Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Housing Statistics - U.S., 20 Cities, Los Angeles

U.S. Sales & Inventory - New & Existing



Composite 20 City Case Shiller House Price Index Prices & Table - Prices Down 15.8% but L.A. down 24.5%



Los Angeles Case Shiller - Low, Mid-Range, High Price Range (Mid-Range down 29.8%)


The low price range is less than $401,614. Prices in this range have fallen 36.5% from the peak.

The mid-range is $401,614 to $606,600. Prices have fallen 29.8%.

The high price range is above $606,600. Prices in this range have fallen 20.0% from the peak.


Looking at the data in real terms probably provides a better idea of how much further prices will fall. If prices fall to the January 2000 level in real terms (shown as 100 on the graph), then the high end has fallen about half way from the peak, and the low end about 2/3 of the way from the peak in Los Angeles.

I've noted this before: In a number of previous housing busts, real prices declined for 5 to 7 years before finally hitting bottom. That is my expectation for the duration of the price declines in the bubble areas. The bottom for real prices will probably be in the 2010 to 2012 period. The less bubbly areas will probably bottom sooner.

If this bust follows the historical pattern, we will continue to see real price declines for several more years, and the rate of decline will probably slow (imagine somewhat of a bell curve on those graphs).

CAR reported for June 2008 that SFR median prices had declined 37.7% for the state ($591,280 to $368,250) and 32.3% for LA County ($586,020 to $396,560).

Data Quick Southern California SFR & Condo Median Sold Price by Zip Code

Monday, July 28, 2008

Has Deleveraging Even Begun?


The serial bubble solution to the problem of prior bubbles and the financial fragilities they spawn has come to a dead end with a third toxic oil bubble the financial authorities did not expect and do not want – the commodity bubble. Now the serial bubblization of the policy makers portends recession, not recovery.....The end of the moon shot in the debt to GDP would appear to be at hand.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Debt Ceiling Raised $800 Billion from $9.815 t o $10.615

SEC. 3083. INCREASE IN STATUTORY LIMIT ON THE PUBLIC DEBT.

Subsection (b) of section 3101 of title 31, United States Code, is amended by striking out the dollar limitation contained in such subsection and inserting in lieu thereof $10,615,000,000,000.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

You Know The Banking System Is Unsound When....

24. There is roughly $6.84 Trillion in bank deposits. $2.60 Trillion of that is uninsured. There is only $53 billion in FDIC insurance to cover $6.84 Trillion in bank deposits. Indymac will eat up roughly $8 billion of that.

25. Of the $6.84 Trillion in bank deposits, the total cash on hand at banks is a mere $273.7 Billion. Where is the rest of the loot? The answer is in off balance sheet SIVs, imploding commercial real estate deals, Alt-A liar loans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds, toggle bonds where debt is amazingly paid back with more debt, and all sorts of other silly (and arguably fraudulent) financial wizardry schemes that have bank and brokerage firms leveraged at 30-1 or more. Those loans cannot be paid back.

What cannot be paid back will be defaulted on. If you did not know it before, you do now. The entire US banking system is insolvent.

Death Spiral Financing at WaMu, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup

Even though hundreds of billions of dollars of capital have been raised by the financial sector over the past several months, which of the investors in a financial institution have made money since their initial investment? Answer: Zero.

We can’t think of one. They are all underwater. When Abu Dhabi first invested $7.5 billion in Citigroup last November, Citi’s stock was $35. Subsequently, when Citi did their $14.5 billion raise in January, the stock was trading at $30. Today Citigroup’s stock is under $20... and it keeps falling. Merrill Lynch did a combined raise of $12.8 billion in December and January at $48. Now the stock is under $35… and also falling. Warburg Pinkus made their now infamous $1 billion investment in MBIA at $31 per share. MBIA has fallen over 80% since and is now trading at under $5 per share.

Those who participated in Ambac’s $1.5 billion rights issue in March are down a similar amount, 80%, as the stock now hovers under $2. Bank of America made their initial investment in Countrywide Financial last August at $18 per share (rather surprising to us, given that Countrywide looked to be going bankrupt if BofA didn’t come to the rescue). Bank of America subsequently made a takeover offer in January. Today Countrywide shares can be got for under $5 per share.

TPG invested in Washington Mutual to the tune of $7 billion at $8.75 per share, a substantial discount at the time to WaMu’s stock price of $13. Today WaMu’s stock is $6. Last month AIG raised $20 billion when their stock was trading at $37 per share. Today AIG stock is just above $30 per share. Even those who participated in Lehman Brothers’ $6 billion equity offering last week at $28 per share are already underwater, with LEH currently trading below $24 (year-to-date Lehman’s stock is down over 60%).

Ironically, thanks to full ratchet provisions, this promises to lead to further dilution and even weaker stock performance going forward.

There were at least some smart investors who noted the downward trend and successfully negotiated for downside protection. We know of at least two cases (though there are doubtless others); namely, Merrill Lynch’s $12.8 billion investment from Temasek (the Singapore sovereign wealth fund) and Washington Mutual’s $7 billion raise from TPG (a private equity firm).

Quite unbeknownst to the general public at the time, downside protection was built into these equity raises to protect these investors. They are called “look back” provisions or “full ratchet” compensation.

We believe it is more accurate to call them “death spiral” securities. They work as follows. The investors in the equity raise would have their investment “protected” by a provision which states that should the bank afterwards raise money at a lower price than what they paid, these investors would be compensated retroactively by having their initial investment priced at this lower price, thereby being issued new shares for free. It doesn’t take a mathematician to see how these provisions can result in massive dilution should the bank subsequently raise even a paltry amount of capital. A new offering will trigger a lower price because of the dilution it would cause, which would trigger even more dilution because of the lower price, which would then trigger an even lower price because of the even higher dilution, etc. This is why we call such securities a death spiral.

However, unless the bank goes bankrupt, these investors can’t lose. And we already know to what lengths the Fed will go to prevent a banking bankruptcy. It’s heads I win, tails I win.

They can even short the stock in the expectation that it will go down and still not lose. At the next financing, which is sure to come, they will be made whole... even making money on the short!

Add Citigroup to the list. I talked about this way back on January 15, 2008 in Cost of Capital "Ratchets Up" at Citigroup and Merrill.

Is it any wonder that Citigroup is desperate to dump $500 billion in assets? The saving grace for Citigroup is that it has assets to dump. The big question is ho much those assets will fetch. I believe it will be far less that Citigroup thinks. I am still sticking to my estimate that Citigroup will survive, just nowhere remotely close to its current state.

Now take a good hard look at WaMu. It is losing money at nearly everything it does. It is in deep serial trouble over Alt-A loans alone.

With that in mind, many have been asking for an update on the WaMu Alt-A pool I have been tracking. The article has been out for some time. The title is certainly not obvious, and those who missed the update can find it in Fannie and Freddie Waterfalls Are Too Big to Bail.

Desperation At WaMu

Think about the implications of a company either desperate enough or dumb enough to issues $billions in shares at $8.75 when the stock was over $13 at the time. The ratchet provisions made it likely those in the deal immediately shorted it. Even if there were short restrictions, there are ways to execute synthetic shorts (writing deep in the money covered calls for example).

Even if TPG took no action on its own accord, others understanding the implications of the ratchet agreements WaMu agreed to, probably shorted the hell out of it. Any company that desperate or that stupid deserved to be shorted into oblivion.

The CEO, CFO, and COO all ought to get fired for agreeing such terms as well as for not seeing the need to raise capital until shares fell to $13. Then again, those executives paid the ultimate sacrifice of foregoing their bonus for a quarter.

WaMu Is Screwed

Washington Mutual is screwed. It cannot raise capital by equity deals even if it wants to. Those who translated "We have no plans to raise capital" into "No Need to Raise Capital" are sadly mistaken.

WaMu desperately needs to raise capital. However, those death spiral financing arrangements it made means WaMu can't raise capital. And if WaMu can't raise capital, it stands to reason it would have no plans to do so.

$217 Billion in Subprime & Alt-A at F&F out of $1.5 T; $6.9 Billion in Foreclosed Properties: & Fixed Rate Mortgage 6.71% conforming & 7.8% jumbo

The average interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages rose to 6.71 percent on Tuesday, from 6.44 percent on Friday, according to HSH Associates, a publisher of consumer rates. The average rate for so-called jumbo loans, which cannot be sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, was 7.8 percent, the highest since December 2000.

Freddie and Fannie together own about $1.5 trillion in mortgage securities and home loans, and they guarantee an additional $3.7 trillion in securities held by other investors. The companies had a combined net worth of $55 billion as of March. Analysts and critics say the companies need significantly more capital to cushion the blow of growing losses on the more-risky mortgages made during the boom. Source

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may need to record more writedowns after they expanded their purchases of non-guaranteed subprime and Alt-A mortgage securities just as other investors fled to safer investments, their regulator said.

The value of $217 billion of the so-called non-agency securities is falling as other financial firms write down their holdings, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight said in its annual mortgage market report. Privately issued securities backed by subprime mortgages made up 9.2 percent of the companies' combined portfolio, while Alt-A represented about 5.8 percent, Ofheo said.

By investing ``heavily'' in private-label securities in 2004 and 2005, the companies ``significantly increased their exposure to fair value losses from changes in market prices,'' Ofheo said. Structured investment vehicles and securities firms, battered by $452 billion in asset writedowns and credit losses, were invested in similar securities and have contributed to the price swings that may lead to more losses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under generally accepted accounting principles.

``To the extent that those institutions recognize fair value losses on their private-label portfolios under GAAP, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have to do so as well,'' the Washington-based regulator wrote in the report. Source

Subprime makes up 9.2% of the GSE's portfolio at a total of over $200 billion dollars. Imagine what happens when that portfolio has to be written down. Source

Together, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two biggest U.S. mortgage finance companies, owned a record $6.9 billion of foreclosed homes on March 31, compared with $8.56 billion held by all 8,500 U.S. commercial banks and savings and loans ... for a total of $15.5 Billion currently held in U.S. foreclosed properties.

A large percentage of existing home sales are previously foreclosed properties (41.9% of sales in California in June were previously foreclosed), and yet, REOs are still piling up at Fannie Mae and elsewhere. The problem is clearly getting worse ... Source

That is why Hank Paulson and in turn Christopher Cox are waving their independent but coordinated wands in an effort to 1) prevent a market run on the price of bank and investment bank stocks until there is enough time to reflate the U.S. housing market, and 2) ultimately recapitalize our primary mortgage lenders – FNMA and Freddie Mac. An interesting press release by the CBO on July 22nd, by the way, points out that the GSEs are barely solvent (9 billion dollars) when their assets are valued at current market prices. Housing’s cow needs to turn into a bull real quick. Source

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

The Beginning of the End for America's AAA Rating?

Over the past three days, the price of a credit default swap (or CDS, a form of "insurance" on creditworthiness) on 10-year U.S. government debt has risen by 8.3 basis points (one-hundreths of a percentage point), or 61 percent, to 21.8 basis points, and is now almost 80% higher than the median value of this CDS since it was first quoted on April 2.

There is no doubt that talk of a bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has spurred what could be a short-lived spike. Still, it makes you wonder if the market is starting to price in what many say is inevitable after years of profligacy and failed policies: a credit downgrade for the United States.
Normal spread is less than 2 bps (versus 21.8bps now).

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

The Fannie & Freddie Doomsday Scenario

Here's a scary, and relevant, question to ponder as the housing market continues to slide: What would it take for the government to step in and help Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and how would a rescue affect you, the taxpayer?

A Lehman analyst's note on Monday sent shares of both companies plunging. Though they've recovered some, the fall, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's downbeat outlook for housing issued Tuesday, is forcing investors to consider what would happen if a bailout is needed.

"If Fannie or Freddie failed, it would be far worse than the fall of [investment bank] Bear Stearns," says Sean Egan, head of credit ratings firm Egan Jones. "It could throw the economy into depression or something close to it."

Clearly, investors remain concerned. Credit default swaps - a kind of insurance against the possibility of Fannie (FNM) and Freddie (FRE) defaulting on their corporate bonds, are at their most expensive levels in 14 weeks; both companies are expected to report steep losses for the second quarter; and their main business, mortgage securitization, is under pressure as home price values decline and foreclosure numbers rise.

Egan estimates that Freddie alone will need to raise $7 billion over the next two quarters due to writedowns and losses. But the company's market capitalization - the number of outstanding shares times the share price stands at $8.7 billion.

"An investment banker would be hard pressed to raise an amount of money nearly equal to the value of the entire company," Egan says.

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury have taken great pains to point out that the government is not obligated to bail out either Fannie or Freddie if they face insolvency. It's debatable where the legal obligations lie, but as a practical matter, the government can't let these institutions fail because they are being counted up on to help fix the mortgage mess. If Fannie and Freddie were unable to buy and back loans, banks would stop originating them and the pool of homebuyers would shrink, causing home prices to fall even further.

In an April report, Standard & Poor's said an Armageddon scenario whereby Fannie and Freddie are insolvent is unlikely, but that the mere possibility of failure at either is a greater threat to the economy than the actual collapse of any investment bank.

The doomsday scenario could cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion, says the S&P report. The report went so far as to say that a government bailout of Fannie or Freddie could force the agency to lower its rating on the creditworthiness of the United States.

Apture