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The Fed smiles upon rising long-term Treasury yields as sign of economic growth and rising inflation expectations.

Long-term US Treasury yields have continued to march higher despite the Fed’s purchases of about $120 billion a month in Treasury securities and MBS, whose purpose it is to push down long-term rates. And the Fed governors continue to voice unanimous support for those higher yields as a sign of a growing economy and rising inflation expectations. Just about every day, they come out shrugging and expressing their support for those higher yields. On Friday, it was Richmond Fed President Thomas Barkin’s job to spread the gospel.

“There’s a lot of momentum in the economy right now,” he told CNBC. “I think we are going to have a very strong summer, a very strong fall, as pent-up demand comes back in the economy, as vaccines roll out, and I think the economy is going to be strong enough to take somewhat higher rates.”

This comes on top of Jerome Powell’s insistence earlier in the week that the Fed will consider the rise in inflation as temporary, and that the Fed won’t do anything about it, and that the resulting rise in long-term yields, as long as it doesn’t create “disorderly conditions” in markets, are a welcome sign of economic growth and rising inflation expectations. This Fed is looking forward to a surge in inflation, and is promoting it, and so on Friday, the 10-year yield closed at 1.74%, the highest since January 2020:

The 30-year yield closed at 2.45% on Friday, the highest since July 2019. When yields rise, bond prices fall. The price of the iShares 20 Plus Year Treasury Bond ETF [TLT], which tracks Treasury securities with maturities of 20 years or more, has dropped 21.5% since August 4.

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

Competing Mortgage Headlines: Rates Barely Move vs Rates Surge Lower on Powell

December 1, 2018

Competing Mortgage Headlines: Rates Barely Move vs Rates Surge Lower on Powell

Freddie Mac says “mortgage rates barely move” but Mortgage News Daily says “rates surge lower”

Mortgage News Daily and Freddie Mac offer conflicting reports on the bond market reaction Jerome Powell’s speech yesterday.

Mortgage News Daily says Mortgage Rates Surge Lower

Mortgage rates surged lower today, falling at the fastest single-day pace in more than a year. In order to see the average lender offer lower rates, you’d need to go back to October 2nd at least. For many lenders, it would be a few weeks before that. Granted, this merely restores rates to what had been 7-year highs at the time, but you know what they say about journeys of 1000 steps and what not…

Much of the improvement was driven by an ongoing reaction to a speech by Fed Chair Powell from yesterday.

Surge Defined

A surge is 9 basis points.

Freddie Mac says rates fell 13 basis points. But note the dates.

Freddie Mac posts mortgage data weekly, on Thursdays. Thus, the data is stale. After that table was posted Freddie Mac offered a different opinion.

Mortgage Rates Barely Move

Freddie Mac says Mortgage Rates Barely Move.

November 29, 2018

Mortgage rates stabilized the last couple of months as interest rate sensitive sectors such as new auto and home sales softened the outlook for the economy. Homebuyers pounced on the stability in rates as purchase mortgage applications increased, which indicates that despite higher mortgage rates this year there are buyers on the fence waiting for the right time to buy.

Ignore that galling bit of propaganda about homebuyers pouncing on rate stability as if buyers are coming back. They aren’t. Let’s step back and put this alleged surge into perspective.

Zero Reaction

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

We Witnessed The 3rd Largest Point Crash In Stock Market History On The Same Day That The 3rd Most Powerful Hurricane To Ever Hit The U.S. Made Landfall

October 12, 2018

We Witnessed The 3rd Largest Point Crash In Stock Market History On The Same Day That The 3rd Most Powerful Hurricane To Ever Hit The U.S. Made Landfall

If you don’t believe in “coincidences”, what are we supposed to make of this? On Wednesday, the 3rd most powerful hurricane to ever hit the United States made landfall in the Florida panhandle. Entire communities were absolutely shredded as Hurricane Michael came ashore with sustained winds of 155 miles per hour. You can find the entire article that I just posted about this massive storm right here. In this article, I am going to focus on what just happened on Wall Street. At the exact same time that Hurricane Michael was causing chaos in the Southeast, an October stock market crash was causing havoc in the Northeast. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 831 points, which was the 3rd largest single day point crash in stock market history. Of course it isn’t as if we hadn’t been repeatedly warnedthat this was coming, and the truth is that it looks like this is only the start of the financial shaking.

In fact, international financial markets are in a state of chaos as I write this article. Asian markets are a sea of red, and at this moment Dow futures are way down.

So it appears likely that Wednesday’s nightmare may extend into Thursday as well.

But before we look ahead too much, let’s talk about the utter carnage that we just witnessed.

According to Bloomberg, the 500 wealthiest people in the world lost 99 billion dollars on Wednesday…

Plunging global markets lopped $99 billion from the fortunes of the world’s 500 wealthiest people on Wednesday, the year’s second-steepest one-day drop for the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

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

Ron Paul Is Warning That A 50% Stock Market Decline Is Coming – And That There Is No Way To Stop It

October 8, 2018

Ron Paul Is Warning That A 50% Stock Market Decline Is Coming – And That There Is No Way To Stop It

Is Ron Paul about to be proven right once again? For a very long time, Ron Paul has been one of my political heroes. His willingness to stand up for true constitutional values and to keep saying “no” to the Washington establishment over and over again won the hearts of millions of American voters, and I wish that there had been enough of us to send him to the White House either in 2008 or in 2012. To this day, I still wish that we could make his classic work entitled “End The Fed” required reading in every high school classroom in America. He was one of the few members of Congress that actually understood economics, and it is very sad that he has now retired from politics. With the enormous mess that Washington D.C. has become, we sure could use a lot more statesmen like him right now.

But even though he has retired from politics, Ron Paul is still speaking out about the most important issues of the day. And what he recently told CNBC is extremely ominous.

The following comes from a CNBC article entitled “Ron Paul: US is barreling towards a stock market drop of 50% or more, and there’s no way to prevent it”…

According to the former Republican Congressman from Texas, the recent jump in Treasury bond yields suggest the U.S. is barreling towards a potential recession and market meltdown at a faster and faster pace.

And, he sees no way to prevent it.

Of course lots of such predictions are flying around these days.

In fact, at this point even the IMF is warning of a “second Great Depression”.

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

Evidence The Housing Bubble Is Bursting?: “Home Sellers Are Slashing Prices At The Highest Rate In At Least Eight Years”

September 22, 2018

Evidence The Housing Bubble Is Bursting?: “Home Sellers Are Slashing Prices At The Highest Rate In At Least Eight Years”

The housing market indicated that a crisis was coming in 2008. Is the same thing happening once again in 2018? For several years, the housing market has been one of the bright spots for the U.S. economy. Home prices, especially in the hottest markets on the east and west coasts, had been soaring. But now that has completely changed, and home sellers are cutting prices at a pace that we have not seen since the last recession. In case you are wondering, this is definitely a major red flag for the economy. According to CNBC, home sellers are “slashing prices at the highest rate in at least eight years”…

After three years of soaring home prices, the heat is coming off the U.S. housing market. Home sellers are slashing prices at the highest rate in at least eight years, especially in the West, where the price gains were hottest.

It is quite interesting that prices are being cut fastest in the markets that were once the hottest, because that is exactly what happened during the subprime mortgage meltdown in 2008 too.

In a previous article, I documented the fact that experts were warning that “the U.S. housing market looks headed for its worst slowdown in years”, but even I was stunned by how bad these new numbers are.

According to Redfin, more than one out of every four homes for sale in America had a price drop within the most recent four week period…

In the four weeks ended Sept. 16, more than one-quarter of the homes listed for sale had a price drop, according to Redfin, a real estate brokerage. That is the highest level since the company began tracking the metric in 2010. Redfin defines a price drop as a reduction in the list price of more than 1 percent and less than 50 percent.

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

Mortgage Rates Head to 6%, 10-Year Yield to 4%, Yield Curve Fails to “Invert,” and Fed Keeps Hiking

September 20, 2018

Mortgage Rates Head to 6%, 10-Year Yield to 4%, Yield Curve Fails to “Invert,” and Fed Keeps Hiking

Nightmare scenario for the markets? They just shrugged. But homebuyers haven’t done the math yet.

There’s an interesting thing that just happened, which shows that the US Treasury 10-year yield is ready for the next leg up, and that the yield curve might not invert just yet: the 10-year yield climbed over the 3% hurdle again, and there was none of the financial-media excitement about it as there was when that happened last time. It just dabbled with 3% on Monday, climbed over 3% yesterday, and closed at 3.08% today, and it was met with shrugs. In other words, this move is now accepted.

Note how the 10-year yield rose in two big surges since the historic low in June 2016, interspersed by some backtracking. This market might be setting up for the next surge:

And it’s impacting mortgage rates – which move roughly in parallel with the 10-year Treasury yield. The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) reported this morning that the average interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($453,100 or less) and a 20% down-payment rose to 4.88% for the week ending September 14, 2018, the highest since April 2011.

And this doesn’t even include the 9-basis-point uptick of the 10-year Treasury yield since the end of the reporting week on September 14, from 2.99% to 3.08% (chart via Investing.com; red marks added):

While 5% may sound high for the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage, given the inflated home prices that must be financed at this rate, and while 6% seems impossibly high under current home price conditions, these rates are low when looking back at rates during the Great Recession and before (chart via Investing.com):

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

Australia’s Big Banks Raise Mortgage Rates, Sparking Housing Market Fears

September 7, 2018

Australia’s Big Banks Raise Mortgage Rates, Sparking Housing Market Fears

For decades, the housing market in Australia – which has not seen a recession in 27 years – appeared immune to any external or internal shocks, as prices kept rising gingerly year after year. That all changed in the past year, when according to Core Logic, home prices across Australia’s 5 top cities peaked in October of 2017 and have since declined by 3.5% on average.

That decline is now set to accelerate because overnight, two of Australia’s biggest banks, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, announced within minutes of each other that they are raising mortgage rates citing higher funding costs, cutting chances of an official rate hike and risking a political backlash.

The rate increases followed one week after Australia’s second largest bank, Westpac, became the first of the so-called “Big Four” to raise rates. That prompted fierce criticism from Prime Minister Scott Morrison. The former Treasurer demanded the bank explain itself and suggested unhappy borrowers should shop around.

“They have to justify, in this environment when people are really feeling it, why they believe they need to clip that ticket a little harder when people in Australia and their customers I think are doing it tough,” he told reporters.

Fourth-ranked National Australia Bank Ltd is the only one of the majors not to deliver an out-of-cycle rate rise.

CommBank will increase all variable home loan rates by 15 basis points from October 4, while ANZ will hit all borrowers with a 16 basis point increase from September 27. The change means a customer with a $400,000 loan from CommBank will pay an extra $37 a month, or $447 a year. An ANZ customer with the same loan will pay an extra $40 a month, or $476 a year.

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

If You Read Between The Lines, Global Economic Leaders Are Telling Us Exactly What Is Coming

August 22, 2018

If You Read Between The Lines, Global Economic Leaders Are Telling Us Exactly What Is Coming

Sometimes, a strongly-worded denial is the most damning evidence of all that something is seriously wrong. And when things start to really get crazy, “the spin” is often the exact opposite of the truth. In recent days we have seen a lot of troubling headlines and a lot of chaos in the global financial marketplace, but authorities continue to assure us that everything is going to be just fine. Of course we witnessed precisely the same thing just prior to the great financial crisis of 2008. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke insisted that a recession was not coming, and we proceeded to plunge into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Is our society experiencing a similar state of denial about what is ahead of us here in 2018?

Let me give you a few examples of some recent things that global economic leaders have said, and what they really meant…

–Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk: “We are definitely not going bankrupt.”

Translation: “We are definitely going bankrupt.”

Tesla is a company that is supposedly worth 51 billion dollars, but the reality is that they are going to zero. They have been bleeding massive amounts of cash for years, and now a day of reckoning has finally arrived. A severe liquidity crunch has forced the company to delay payments or to ask for enormous discounts from suppliers, and many of those suppliers are now concerned that Tesla is on the verge of collapse…

Specifically, a recent survey sent privately by a well-regarded automotive supplier association to top executives, and seen by the WS , found that 18 of 22 respondents believe that Tesla is now a financial risk to their companies.

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

Toxic Mix in Canada: Spiking Inflation, Variable-Rate Mortgages, and a Housing Bubble

August 20, 2018

Toxic Mix in Canada: Spiking Inflation, Variable-Rate Mortgages, and a Housing Bubble

What will the Bank of Canada do?

The Bank of Canada has nudged up its target rate four times, starting July a year ago, from 0.5% to 1.5%. It last hiked on July 11. But now it is facing inflation that suddenly and unexpectedly jumped at twice the Bank of Canada’s current target rate.

Canada’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 3.0% in July from a year earlier, the hottest since September 2011, Statistics Canada reported on Friday. Consensus expectation was a rise of 2.5%, same as in June.

Prices rose in all major components. Prices for services – the largest part of consumer spending – jumped 3.2% year over year, up from a 2.2% increase in June.

In most provinces, CPI ran even hotter:

Alberta : 3.5%
Prince Edward Island: 3.4%
Manitoba: 3.3%
British Columbia: 3.3%
Ontario: 3.1%
Saskatchewan: 3.1%
Newfoundland and Labrador: 2.7%
Nova Scotia: 2.7%
New Brunswick: 2.7%
Quebec: 2.4:

But no problem.

Like the Fed and other central banks, the Bank of Canada has its “preferred” measures of inflation. And they’re a lot lower, of course. Which is the point. But unlike the Fed, it does not use a core index “without food and energy.” Instead, it has three measures (definitions) that have been statistically “trimmed:” CPI-trim, CPI-median and CPI-common.

Its stated goal is to keep inflation as measured by these three indices at the 2% midpoint of “an inflation-control range of 1% to 3%.” And this is how these three indices stacked up in July:

CPI-trim: 2.1%
CPI-median: 2.0%
CPI-common: 1.9%

Statistically trimming the hot items out of an index works miracles, though it makes this trimmed index even more meaningless to consumers because consumers, who live in the the real world, cannot trim those items out of their budgets quite so easily. So now, after a proper trimming of the index, the BOC is right on target.

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

Ron Paul Warns That When The “Biggest Bubble In The History Of Mankind” Bursts It Could “Cut The Stock Market In Half”

July 16, 2018

Ron Paul Warns That When The “Biggest Bubble In The History Of Mankind” Bursts It Could “Cut The Stock Market In Half”

When this bubble finally bursts, will we witness the biggest stock market crash in U.S. history? “The bigger they come, the harder they fall” is a well used phrase, but I think that it is very appropriate in this case. From a low of 6,443.27 on March 6th, 2009, we have seen the Dow nearly quadruple in value since the last financial crisis. It has been a remarkable run, and it has lasted far longer than virtually any of the experts anticipated. But what goes up must come down eventually. This stock market bubble was almost entirely fueled by easy money from the Federal Reserve, and now that easy money has been cut off. The insiders can see the handwriting on the wall and they are getting out of the market at a pace that we haven’t seen since 2008. Could it be possible that the day of reckoning is finally at our door?

Of course we have been hearing warnings like this for a very long time. In fact, I have been warning about a market crash for a very long time. Just the other day, one of my readers insisted that if something was going to take place that “it would have happened by now”. In the Internet age, we have been trained to have very short attention spans, but financial bubbles don’t care about the length of our attention spans. They all inevitably come to a bitter end, but they don’t reach that end until they are good and ready.

And without a doubt we are on borrowed time, but meanwhile so many of us that are continually warning about what we are facing are getting a lot of heat for it.

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

Canadian Banks See Mortgage Growth Stall As Interest Rates Rise

May 25, 2018

Canadian Banks See Mortgage Growth Stall As Interest Rates Rise

As anybody who was around for the housing collapse will remember, nothing bursts a bubble in home prices faster than rising mortgage rates. And while US home prices have surpassed their pre-crisis peak, Canadian home prices have risen much more quickly than home prices in the US, and what’s more, they didn’t see nearly as large of a pullback during the crisis.

Instead, they’ve ridden a wave of hot foreign money to all time highs…

…in the process, leaving housing and construction as one of the focal points of the Canadian economy.

But in the latest sign that home prices could be due for a pullback, Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank reported that mortgage lending fell sharply during the fiscal second quarter, compared with a year earlier.

However, a spike in business lending has helped soften the blow to the bank’s bottom line.

But yields on 10-year Canadian bonds have moved higher since the end of last quarter, meaning mortgages would be more expensive now than then.

One analyst said it’s good that the banks are finding more business customers, because with the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, Canadian banks shouldn’t rely on growth from the consumer end.

“It’s really a favorable macro-economic environment in Canada and the U.S. right now that’s driving really healthy business demand,” Shannon Stemm, an analyst with Edward Jones & Co., said in a phone interview.

“It’s a smart pivot for some of these banks to really focus in on their efforts on the business side when you think about the looming risks and the fact that they’re potentially not getting credit for the growth on the consumer side.”

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

Housing Collapse Coming Right Up

March 8, 2018

Housing Collapse Coming Right Up

Mortgage rates are high and rising. Refinancing opportunities are nonexistent; home affordability has collapsed.

The latest Black Knight Mortgage Monitor is worth a very close look.

Here’s what the report says about the feature chart.

Recent rate jumps coupled with climbing home prices have increased the cost to purchase the median home by $67/month (+6 percent) over the past six weeks.
Overall, it costs $1,141 in monthly principal and interest to purchase the median home using a 30-year fixed mortgage with 20 percent down, the largest monthly payment required since late 2008.
It currently takes 23 percent of the median income to purchase the median home, the highest share since 2009.
However, overall affordability remains better than long-term historical averages, even taking the recent rate jump into consideration. Purchasing the median home requires one percent less of the median income than 1995-1999, three percent less than 2000-2003 (before the sharp run-up in home prices) and two percent below those combined benchmarks (1995- 2003).
Average incomes are more than 20 percent higher today than in 2006 (according to the Census Bureau) and interest rates 2.3 percent lower. As such, affordability remains much better than at the pre-recession peak, even though today’s home prices have surpassed 2006 levels.
Assuming all else remains equal, to return to 2006 affordability levels, interest rates would have to climb north of 8.0 percent or the median home price increase to $420K.

Statistical Nonsense

Black Knight is correct on points 1-3. Statistically, it is correct on points 3-6. However …

Regarding point 5: It’s not average incomes that matter, it’s median incomes.

And real median incomes have declined in seven out of the last 11 years.

Regarding points 4 and 6: Those who want a home and can afford a home have a home. The rest struggle because incomes have not kept up with home prices.

Notions of affordability are statistical nonsense. Black Knight does mention some of these issues in relation to other charts.

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

Housing Collapse Coming Right Up

March 5, 2018

Housing Collapse Coming Right Up

Mortgage rates are high and rising. Refinancing opportunities are nonexistent; home affordability has collapsed.

The latest Black Knight Mortgage Monitor is worth a very close look.

Here’s what the report says about the feature chart.

Recent rate jumps coupled with climbing home prices have increased the cost to purchase the median home by $67/month (+6 percent) over the past six weeks.
Overall, it costs $1,141 in monthly principal and interest to purchase the median home using a 30-year fixed mortgage with 20 percent down, the largest monthly payment required since late 2008.
It currently takes 23 percent of the median income to purchase the median home, the highest share since 2009.
However, overall affordability remains better than long-term historical averages, even taking the recent rate jump into consideration. Purchasing the median home requires one percent less of the median income than 1995-1999, three percent less than 2000-2003 (before the sharp run-up in home prices) and two percent below those combined benchmarks (1995- 2003).
Average incomes are more than 20 percent higher today than in 2006 (according to the Census Bureau) and interest rates 2.3 percent lower. As such, affordability remains much better than at the pre-recession peak, even though today’s home prices have surpassed 2006 levels.
Assuming all else remains equal, to return to 2006 affordability levels, interest rates would have to climb north of 8.0 percent or the median home price increase to $420K.

Statistical Nonsense

Black Knight is correct on points 1-3. Statistically, it is correct on points 3-6. However …

Regarding point 5: It’s not average incomes that matter, it’s median incomes.

And real median incomes have declined in seven out of the last 11 years.

Regarding points 4 and 6: Those who want a home and can afford a home have a home. The rest struggle because incomes have not kept up with home prices.

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

Four Rate Hikes in 2018 as US National Debt Will Spike

February 13, 2018

Four Rate Hikes in 2018 as US National Debt Will Spike

Chorus gets louder. But no one will be ready for those mortgage rates.

It didn’t take long for rate-hike expectations to be jostled further by last week’s “monster” two-year budget bill that Congress passed with its usual gyrations, including a government mini-shutdown, and that Trump signed into law on Friday. The bill increases spending caps by $300 billion over the next two years. It includes an additional $165 billion for the Pentagon and $131 billion for non-defense programs.

The bill comes after the tax cuts slashed expected revenues by $1.5 trillion of the next ten years. So pretty soon this is starting to add up.

Going forward, the US gross national debt will likely balloon at a rate of over $1 trillion a year, every year, even during the best of times. It’s $20.5 trillion currently [update 3 hours later, after debt ceiling suspended: $20.7 trillion]. It will likely be over $21.5 trillion a year from now – and this when the US economy is expected to boom. Any downturn will cause the debt to spike.

And what will the Fed do?

Four rate hikes this year – that’s what Credit Suisse’s US economists said in a research note on Monday. Previously, they’d expected three rate hikes for 2018.

“The FOMC has already boosted their growth outlook for 2018 in light of the tax bill passed in December and we anticipate another upward revision to their growth forecast at the March meeting,” the economists wrote in the research note, according to Reuters.

“With the economy near (or above) full employment, prudent risk management suggests the Fed ought to accelerate their tightening in response to a large positive demand shock,” they said.

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

“This Won’t End Well” – Mortgage Rates Spike To 4-Year Highs

February 8, 2018

“This Won’t End Well” – Mortgage Rates Spike To 4-Year Highs

Growth? Inflation? Be careful what you wish for, as the surge in Treasury yields has sent mortgage interest rates to their highest in four years, flashing a big red warning light for affordability and home sales in 2018…

The U.S. weekly average 30-year fixed mortgage rate rocketed up 10 basis points to 4.32 percent this week. Following a turbulent Monday, financial markets settled down with the 10-year Treasury yield resuming its upward march. Mortgage rates have followed. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate is up 33 basis points since the start of the year.

Will higher rates break housing market momentum?

As the following chart shows, that surge in rates will have a direct impact on home sales (or prices will be forced to adjust lower) as affordability collapses…

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