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Back in March, we explained why the “fate of the world economy is in the hands of China’s housing bubble.” The answer was simple: for the Chinese population, and growing middle class, to keep spending vibrant and borrowing elevated, it had to feel comfortable and confident that its wealth will keep rising. However, unlike the US where the stock market is the ultimate barometer of the confidence boosting “wealth effect”, in China it has always been about housing: three quarters of Chinese household assets are parked in real estate, compared to only 28% in the US with the remainder invested financial assets.

Beijing knows this, of course, which is why China periodically and consistently reflates its housing bubble, hoping that the popping of the bubble, which happened in late 2011 and again in 2014, will be a controlled, “smooth landing” process.

The other reason why China is so eager to keep its housing sector inflated – and risk bursting bubbles – is that as shown in the chart below, in 2016 the rise of property prices boosted household wealth in 37 tier 1 and tier 2 cities by RMB24 trillion, almost twice the total local disposable income of RMB12.9 trillion. For any Fed readers out there, that’s how you create a wealth effect, fake as it may be.

Unfortunately for China, whose record credit creation in 2017, and certainly in the months leading up to the 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress which started last week, has been the primary catalyst for the “global coordinated growth”, the good times are now again over, and according to the latest real estate data released last week, property sales in China dropped for the first time since March 2015, or more than two-and-half years, in September and housing starts slowed sharply reinforcing concerns that robust growth in the world’s second-largest economy is starting to cool.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Too Good For Too Long

October 13, 2017

Shutterstock

Too Good For Too Long

Over-extended systems contract quickly & violently

It’s amazing how instantly the status quo where I live has changed. The world my neighbors and I lived in when we all went to bed on Sunday night simply no longer existed by the time we woke up on Monday morning. Lives have been lost. Entire neighborhoods — thousands of homes — have burned to the ground. Businesses, hospitals and schools are now shuttered.

Having now experienced this personally — on top of watching news reports over the previous weeks of similarly abrupt “before/after” transitions in Houston, Florida, Puerto Rico, Mexico City, Las Vegas and Catalonia — I have a new-found appreciation for the maxim that when it arrives, change happens quickly — usually much more quickly than folks ever imagined, catching the general public off-guard and unprepared.

We humans tend to think linearly and comparatively. In other words, we usually assume the near future will look a lot like the recent past. And it does much of the time.

But other times it doesn’t. And that’s where the danger lies.

The Cruel Math

In 1987 a Danish physicist named Per Bak released a landmark paper introducing the concept of self-organized criticality. Bak observed that complex systems draw stability through an ongoing cycle of corrective collapses that keep the overall system from becoming too over-extended.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Only China Can Restore Stability in The Global Economy

October 12, 2017

Only China Can Restore Stability in The Global Economy

Fan Ho East meets west 1963

For those of you who don’t know Andy Xie, he’s an MIT-educated former IMF economist and was once Morgan Stanley’s chief Asia-Pacific economist. Xie is known for a bearish view of China, and not Beijing’s favorite person. He’s now an ‘independent’ economist based in Shanghai. He gained respect for multiple bubble predictions, including the 1997 Asian crisis and the 2008 US subprime crisis.

Andy Xie posted an article in the South China Morning Post a few days ago that warrants attention. Quite a lot of it, actually. In it, he mentions some pretty stunning numbers and predictions. Perhaps most significant are:

“only China can restore stability in the global economy”

and

“The festering political tension [in the West] could boil over. Radical politicians aiming for class struggle may rise to the top. The US midterm elections in 2018 and presidential election in 2020 are the events that could upend the applecart.”

Here are some highlights.

The bubble economy is set to burst, and US elections may well be the trigger

Central banks continue to focus on consumption inflation, not asset inflation, in their decisions. Their attitude has supported one bubble after another. These bubbles have led to rising inequality and made mass consumer inflation less likely. Since the 2008 financial crisis, asset inflation has fully recovered, and then some.

The US household net worth is 34% above the peak in 2007, versus 30% for nominal GDP. China’s property value may have surpassed the total in the rest of the world combined. The world is stuck in a vicious cycle of asset bubbles, low consumer inflation, stagnant productivity and low wage growth.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The 5 Biggest Bubbles In Markets Today

October 9, 2017

The 5 Biggest Bubbles In Markets Today

Bubbles aren’t new—they’ve been around since Dutch tulips—but it’s only recently that they’ve worked their way into the average investor’s lexicon. That’s probably because bubbles happen much more frequently these days.

We never used to get a giant speculative bubble every 7–8 years. But that has been the case since the new millennia.

In 2000, we had the dot-com bubble.

In 2007, we had the housing bubble.

In 2017, we have the everything bubble.

Why do we call it the everything bubble? Well, there is a bubble in a bunch of asset classes simultaneously (I delve deeper into this topic in my free exclusive special report, Investing in the Age of the Everything Bubble).

Let’s look at some of them.

Real Estate

You can spot real estate bubbles all around the world now. Canada, Australia, Sweden, Hong Kong, China—and California—to name a few.

Home prices in California have risen by 69% since 2010. Meanwhile, Canadian housing has shot up 1040% over the same period.

Why do these bubbles exist? For starters, ultra-loose monetary policy (which is also the reason that the bitcoin bubble exists).

What will be the catalysts that deflate these real estate bubbles? I’m not sure, but usually there isn’t a catalyst. The marginal house price just gets too expensive.

It seems pretty nutty that another real estate bubble is forming just ten years after the last one that nearly wiped out the planet. But real estate has been part of the food fight in asset prices and it appears to be peaking.

Cryptocurrencies

You have probably heard about the madness in cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ripple. Ethereum is up about 3,600% this year. As for bitcoin, it is old and boring and up only 343% this year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Sorry Vancouver, But Toronto Is The King Of Risky Mortgage Debt

May 1, 2017

Sorry Vancouver, But Toronto Is The King Of Risky Mortgage Debt

Canadian real estate values continue to soar, and a record number of buyers are piling into risky loans. According to the Bank of Canada (BoC), and the Ministry of Finance (MoF), high ratio mortgage borrowers are extending themselves to the limit. While we covered how concerning this trend has become in Toronto, it’s not just isolated to that city. It’s a trend that’s growing across all Canadian urban centers.

High Risk Mortgages

People taking out high-ratio mortgages combined with incomes too low for the property value, is spreading across Canada. A high-ratio mortgage is defined as a mortgage where the buyer leaves less than a 20% downpayment. The BoC and MoF have both expressed concern when high-ratio mortgages are paired with high income-to-loan ratios. The amount of high risk buyers is increasing as markets reach dizzying heights, especially in urban areas.

Vulnerability isn’t just the buyer’s ability to keep devoting a high percentage of their income to carrying payments. Since the number of these buyers are accelerating as prices get higher, they’re at a greater risk during a correction (not even a crash). Something as small as a 5% drop in value and many of these mortgages would be underwater. Underwater is industry slang for the buyer has 0, or less than 0, equity in their home. If this happens it would mean already broke homeowners would have to pay to get rid of their home. Combine that with a higher interest rate at renewal, and you can imagine the mayhem that can unfold.

Toronto And Vancouver Have The Highest Totals

High-ratio mortgages with low income levels is a growing trend in Canada, but Toronto and Vancouver take it to the next level. Across Canada, 18% of high risk mortgages have extremely low incomes for the homes they’re in, an increase of 38% over two years.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

So China’s Authorities Crack Down on Housing Speculation?

April 18, 2017

So China’s Authorities Crack Down on Housing Speculation?

Who’s Behind China’s Wild House Price Bubble? State-Owned Property Developers, Funded by State-Owned Banks.

Beijing’s municipal government summoned representatives of state-owned property developers on Monday and told them to stop hyping the already overheated housing market, according to the portal, Chinese Real Estate Business (CREB), cited by Reuters.

State-owned property developers, funded by state-owned banks, have been a major force in inflating home prices as they bid aggressively for land to gain market share. According to CREB, state-owned developers bid for nearly half of the most expensive land in China during the first five months of 2016. And that trend has continued. But after the meeting with the municipal government of Beijing, these firms may be forced “to change their land strategy.”

Telling state-owned developers to stop hyping, as CREB put it, “operational and market activities” would be the latest effort to crack down on property speculation gone wild in China. It would come on top of the numerous other ways local and central authorities have tried to curb this speculation, without success so far.

Today, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that new home prices in 70 cities surged 11.3% in March year-over-year. It was the 18th month in a row of year-over-year gains. Prices jumped 19% in Beijing and 16.8% in Shanghai (chart by Trading Economics):

On a monthly basis, new home prices rose 0.6%, the fastest in four months, up from 0.3% in February. Of the 70 cities in the index, 62 experienced a month-to-month price gain, up from 56 cities in February, once again defying expectations of a slowdown. Prices jumped the most in Haikou (2.6%), Sanya (2.5%), and Guangzhou 2.3%), followed by other second- and third-tier cities, to which the speculative fire has been spreading.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Murderous Complacency

February 4, 2017

A Murderous Complacency

Dark omens are circling everywhere in today’s markets

murder: a flock of crows

~ Miriam-Webster dictionary

Many view the appearance of crows as an omen of death because ravens and crows are scavengers and are generally associated with dead bodies, battlefields, and cemeteries, and they’re thought to circle in large numbers above sites where animals or people are expected to soon die.

~ “Nature”, PBS.org

Running PeakProsperity.com requires me to read and process a lot of data on a daily basis. As it’s hard to digest it all in real-time, I keep a running list of charts, tables and articles that catch my attention, to return to when I have the time to give them my full focus.

Lately, that list has been getting quite long. And it’s largely full of indicators that concern me; signals that the long era of “extend and pretend” in today’s markets may finally be at its terminus.

Like crows circling overhead, every day brings with it new worrisome statistics that portend an ill change ahead. Indeed, these omens are increasing so quickly now that it’s hard not to feel like Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s suspense classic The Birds:

So what are the data that make me think these crows will soon be feasting on the carcass of the great bull market that has powered stock, bonds, real estate and most other asset classes to record highs since 2009?

Rogue’s Gallery

Complacent Investors

Investors have enjoyed remarkably gentle treatment by the stock markets over the past half-decade. Retracements have occurred much less frequently than historical norms, and have been shallow and short-lived when they happened.

Tom Lee, head of research at Fundstrat and often referred to as “Wall Street’s biggest bull” notes that 2016 was the mildest year on record for the S&P 500, with only 7 days in which the index traded at less than 3% of its 52-week high.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

When Assets (Such as Real Estate) Become Liabilities

December 27, 2016

When Assets (Such as Real Estate) Become Liabilities

December 27, 2016

It will be the middle class that accepted the notion that “real estate is the foundation of family wealth” that will be stripmined by higher taxes on immobile assets such as real estate.

Correspondent Joel M. submitted an article that struck me as a harbinger of the future: In Greece, Property Is Debt:

“At law courts throughout Greece, people are lining up to file papers renouncing their inheritance. Not necessarily because some feckless uncle left them with a pile of debt at the end of his revels; they are turning their backs on what used to be a pillar of Greece’s economy and society: real estate.

Growing personal debt, declining incomes and ever higher taxes as Greece’s depression grinds on have turned property and the dream of easy money into dread of a catastrophic burden.

After many years in which only very valuable properties were taxed, many Greeks went from paying almost no taxes on real estate to not having enough money to pay.

In 2010, property taxes accounted for 0.26 percent of gross domestic product, while this year they are around 2 percent, according to state budget figures. ‘Suddenly, the state treated the Greeks as if they were rich, at the precise moment that they ceased to be rich.’

Among the many disruptions of the past few years, this one shows how traditional conceptions — and a sense of security — can be shattered. With a history full of wars, bankruptcies and rampant inflation, Greeks had always seen land as a haven.

But it is private debt — at 222 billion euros last year — that may prove an even greater danger. This shows in government revenues. With the unified tax, ownership of every kind of property is now subject to taxation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“War, Confiscation Or Redistribution” – An Anecdote On Systemic Reset

April 18, 2016

“War, Confiscation Or Redistribution” – An Anecdote On Systemic Reset

Excerpted from One River Asset Management’s Eric Peters’ comments…

Anecdote: “People work in order to convert their time into a unit of account,” he said. “We call that money, and it’s an invention that allows us to store time.”

Most people have stored little or none. So when they receive money, they quickly purchase necessities; food, shelter, health care.

“People who are able to save money inevitably purchase real estate, stocks, bonds – all of which are alternative vehicles for storing time.”

One share of Google stores 30 hours of work for the average American, or 30 minutes of copying-and-pasting formation documents for the average hedge fund attorney.

“Bill Gates has stored enough time to fund a 1bln person army for 20 years.”

As the gulf between people’s income has grown, the amount of stored time has accumulated in fewer hands.

“Wealthy people convert their hours into financial assets so that they can accumulate excess hours relative to their fellow man. But the average worker is simply thinking how to exchange hours for dollars and then exchange those for food.”

Central banks face a different problem altogether. They need to get people who’ve saved time to exchange it for something other than clever inventions that store it. They’ve largely failed. So now, everything that stores time is extremely expensive and offers little or negative return, while the pace of economic activity slows.

“The problem that we face now is that there is simply too much time that’s been saved. Another way of saying it is that there’s too much capital in the world, in too few hands.”

To restart the system, capital needs to exchange hands or be destroyed, spurring people to rebuild their store of time, rather than just save it.

“It is an elemental truth that at some point, through inflation, war, or confiscation and redistribution, this imbalance will correct, and the system will then restart.”

This Will Be Largest Evaporation of Wealth in Modern History

April 14, 2016

This Will Be Largest Evaporation of Wealth in Modern History

It’ll devastate China’s economy and reverberate around the world

Only a handful of countries have a higher savings rate than the Chinese do. For a still relatively poor emerging country with GDP per capita about a fifth of that in the U.S., the Chinese get an A+ in this area.

But if diversification and asset allocation are the key to preserving wealth, then the Chinese get an F!

The reason: 75% of their wealth is in real estate. They’ve overinvested in one illiquid and bubbly asset that they wrongly believe can only go higher. Relative to income, China has seven of the 10 most expensive cities in the world.

In other words, it has the greatest real estate bubble in modern history!

Price to income ratios in the top cities are off the charts. Beijing is 33.5 times income, Shanghai is 30.2 and Shenzhen is 30.0. The average condo in such tier I cities is only 650 square feet and would go for $460 per square foot, or $300,000. In a tier II city, we’re talking $100,000.

That may not sound like a lot, but the average Chinese are only making about $10,000 per year! That begs the question: how do they even do it on their incomes!?

Wade Shepard went after this question in a recent Forbes article. In China, owning your home is paramount. If you’re a man, you have zero chance of getting a date if you don’t. But with home prices running at exorbitant rates, what are their chances?

It all comes back to China’s phenomenally high savings rate. Compared with about 2% in the U.S., the Chinese on average save about 30% of their income. And for the most affluent, it’s more than double that!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Chinese Take Over Canada’s Real Estate Market, Buy One-Third Of All Vancouver Homes Sold In 2015

March 24, 2016

Chinese Take Over Canada’s Real Estate Market, Buy One-Third Of All Vancouver Homes Sold In 2015

“Housing in Vancouver is insane — it was insane when I left and it’s more insane now.”

That’s from 33-year-old Kevin Oke, co-founder of LlamaZoo Interactive who left Vancouver for Victoria two years ago because he couldn’t afford to buy a home in his native city even while earning a generous salary as a lead designer at a video-game company whose clients included Atari and Ubisoft Entertainment SA.

Kevin isn’t the only one leaving. Vancouver added only 884 net new people age 18-24 last year according to Statistics Canada, and many observers worry the soaring cost of housing will eventually strip the city of its burgeoning tech economy.

(a representative listing from Point Grey)

We’ve spilled quite a bit of digital ink documenting the “three-alarm fire” (to quote Bank of Montreal chief economist Doug Porter) that’s burning in British Columbia’s housing market. Here, for those who missed it, are some informative posts:

According to the Greater Vancouver Real Estate Board, residential property sales in Greater Vancouver rose 31.7% in January, 46% above the 10-year sales average for the first month of the year and the second highest January ever. The benchmark price for a detached home in Vancouver: $1,293,700. The benchmark price for an apartment: $456,600. The latest data from the Canadian Real Estate Association shows the average price of a home in Canada rose an astonishing 16% Y/Y last month to more than $500,000. Underscoring the extent to which British Columbia and Ontario are driving the market, stripping out those two provinces pulls the national average down to under $300,000.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Norway’s Interest Rate Conundrum

March 12, 2016

Norway’s Interest Rate Conundrum

Current Situation

The ECB recently stimulated more than expected, cutting rates by five basis points and expanding quantitative easing. It is already expected that Norges Bank (The Norwegian Central Bank) will cut rates next week, seeing accelerating inflation as temporary. They have a 2.5% inflation target mandate “over time,” giving them lee-way. They see demand falling off while the local economy, driven by exports, recovering. Therefore, they feel that they can cut rates. My previous articles challenged the assumptions that the oil sector will recover, showing that new technology reduces long term prices below offshore break-even points, and exports can make up the difference, illustrating that key sectors, like fishing, can be replicated in Canada, Maine, Russia and Japan.

We are experiencing 1970’s style stagflation, coming from the supply side, not demand. Prices are going up because Norges Bank continues to destroy the Norwegian Krone, turning it into the Nordic Peso. This is where they are “hiding” the damage to save rest of the economy. For example, housing prices will rise in NOK but fall in USD or gold (universal commodity) terms. It’s a shell game, leading to long term decline or even worse, an unexpected period of elevated inflation, requiring a rapid rise in interest rates. Housing remains at risk in this situation (Norway does not have 30 year fixed loans, most people float monthly).

I am in no position to stop them from making trips to Thailand, fruit from Spain and iPhones from California more expensive, but at least I can share my knowledge with others.

The dashboard, above, lines up key figures, showing how low rates drive inflation, gradually eroding public wealth. It is important to notice that inflation is much higher than interest paid at the bank, punishing responsible behavior. A person’s savings diminishes over time in terms of purchasing power.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Vacant Condos in Vancouver

March 11, 2016

The Vacant Condos in Vancouver

Suddenly lurking in the shadow inventory.

The magnificent housing bubble in Canada has been stumbling recently, propped up largely by the two largest cities, Toronto and Vancouver.

Home prices declined 0.1% in January from a month earlier, the second month in a row of declines, according to the Teranet-National Bank National Composite House Price Index. Even Toronto booked a decline of 0.2%. The oil-dependent regions got hit harder. Prices rose only in four of the 11 metro areas in the index. On a 12-month basis, the index was still up only 5.9%, the lowest 12-month gain in three months.

But Vancouver has none of this slow-down rigmarole. Its housing market is booming, with prices up 12.5% year-over-year, beating Toronto’s 12-month gain of 8.5%. Due to their size, they account for well over half of the index.

In Vancouver, prices have now soared 40% from the peak of the bubble just before the Financial Crisis. This chart by NBF Economics and Strategy of the Teranet-National Bank House Price Index shows just how crazy prices have been in Vancouver:

Canada-Vancouver-home-price-index-2016-02

But the price increases might have been even crazier. Depending on methodologies used, “results may vary,” as they say. The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver reported that home sales in February jumped 36% from a year ago and were 56% above the 10-year average.

“We’re in a competitive, fast-moving market cycle that favors home sellers,” gushed REBGV president Darcy McLeod. “Sustained home buyer competition is keeping upward pressure on home prices across the region.”

So their benchmark price for all types of homes in Metro Vancouver soared 22.2% year-over-year to C$795,500.

In some of the more expensive neighborhoods, price increases were even higher. For instance, the benchmark price for all types of homes in Vancouver West and West Vancouver soared respectively 24% to C$1.1 million and 26.1% to C$2.25 million.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Vancouver Is Being Sold To The Chinese: The Illegal Dark Side Behind The Real Estate Bubble

March 11, 2016

How Vancouver Is Being Sold To The Chinese: The Illegal Dark Side Behind The Real Estate Bubble

One month ago, when describing the latest in an endless series of Vancouver real estate horror stories, in this case an abandoned, rotting home (which is currently listed for a modest $7.2 million), we explained the simple money-laundering dynamic involving Chinese “investors” as follows.

Chinese investors smuggle out millions in embezzled cash, hot money or perfectly legal funds, bypassing the $50,000/year limit in legal capital outflows.
They make “all cash” purchases, usually sight unseen, using third parties intermediaries to preserve their anonymity, or directly in person, in cities like Vancouver, New York, London or San Francisco.
The house becomes a new “Swiss bank account”, providing the promise of an anonymous store of value and retaining the cash equivalent value of the original capital outflow.

We also explained that hundreds if not thousands of Vancouver houses, have become a part of the new normal Swiss bank account: “a store of wealth to Chinese investors eager to park “hot money” outside of their native country, and bidding up any Canadian real estate they could get their hands on.”

This realization has now fully filtered down to the local population, and as the National Post writes in its latest troubling look at the “dark side” of Vancouver’s real estate market, it cites wholesaler Amanda who says that “Vancouver seems to be evolving from a residential city into almost like a lockbox for money… but I have to live among the empty houses. I’m a resident, not just an investor.”

The Post article, however, is not about the use of Vancouver (or NYC, or SF, or London) real estate as the end target of China’s hot money outflows – by now most are aware what’s going on.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The “Terrifying Prospect” Of A Triumph Of Politics Over Economics

March 9, 2016

The “Terrifying Prospect” Of A Triumph Of Politics Over Economics

The Triumph of Politics

All of life’s odds aren’t 3:2, but that’s how you’re supposed to bet, or so they say. They are not saying that so much anymore, or saying that history rhymes, or that nothing’s new under the sun. More and more theys seem to be figuring out that past economic and market experiences can’t be extrapolated forward – a terrifying prospect for the social and political order.

Consider today’s realities:

Global economies have grown to their current scale thanks to a glorious secular expansion of worldwide credit – credit unreserved with bank assets and deposits; credit extended to brand new capitalists; credit that can never be extinguished without significant debt deflation or hyper monetary inflation

Economies no longer form sufficient capital to sustain their scales or to justify broad asset values in real terms

Markets cannot price assets fairly in real terms without risking significant declines in collateral values supporting them and their underlying economies

Politicians that used to anguish (rhetorically) over the right mix of potential fiscal policies, ostensibly to get things back on track (as if somehow finding the right path would have actually been legislated into existence), have come to realize the limits of their power to have a meaningful impact

Monetary authorities have become the only game in town,assassinating all economic logic so they may juggle public expectations in the hope – so far successfully executed – that neither man nor nature will be the wiser.

The good news for policy makers is that man remains collectively unaware and vacuous; the bad news is that nature abhors a vacuum. The massive scale of economies relative to necessary production (not to mention already embedded systemic leverage) suggests this time is truly different.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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