Housing Doom

Kashkari, 35, resigned from the Treasury Department on May 1 to detox from Washington in a cabin on the Truckee River in Northern California, the Post reports. // In addition to building a new shed and losing some weight, the Post reports, Kashkari is working closely with Paulson on the upcoming book. – National examiner¹ 12/6 '09

Well Hank's description of the catastrophe from his perch behind Hamilton's statue comes out today.  Click the pic to see what a rather punchy Housing Doom was laughing at just 25 days after the 9/18 '08 coup (seems like a long time ago).

And here's what he sounds like now.

I think the $5 trillion egg that FHFA is incubating clearly implies a decade of grinding depression and that a lot of DC insiders already see it coming and are bracing for it.  The 10 month long bear rally may have peaked (Dow is presently down about 6.15 percent from its highest point about 1/2 hour before close on the 19th, if I'm reading the charts correctly — the MSM has been rather quiet about that little data point) and Volcker appears ready to go to the Hill and rip the veil off a few things on Tuesday.

Of course in one of these Minerva's Owl eras we can expect an outburst of priceless talent to emerge.  Here's an early contender (hat tip to Sherry, our church organist).  Her name is Melissa Venema and she was 13 when she did this on a beautiful summer Sunday in her native Holland (corrected) just 25 days before Hank and Ben stormed Nancy's office, making for a nice bit of symmetry.

If Communism went crashing down to the strains of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Capitalism's silent fall was well served by this classy exit music

Doomers can consider this an open thread … what do you think of the upcoming week?

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Opponents say it's a way for banks to take people's houses without legal safeguards built into the court system – even when a lender's claim to foreclose is shaky. – News-Press¹

Reporter Dick Hogan does a pretty good job laying out all aspects of the story, and Doomers could do worse than clicking through to the whole piece.

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Now this doesn't happen every day …

Leopard victim of Moscow housing dispute

The big cat's plight prompted Russia's natural resources ministry to declare on Friday that Cleopatra, which grew up in captivity, should be removed from its owner and given to a zoo or rehabilitation centre.

Goldman lent $4 million to Rodney O. Martin, the COO of AIG’s life insurance unit. Martin and his wife purchased a $4 million apartment in 15 Central Park West just as the bottom was falling out, and none other than their new neighbor Lloyd Blankfein, who also lives in that building, supplied them with a 30-year mortgage, which was interest-only for the first ten years. – quoted in WSJ¹

I am so touched …

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It's actually more than a little bit baffling why BusinessWeek even bothers removing heavy Bloomberg re-posts from their site when the originals are still up at BL  It does make one wonder, though, just what goodies they are spiking that aren't easily retrieved from alternative sources

UPDATE (11:36 Atlantic Time): Bloomberg was kind enough to reply just now to a query I sent and informs that the broken link at BW is a problem they are working to resolve.  I'm beginning to strongly suspect that the BW removals may well be technical web problems and not censorship at all.  More as further information becomes available.  Perhaps just Murphy's Law that its the especially sensitive articles that are being affected.

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(12:33 Atlantic Time): Ah, the light dawns over Marblehead (and in a far distant Millenium they used to pay me to worry about stuff like this).  Bloomberg got back again with the proper link and some further information.  Seems they're looking at how some of the dates work in their BW submissions.  Anyway, here's the good link.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-29/secret-banking-cabal-emerges-from-aig-shadows-david-reilly.html

Any maintenance programmers out there will immediately notice that there's exactly one character different in the above from the below URL, that it points at today (the 29th) instead of yesterday (the 28th) which is what's in the bad link below.  From that and a hint or two gleaned from BL's communication it looks like that old stand-by, sending something with a future date that then gets processed by the recipient shortly before that date becomes "today".  I have been there before.

……..

(1:40PM Atlantic Time): … and of course it would be precisely those breaking / hurry / do-it-now / overnight stories that would be prone to getting goosed by something like the date changing in the middle of a multi-step transaction such as BW uploading from BL.  That's even a plausible explanation for why it's the especially interesting stories that keep getting killed.  I do believe I'm starting to feel better about this (except for the poor maintainer who's got to piece together the actual details so they can fix it).

Anyway, Mish was having a fine little rant on some recent aspects of the AIG bailout, but failed to notice that Reilly is actually a Bloomberg writer, not a BW scribe.

David Reilly at BusinessWeek takes dead aim at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the New York Fed in Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows.

Alas, when Mish's readers (such as me) clicked on that link …

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-28/secret-banking-cabal-emerges-from-aig-shadows-david-reilly.html

… all they got was BW's Amateur Night broken-link redirect.

So then, of course, I googled the link:

So Mish obviously had been reading the genuine re-post before it got trashed.  But since it was just a BL repost, the original is still available, at least for the moment

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aaIuE.W8RAuU

Doomers (heck, Congress) should click through and read the whole thing while they can.

There are many underwater borrowers who are asking themselves why they bother staying in a home that's worth less than they owe.  One reason is that, in some states, walking can be really expensive: [Hat tip L!]

Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) — When John King stopped making payments on his home in Coral Gables, Florida, two years ago, he assumed the foreclosure ended his mortgage contract, he said. Last month, a Miami-Dade County court gave collectors permission to pursue him for $44,000 stemming from the default.

King is among a rising number of borrowers who are learning that they can be on the hook for years after losing their homes. Amid a crisis that stripped $6.4 trillion, or 28 percent, from the value of U.S. residential real estate since the 2006 peak, lenders are exercising their rights to pursue unpaid mortgage balances. To get their money, they can seize wages, tap bank accounts and put liens on other assets held by debtors.

“The big dogs get a bailout, and the little man gets no mercy,” said King, 39, referring to the U.S. government’s rescue of banks and other financial institutions.

While there are no statistics on the number of deficiency judgments approved by courts, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. tracks the amount banks collect after defaulted loans were written off.

These mortgage recoveries rose 48 percent to a record $1.01 billion in the first nine months of last year compared with the year-earlier period, according to the Washington-based regulator. Recoveries on defaulted home-equity loans almost doubled to $392 million, the FDIC data shows.
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Indirect bidders, a group that includes foreign central banks, bought 51.1% of the sale, compared to an average of 57.1%. That slight decline was offset by direct bidders, which include domestic investment funds, which took a record 11.8%, compared to 6.5% on average in the last four sales. – MW⁴

The unseemly haste over Bernanke's reconfirmation had nothing to do with a newly awakened Bear menacing Dow 10k from the high side. Neither was it a reaction to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (the UK Telegraph's Angel of Debt) and his comments about the ongoing Greek crisis. No, it was nothing other than fear over what the gnomes at Timmy's old shop were going to uncork around 4:30 PM EST yesterday afternoon.

Indeed, the Scott Reynolds Nelson scenario of at least a decade of grinding depression after the Administration's stimulus efforts peter out is now definitely in play, because the yellow line in the below raw numbers graph has, over the last month and a half, gone Stuka …

LATER: Now twist and I are separated by a couple of time zones (and typically quite a few Degrees Centigrade) so after I went off to bed she played around a bit and concluded that this version of the above graph showing the whole dataset (which now extends back almost exactly a decade) gives in many ways a better picture of just how dramatic was the post-September '08 run-up.

From September 17, 2008, the eve of the coup, to December 30, 2009 the cenbanks supported both Administrations' bailout efforts by adding $0.738 trillion to their treasuries holdings. That era appears to be ending.

This not being an options week, it's not surprising to see the Fed's own MBS holdings drifting down $1.173 billion. The hair raising story is in the foreign central banks' Treaury Debt holdings and their slow but ominously accelerating decline of around $1 billion a week over the last 6 weeks. This week's Reuters report¹ was, 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.

This week's treasuries sell-off was $3.806 billion, and the total drop since December 16th stands at $6.507 billion.

Agency Debt did a bit better, adding $1.776 billion (that's the Spirit ), but the agencies number has been flat as a pancake now since mid-September.

UPDATE: Igor didn't think treasuries should have all the fun today.  Hat tip to the Implode-O-Gang for this⁵ little leak promoting Hank's book launch Monday.

Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — Russia urged China to dump its Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds in 2008 in a bid to force a bailout of the largest U.S. mortgage-finance companies, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said.

This puts a whole new perspective on the red line's 180-degree turn after mid-'08, not to mention the mysterious halt in its downward momentum in January '09.  Eventually a robust audit of the NY Fed may throw some light on what sort of war they have been fighting over the red line, but now that the yellow one's also in play, a sense of urgency about that might be in order.

With agencies neither rising nor falling that yellow line above is the whole show, and it's looking very toppy about now. With a top around year-end of nearly $2.19 trillion that's a lot of air under that number.  And a lot of that stuff's on the short end and getting shorter by the day.

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Igor and I have been digging through the archives and hereby present our Housing Doom Top Ten List of digs we're, well, not quite sure why we perpetrated on our readers

10 — Bank of America sued for gender bias over bonuses, Reuters 6/25 '09

9 — High Interest Rates Encourage Housing Speculation, Scoop (NZ), 4/24 '07

8 — Swiss Re In CHF1.3B US Life Block Sale To Berkshire, WSJ 1/18 '10

7 — Can’t Sell Your Home? Maybe It’s Priced Too Low, NYT 7/11 '07

6 — "Re-jiggered accounting methods gave Freddie Mac a boost Wednesday when investors rallied over better-than-expected losses", Forbes 5/14 '08

5 — Cooling U.S. economy good for Canadian housing market, CanWest 9/16 '06

4 — Barclays Capital to charter ships to move commodities, SmartBrief 4/26 '08

3 — Ambac Rises as Bond Insurers Try to Tap Treasury Plan, Bloomberg 10/17 '08

2 — Bank of America Says ‘Thank Goodness’ for Countrywide, Bloomberg 3/13 '09

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Just when you think that losses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac couldn't get any worse, Sen. Chuck Schumer comes up with a new idea:

Taxpayers may look at the unlimited federal credit line now enjoyed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and see disaster. But New York Senator Chuck Schumer sees opportunity.

Yesterday he demanded that the two failed mortgage giants guarantee low rent for tenants in a Manhattan property they now own after the owner defaulted. As they say in Democratic Washington, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Recently we told you about the Treasury's Christmas Eve announcement that after chewing through $111 billion from taxpayers, Fan and Fred can now consume an unlimited amount of cash from the U.S. Treasury. The companies have been losing billions each quarter to serve President Obama's political goal of modifying troubled mortgages. They can lose still more by serving Mr. Schumer.

In truth, they already are. The New York lawmaker has pioneered the use of the Fannie and Freddie earmark, having successfully pressured Fannie to sell another property in the Bronx to an affordable housing group. But his appetite is growing for taxpayer cash to dole out to his constituents. Whereas the Bronx housing complex was worth a mere $29 million, Fan and Fred's interest in the mammoth Stuyvesant Town complex in Manhattan could run into the billions.

The New York Observer quotes Mr. Schumer saying that after Stuyvesant Town's owners defaulted, "Now Fannie and Freddie must guide this process to a conclusion with the least amount of impact on current tenants and families. I am going to watch them like a hawk to make sure they do just that."

Congressman Jeb Harsarling says he's outraged because We are paying these people bonuses to lose tens of billions of dollars for the United States taxpayer:

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Earlier today BusinessWeek picked up this interesting Bloomberg piece and I dutifully placed the BW re-post on Doom's sidebar.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=awxR78OEhDdw&pos=5

… but I had to interrupt my reading of the BW re-post to break bread with Mrs. M.

When I returned to complete my reading I found that the MiniTruth Dept at BusinessWeek had determined that this was simply too much truth for the markets in a sensitive week. So they sent it right to the memory hole, except for the URL

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-27/carlyle-s-rubenstein-warns-against-roubini-pessimism-in-davos.html

It will be most interesting to see if the culprits continue to clean up traces of this little escapade as the morning wears on.

UPDATE: Twist sends a CNBC article, which included this interesting video of Nouriel's Davos-iacal thoughts.