Millions to lose their homes

David Seaton's News Links
The infinite number of human tragedies that occur when millions of people lose their homes are bad enough, but if you look at them as merely symptoms of an inhuman system, your heart might break, because this may be only the opening chapter of a story none of us want to read. DS

Foreclosures rising among high-risk US mortgages - The Christian Science Monitor
Abstract: One of the great legacies of the housing boom of the past six years is that almost everyone – even people with questionable credit – has access to a mortgage. But now, some housing advocates contend, all that easy credit is on the verge of creating the worst mortgage crisis since the 1980s. The reason: A rising number of homeowners are shouldering mortgages they can no longer afford.(...) Across the nation, foreclosures and defaults are rising as mortgages that were once affordable are now expensive albatrosses as the introductory "teaser rates" that made the loan possible end and higher interest rates kick in. Some housing specialists worry that the mortgage industry – with more than 20 companies already in bankruptcy – will raise its lending standards so high that would-be homeowners with less-than-perfect credit will be frozen out. There is even some concern that the pullback in lending will extend the slump in the nation's housing market. "It's the most serious threat to the economy," says Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com. "It has the potential to set the housing market back another big notch since there could be a whole class of people who can't get credit." At issue is a class of mortgages that lenders call "subprime" because they do not qualify for the lowest or prime interest rate. These are designed for high-risk borrowers, those with fixed incomes, or those who have had credit problems in the past. Since 1998, more than 6 million Americans have borrowed in this way, according to the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL). The majority of these loans are adjustable-rate mortgages (ARM) that are tied to changes in interest rates. That's a dramatic increase in only a decade. In 1995, subprime mortgages represented a niche market: less than 5 percent of mortgages originated. Today, Wall Street analysts estimate they make up from 18 percent to 24 percent.(...) Deregulation has allowed the mortgage industry to create products like the no-down-payment mortgage and the even riskier "no documentation" loan where all borrowers have to do is state their income without providing proof of their ability to repay the loan. "There was a real rush to make these loans and make as many loans as they could," says Jordan Ash, director of the ACORN Financial Justice Center in Minneapolis, a national low-income housing advocacy organization. "That's because the mortgage companies could sell them off right away" to Wall Street investors. Investors profited from the high interest rates that consumers were paying. "Wall Street wanted the mortgage brokers to keep making loans even though they were riskier and riskier," says Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates in Washington, D.C. "They didn't care that ... people were getting loans they couldn't afford because there was so much money to be made." Abuses got so bad that some lenders were making loans to borrowers who ended up defaulting on their very first payment, according to housing experts.(...) now that the housing market is in a tailspin in some areas, as many as 2.2 million people could end up losing their homes, worth a total of $164 billion, according to CRL. Another report, by Lehman Brothers, concluded that as many as 30 percent of people who obtained subprime loans in 2006 may end up defaulting on them. READ IT ALL

Krugman on the coming recession - NYT

David Seaton's News Links

The bursting of the housing bubble has an objective effect on the economy, of course, but I'm more interested in the subjective effects of the loss of value of the only thing most Americans possess that is of any real value. What is the subjective cost of the loss of the "wealth effect": the idea that one is rich because of the sharp rise in the paper value of one's dwelling? As the disaster in the Middle East gathers speed and steam and its complex knock-on effects make themselves evident, we could be looking at the sinister synergies of a massive "feel bad" movement. If a war went sour with everybody feeling rich it would be different from losing a war when people are feeling recently impoverished... There is a good chance that we'll soon be looking at a "perfect storm" of pessimism. DS

Abstract: The last time things were this confused was early in 2001, when most economists failed to realize that the United States was sliding into recession. If that sounds ominous, it should: the bond market, which has a pretty good record of forecasting recessions, is pointing toward a serious economic slowdown next year. Before I explain what the bond market is telling us, let’s talk about why the economy may be at a turning point. Between mid-2003 and mid-2006, economic growth in the United States was fueled mainly by a huge housing boom... That housing boom has now gone bust. But the optimists and pessimists disagree both about how bad the bust will get and about how much damage the housing slump will do to the economy... Most, though not all, of the ... economic numbers that came out this week were ... substantially weaker than expected. Pessimists feel vindicated by the downbeat data. Nouriel Roubini..., who has been forecasting a housing-led recession for some time, ... predicts zero growth for the current quarter. Economists at Deutsche Bank say the same thing.(...) most forecasters are still telling us not to worry. So whom should you listen to? And how can you avoid believing what you want to believe? Maybe the best answer is to look at what the financial markets say. Not the stock market, which is a notoriously bad indicator of the economy’s direction, but the bond market. (Paul Samuelson, the Nobel Prize-winning ... economist, famously quipped that the stock market had predicted nine of the last five recessions). Since last summer, when the housing bust became unmistakable, interest rates on long-term bonds have fallen sharply. They’re now yielding much less than short-term bonds. The fact that investors are willing to buy those long-term bonds anyway tells us that these investors expect interest rates to fall. And that will happen only if the economy weakens, forcing the Federal Reserve to cut rates. So bond buyers are, in effect, betting on a future economic slowdown. How serious a slump is the bond market predicting? Pretty serious. Right now, statistical models ... give roughly even odds that we’re about to experience a formal recession. And since even a slowdown that doesn’t formally qualify as a recession can lead to a sharp rise in unemployment, the odds are very good — maybe 2 to 1 — that 2007 will be a very tough year. Luckily, we’ve got good leadership for the coming economic storm: the White House is occupied by a man who’s ideologically flexible, listens to a wide variety of views, and understands that policy has to be based on careful analysis, not gut instincts. Oh, wait. READ IT ALL (bootleg)

Housing Free Fall Turning into Meltdown...2007 Recession Ahead - Nouriel Roubini

David Seaton's News Links
If you woke up this morning whistling and singing; with the world at your feet. If you just can't really seem to shake the feeling that the sun shines out of a certain part of your anatomy.... My friend, what you need is a dose of good Doctor Roubini's "Recession of 2007 - Elixir" to reorganize your organism. Try it and see. DS

Abstract: Now the housing recession is spreading to non residential construction. Until Q2 non residential construction investment was strong but it was only half the size of housing; but by now it is clear that non residential construction is also completely stalling; the figures for total construction spending for September show a sharp fall in residential construction and a stall of non residential construction. The reason for this contagion from residential to non residential construction is obvious: since we have now entire "ghost towns" in the West (a term used by SF Fed Prez Janet Yellen to describe many housing developments that are empty in the West) no one is going to build stores, shopping malls, shopping centers/strips, offices near these "ghost towns". Indeed, as reported in a recent lead article of the WSJ, a McGraw Hill Construction study forecasted sharp drops in non-residential construction in 2007 as lower housing leads to lower non residential construction. Indeed, the October figures for construction employment already show a fall of 26K, a fall that will accelerate in the next few months as housing construction now under completion is completed and then new starts will become sharply lower. So, the housing recession is now becoming a construction recession; and the construction recession is now turning into a clear auto and manufacturing recession; and the manufacturing recession will soon turn into a retail recession as squeezed households - facing falling home prices and rising mortgage servicing costs - sharply contract their rate of consumption. As I have predicted since July a recession in 2007 (as early as Q1 or at the latest by Q2) is now highly likely to occur. Expect the Fed to slash the Fed Funds rate as early as January and expect this Fed easing to fail to prevent the 2007 recession as the glut homes, autos, consumer durables will make the demand for these totally insensitive to changes in interest rates. The Fed easing in 2001 failed to prevent the 2001 recession and the Fed easing in 2007 will also fail to prevent the 2007 recession. Also expect this sucker rally in equity to continue for a while into the end of 2006 as expectations of a Fed easing will lead to the delusional hope that such easing will prevent the 2007 recession. But once the signals of a recession are clear to all by the beginning of 2007 expect, as in previous US recessions, for the stock market to experience a sharp contraction; as detailed in my research work, in the typical US recession the S&P500 has fallen by an average 28%. READ IT ALL