to and inked a month ago. It is still pending approval. So the information that was first reported by Bloomberg was a deliberate plant. A possible objective would have been to get a decision on the transaction before yesterday’s release. Note that the Q provides an update of the deal’s status as of November 5. Someone was waiting to edit this section right up to the last minute. A tad unusual.

……………………..

Further (Friday PM late): This¹² just in from the WSJ.

The U.S. Treasury blocked Fannie Mae’s proposed sale of nearly $3 billion in low-income housing tax credits to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. on Friday after concluding that the deal was too costly for taxpayers.
…

But Treasury Department officials blocked the deal after concluding that it would have resulted in a loss of tax revenues greater than the savings to the federal government had it allowed the sale. "In short, withholding approval of the proposed sale affords more protection of the taxpayers than does providing approval," an administration official said in a statement.
…

Approving the deal could have also furthered a perception that policy makers have taken steps that have favored Goldman ahead of other banks at a time when populist sentiment against Wall Street has surged.

But since the debt that finances things like that is still regarded as the world’s safest investment, foreign central banks are eager to buy the stuff. While The Fed’s own MBS holdings rose a trivial $0.328 billion, and the cenbanks’ agencies not much more than that, their Treasury Debt buy was more than healthy, according to this week’s Reuters report⁸. The report was, as usual, based on the weekly update from the NY Fed’s H.4.1 table site.⁹ Here is Doom’s updated CSV version¹⁰ of the agencies and treasuries foreign central bank holdings data set.

The treasuries buy was a lusty $18.159 billion, more than doubling last week’s figure.

Agencies were back in positive territory, but only added $0.758 billion.

The net change of US obligations was an excellent $18.917 billion, well over $2 billion a day.

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So, you know, there’s nothing for safety and soundness like a comfortable oligopoly. We might think about that and … we’re planning, for those of you who are interested, a conference, coming up in a few months, contrasting the Canadian house finance and financial system with the American system. So there’s a little advert — little preview.

Doom Transcripts: Index & Guide

Well, that certainly got my attention

Housing Doom is pleased to present a seventh selection from our under-construction transcript of the American Enterprise Institute’s October 22, 2009 event "The Deflating Bubble, Part VI: The Lessons of the Bubble and Crisis".¹

The event site has a number of resources, including an audio and video of the proceedings. There is as yet no official transcript.

Most of AEI’s "team bear" participated in a brief but lively discussion after the presentations.

Alex Pollock: [1:21:56] Thank-you, Desmond.  Having heard five really interesting presentations, let me give the panelists, if they want, a chance to add something, or react to the others.  Nouriel?

Nouriel Roubini: Just a comment on the last point that Desmond made. In this crisis, regulated banks got in trouble, but also a lot of non-regulated financial institutions — were broker/dealers like Bear and when bust. And so in some sense, suppose we go back to Glass-Steagall and not against it? What does it rule out? And then you’re going to have a bunch of broker/dealers or non-bank Shadow Banks that are going to become too big to fail. They’re going to do crazy things and eventually we’ll have to bail them out.

So do we need to really go back to Glass-Steagall? Or we need to break up every financial institution and make it so small that it can fail and who cares? And we don’t have to bail them out. What’s the appropriate policy choice on that? And I think that’s an open question for everybody else on the panel.

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Doom Transcripts: Index & Guide

Housing Doom is pleased to present a sixth selection from our under-construction transcript of the American Enterprise Institute’s October 22, 2009 event "The Deflating Bubble, Part VI: The Lessons of the Bubble and Crisis".¹

The event site has a number of resources, including an audio and video of the proceedings. There is as yet no official transcript.

This is the presentation by AEI’s Desmond Lachman.

Desmond Lachman: [1:08:20] Alex, thank-you very much again for organizing this conference at a 6-monthly interval.

I think one’s got to go through life counting one’s blessings, and one of the blessings that I’ve realized that I’ve got to count on now is that my name isn’t Tom Zimmerman, and that I come at the end of the presentation.

Because much of what is said, I really agree with. So I can walk through a presentation. I’ve entitled it "A False Dawn for the Housing Market?" [slide 1²]

In the interests of being optimistic I’ve put a question mark whereas I really meant putting an exclamation mark. [laughter]

Let me start just with the lessons that one can draw from this crisis, and I think that there are a whole bunch of lessons. We’re going to be writing books about this for many years to come, much like The Great Depression we’ll be looking through this crisis. And I very much agree with what both Nouriel and John have said, that one really needs to be paying attention to bubbles, that we’re just creating another bubble that is going to be bursting. But I think that there are just a whole bunch of other lessons to be learned.

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I think almost by definition we’re … I mean I would say W, because I think in the US anyway we’ll still see a 3 1/2 percent growth number in the 3rd quarter, which will be reported next week, and maybe a 3 percent number in the 4th quarter …

Doom Transcripts: Index & Guide

I do believe we have a winner.¹

Housing Doom is pleased to present a fifth selection from our under-construction transcript of the American Enterprise Institute’s October 22, 2009 event "The Deflating Bubble, Part VI: The Lessons of the Bubble and Crisis".²

The event site has a number of resources, including an audio and video of the proceedings. There is as yet no official transcript.

This is the presentation by AEI Visiting Scholar John Makin

John Makin: [0:54:19] So I’m going to say that so far what we’ve heard is, it’s the lessons of the — having deflated and about to reflate bubble. And that’s a little different than the idea that the bubbles burst and it’s past us.

But, you know, I’ve taken the charge here quite literally — What are the lessons of the bubble? And I think we’ve heard that it may not be the only bubble that we’re getting, but I … The main lesson of the bubble in the US in a sentence is "You’ve got to be Too Big to Fail," because then you get bailed out.

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Final risk. The increasing asset prices we’ve seen since March for everything: global equities; in US, equities; EM [emerging market] asset classes; commodity; credit; everything around the world is driven by one factor.

Doom Transcripts: Index & Guide

The penultimate risk was merely the prospect of World War III breaking out.  Fortunately Nouriel was running overtime so Alex had to cut him short just before he got to the scary bit

UPDATE (11/6): Here’s Nouriel’s Nov 4th expansion on the idea

Housing Doom is pleased to present a fourth selection from our under-construction transcript of the American Enterprise Institute’s October 22, 2009 event "The Deflating Bubble, Part VI: The Lessons of the Bubble and Crisis".¹

The event site has a number of resources, including an audio and video of the proceedings. There is as yet no official transcript.

Dr. Doom was batting cleanup …

Nouriel Roubini: [0:37:03] OK. Tom spoke about housing and mortgages. What Chris spoke about — the banks. So I’ll try to speak about the economy and what’s going to happen to the economy looking ahead.

We’ve had the most severe recession and financial crisis since the Great Depression. Given the monetary and fiscal stimulus and the backstopping of the financial system now we’re close to the bottom, at least on a temporary basis.

And now the debate is, of course, on what’s going to happen — the shape of the recovery. Given what has happened in the markets I would say the markets are pricing now a V-shaped recovery with rapid return to potential growth, and that’s even what the macro forecasters’ consensus is.

There is a second view, which is the one I share, is that this recovery is going to be at best an anaemic, subpar, below trend, with growth well below trend for the next couple of years, much as in the US, but also in advanced economies. So more like a U-shaped recovery. That’s also the view of the IMF and the one of those folks at PIMCO who are talking about A New Normal.

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Doom Transcripts: Index & Guide

Housing Doom is pleased to present a third selection from our under-construction transcript of the American Enterprise Institute’s October 22, 2009 event "The Deflating Bubble, Part VI: The Lessons of the Bubble and Crisis".¹

The event site has a number of resources, including an audio and video of the proceedings. There is as yet no official transcript.

This is the presentation by IRA co-founder Chris Whalen.  I see Nouriel on deck, but this one’s going to be a tough act to follow.

So this is what the commenters at Calculated Risk have been going on about …

Chris Whalen: [0:27:02] I’m going to talk a little bit about the industry because we’re in the middle of earnings season, and I apologize for not preparing something, but I’ve been reading bank earnings statements, so I will share some of my impressions of that. And then I want to talk a little bit about not only lessons, but some of the enduring trends that I see that have not been affected by the extensive bailout that the government has put together for our largest financial institutions.

In general, when you look at the industry you have to recall the words of Mr. Feinberg, and I don’t mean the guy who was in the newspaper today, I mean my friend Bob Feinberg in the back of the room, who predicted several years ago in an interview we published that the GSE would become the business model of choice for the United States.

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Doom Transcripts: Index & Guide

Housing Doom is pleased to present a second selection from our under-construction transcript of the American Enterprise Institute’s October 22, 2009 event "The Deflating Bubble, Part VI: The Lessons of the Bubble and Crisis".¹

The event site has a number of resources, including an audio and video of the proceedings. There is as yet no official transcript.

This is the presentation by UBS fixed income researcher Tom Zimmerman.  Tom’s the most moderate of AEI’s Six Bears but in my opinion the scariest, because he usually brings the hardest data to the table.

Tom Zimmerman: [0:11:43] Thanks a lot, Alex, it’s great to be here again. [slide 0²] What’s amazing about coming down here every 6 months is that I’m usually viewed as one of the more bearish people in my shop, and also when I speak at conferences around the country I’m usually sort of sitting on the bearish side of these discussions. But I come down here, [laughs] and I’m not … it’s a … I feel like I’m a raving bull about what’s going to happen in the world when you listen to some of these people talk. So anyway, that hasn’t changed, in the last 6 sessions, so …

We had lunch together today, and it’s exactly the same.

I see some green shoots here and there, but I think that it’s not something the other panelists see some real major problems down the road.

What I thought I’d do today is just continue some of the things I’ve talked about before in terms of the housing market, mortgage market. And then at the end talk about some of the lessons that we’ve learned from this bubble which isn’t over with yet, but we’ve learned some lessons or at least some take-aways from it.

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Doom Transcripts: Index & Guide

Housing Doom is pleased to present a fourth selection from our under-construction transcript of the American Enterprise Institute’s October 9, 2009 event "No Way Out: Government Response to the Financial Crisis".¹ The event site has a number of resources, including an audio and video of the proceedings. There is as yet no official transcript.

This is the Panel I  response to Vince Reinhart by Tudor Investment Corporation’s Angel Ubide.

Angel Ubide: [1:02:45] I think Vincent forgot to mention at the beginning of his presentation of something he says in his introduction. That is, the narrative of this crisis will be the most permanent impact over the global economy, above and beyond the very sharp recession we have suffered, and the increasing unemployment, and everything else. Because it is those narratives that then will define the policy reaction to it and the way the markets and the economies will operate over the next — probably decades.

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Doom Transcripts: Index & Guide

Housing Doom is pleased to present a third selection from our under-construction transcript of the American Enterprise Institute’s October 9, 2009 event "No Way Out: Government Response to the Financial Crisis".¹ The event site has a number of resources, including an audio and video of the proceedings. There is as yet no official transcript.

This is the impassioned Panel I  response to Vince Reinhart by IRA’s Chris Whalen.  Later today, less than 2 weeks after the "No Way Out" event, Chris will be rejoining the AEI subprime gang, including Nouriel Roubini, for "The Deflating Bubble, Part VI: The Lessons of the Bubble and Crisis." Doomers in the DC area might want to take that one in.  Should be quite a show.

Chris Whalen: [0:49:23] … And I want to thank Vince for asking me to be with him today and to comment on his fine work. We were out in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, and one of the retired senior Fed officials who was there later remarked that I was one of the more reasonable attendees. And I think this is because the economists were still arguing over causation.

If you know anything about my writing or my history, that came as a surprise to me, but I’ll take the compliment.

What I would say to all of you today is I’d like to step back a little bit from this discussion, because … and I’ve seen Taleb’s first book, [0:50:00] The Black Swan. He talks about how people take complex situations and turn them into narratives in order to understand them. And they refine these narratives by speaking and writing and discussing their ideas amongst one another, and they eventually come up with a story that starts to look remarkably consistent no matter who you talk to. This is human nature.

I think the same thing is happening with this crisis. We, especially in the United States, have this wonderful tendency to look at everything from a vertical perspective, in silos. So we could somehow isolate monetary policy and bank supervision and fiscal policy into neat little boxes that are not at all disturbed by one another.

And in particular, when we hear people talking about foreign capital inflows, I want to scream, because those are our pieces of paper, we printed them, and they have come home looking for at least a nominal return. That’s why we have this problem, and I agree with the other speakers, I’m not sure how we deal with it, as long as the rest of the world is silly enough to allow us to have a monopoly on the means of exchange.

But I guess the way I look at this crisis is from a political perspective, because I think if you don’t understand the evolution of the United States and the change that is occurring in our society as we migrate from a democracy focused on individuals and individual’s liberty to a society which is growing more and more corporatist every day; more and more European every day. And I think this is reflected in the quiet but very intense debate going on in the regulatory community between Sheila Bair & the folks at the FDIC on the one hand, who represent a somewhat legalistic but traditional American view of banks and insolvency and resolution, and what I like to call the internationalist component, which is the Treasury & the Fed, who seem to know nothing about traditional American values, and who are aligning themselves with foreign nations, which are predominately socialist and authoritarian in nature.

I think you can tell whose side I’m on.

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