PIN MEET HOUSING BUBBLE 2.0

Housing bubble 2.0 just met Pin 2.0

The 30 Year U.S. Treasury bond yield hit 2.35% yesterday. That is the lowest rate in U.S. history for the 30 Year Treasury. During the deepest darkest depths of the recession in March 2009, after the stock market had fallen over 50%, the yield was 3.5%. One year ago it was yielding 4.0%. Long term interest rates are not controlled by Yellen. They reflect the economic prospects of the country. When they are rising it means the economy is doing well. When they are plummeting to all time lows, the economy is either in recession or headed into recession. Take your pick. No amount of government data manipulation, feel good propaganda spewed by the captured mainstream media, or Ivy League educated Wall Street economist doublespeak, can change the fact this economy is in the dumper and headed much lower. The Greater Depression is resuming its downward march toward inevitable war.

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  • KBH SEES 1Q BOTTOM LINE ABOUT BREAK-EVEN (against expectations of a 17c rise!)
  • KB HOME CFO SAYS FIRST-QUARTER MARGINS EXPECTED TO BE DOWN
  • KB HOME PULLED OUT OF `COUPLE’ HOUSTON LAND DEALS, CEO SAYS
  • LENNAR CFO SAYS MARGINS ARE POISED TO NARROW ON LESS PRICING POWER
  • LENNAR GROSS MARGIN DECLINED & SALES INCENTIVES GREW
  • LENNAR CEO SAYS “ACROSS THE BOARD, WE’RE SEEING INTENSIFIED COMPETITION AS BUILDERS GO OUT AND CHASE VOLUME”

KB Home had revenues of $2.4 billion in 2014. They are one of the largest home builders in the country. It’s stock has dropped 30% in the last few days. It’s down 40% from its February 2014 high. It’s down 85% from its 2005 high. It had $9 billion of revenues and delivered 60,000 homes in 2005. Then Pin 1.0 popped the first bubble. Revenues collapsed to $1.3 billion and they lost hundreds of millions from 2007 through 2012.

Lennar had revenues of $7.0 billion in 2014. They are the largest home builder in the country. It’s stock has dropped 9% this week. It had been trading at a seven year high, but is still trading 33% below its 2005 bubble high. It had $14 billion of revenues and delivered 42,000 homes in 2005. Then Pin 1.0 popped their bubble. Revenues imploded to $3 billion and they also lost hundreds of millions from 2007 through 2012.

Their admissions earlier this week are proof Bubble 2.0 has met Pin 2.0. KB Home’s 85% increase in revenue and Lennar’s 130% increase in revenue since 2011 have been nothing but a Federal Reserve/Wall Street/U.S. Treasury engineered scheme to repair the balance sheets of the insolvent Too Big To Trust Wall Street banks. The financial industry oligarchs and their servile lackey puppet politicians decided an easy money, Wall Street created scheme to boost home prices would benefit the .1% and restore some of their fraudulently acquired wealth. It isn’t a coincidence home prices rose in parallel with the Fed’s QE programs. And it isn’t a coincidence the bubble is rapidly deflating now that QE3 is over.

The fraudulent nature of the supposed housing recovery can be deciphered by analyzing a few pertinent data points. 30 year mortgage rates were in the 5% to 6% range during the first bubble. Mortgage rates have been consistently below 4% for the last three years. In a healthy market driven economy, these low rates should have brought in first time home buyers and led to a sustainable long-term recovery.

Instead, the number of homes bought by first time buyers has languished at record low levels. The majority of homes sold in 2011 and 2012 were distressed foreclosures and short sales, and the vast majority of sales in the last two years have been to Federal Reserve financed Wall Street investors, Chinese billionaires and fast buck flippers. New home sales of just above 400,000 five years into an economic recovery are at previous recession lows, despite record low mortgage rates. They languish 65% below 2005 levels, when KB Home and Lennar were minting money. Existing home sales of 5 million are back at 1999 levels and 30% below the 2005 highs. This pitiful result is after $3.5 trillion of QE, extremely low mortgage rates, and tremendous hype from the NAR and the corporate MSM (It’s always the best time to buy).

The falsity of the housing recovery storyline can be seen in the fact that mortgage applications linger at 1995 levels, even though mortgage rates are 400 basis points lower than they were in 1995. A critical thinking individual might ask how home prices could rise by 20% since 2012 even though mortgage purchase applications are 20% lower than they were in 2012 and 65% below 2005 levels. The answer is they couldn’t have risen by 20% without massive monetary manipulation and insider deals between Wall Street banks, Wall Street hedge funds, FNMA, Freddie Mac, The Fed, and the U.S. Treasury.

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You see, average Americans buy houses not as an investment, but as a place to live. They save enough for a down payment by spending less than they earn, and then make monthly payments for 30 years from their rising household income. Of course, that was the old days. Real median household income is exactly where it was in 1995. It is currently below the level of 1989. Average Americans have made no headway in 20 years. The median price of a home in 1995, according to the Census Bureau, was $128,000. The median price of a home today is $281,000. When prices go up 120% and your real income remains stagnant, even record low mortgage rates is just pushing on a string. With real wages continuing to fall, young people saddled with a trillion dollars of student loan debt, the full impact of the Obamacare neutron bomb (kills small business, doctors and jobs, but not insurance conglomerates or government bureaucracy) just detonating, and an economy clearly going into the tank, there is absolutely no possibility of a real housing recovery in the foreseeable future.

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The Too Big To Trust banks have consistently accounted for 35% to 55% of all mortgage originations in the U.S. over the last four years. Wells Fargo is the undisputed leader. All of these banks have reported dreadful financial results this week, with plunging revenues and profits, even with accounting shenanigans like relieving loan loss reserves and marking their balance sheets to fantasy rather than true market values. In the midst of a supposed housing recovery, with mortgage rates at historic lows, the largest mortgage originator in the world, saw their mortgage originations FALL by 12% over last year. They are down 65% from two years ago. JP Morgan and Citigroup also saw their mortgage businesses contracting. These banks have been firing thousands of people in their mortgage divisions. This is surely a sign of a healthy growing housing market. Right?

Essentially, the entire housing recovery storyline has revolved around the Federal Reserve providing free money to Wall Street banks, who then withheld foreclosures from the market, sold them in bulk at inflated prices to Wall Street hedge funds like Blackstone, who then created a nationwide rental business, driving prices higher. FNMA and Freddie Mac did their part by selling their bulk foreclosures to the same connected hedge funds. The average person had no opportunity to bid on foreclosed homes and reap the benefits of lower prices. Blackstone has since created a new derivative, by packaging their rental income streams into an “investment” to sell to muppets. Their rental properties are concentrated in the previous bubble markets of Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada. What a beautiful business concept. Free money from their Federal Reserve sugar daddy, kicking people out of their homes and then renting their houses back to them, driving prices higher by restricting supply and stopping new household formations, double dipping by creating a new exotic subprime investment opportunity, and then exiting stage left before it all blows sky high again.

Continue reading “PIN MEET HOUSING BUBBLE 2.0”

BLS PHANTOM JOBS IN A FAKE RECOVERY

Here we go again. The BLS (Bureau of Lies & Shams) with their monthly propaganda dump that has a confidence interval of about .001%. It’s nothing but bullshit, excel model created, drivel, fed to the masses and designed to provide the Wall Street banks with some excuse for taking the market higher. The fake number came in below expectations, which of course was a positive for the markets. You see, in this warped fucked up country, if too many people get jobs and see their wages increasing, the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates above 0%. Therefore, the Wall Street shysters would have a harder time borrowing for free and manipulating the stock market higher. Your pain is their gain.

The bankers who run this country love seeing wages growing at 2%, while your everyday living costs rise by 5% to 10%. This forces you to borrow on your credit card at 15% from them in order to survive. Capitalism at its best.

But let’s turn to the latest BLS turd sandwich to see how our awesome economic recovery is progressing:

  • The blaring headline says we added 209,000 jobs in July. Just to let you understand how important excel spreadsheets are to the BLS, the non-seasonally adjusted figure is actually a decrease of 1.1 million.
  • The good old birth death adjustment added 80,000 phantom jobs supposedly created by small businesses. We all know that small businesses are thriving and hiring like mad. Right? What is even more fascinating is that this adjustment should be relatively constant over time for July. In a shocking development, the 80,000 figure was the highest July adjustment in history, 48% higher than last year’s 54,000. It get’s better. Back in 2011 it added 5,000 and in 2010 it subtracted 38,000. The economy is worse this year than last. Why would small businesses, with all the Obamacare mandates, be hiring 48% more people than last year? They aren’t. This 80,000 is complete and utter bullshit.
  • The MSM is downplaying the fact the unemployment rate went up based on the other survey. Let’s examine that data. The working age population went up by 209,000, but the number of employed only went up by 131,000. That is pitiful. And most of these jobs are crappy paying part time service jobs.
  • The number of unemployed went UP by 197,000. Where is that headline? It seems that some of the free shit army was forced back into the labor force as their extended unemployment ran out and their food stamps got cut. It must be getting harder to get on the SSDI rolls as it will run out of money in less than two years.
  • The Obama recovery in the last year has been breathtaking to behold.
    • Working age population – Up 2.3 million
    • Number of people employed – Up 2.1 million
    • Unemployment rate plunges from 7.3% to 6.2%. Hysterical, but this is what your government expects you to believe.
    • 1.9 million Americans have voluntarily left the labor force because their financial situation is SO GOOD, according to your friendly government drones.
    • The labor force participation rate is at 3 decade lows because who needs a job in this economy. It’s a goldilocks economy.

The storyline you will see peddled by CNBC and the Obama loving MSM is that all those Boomers have been retiring, and that is why the participation rate has been plunging. Facts are so inconvenient to the lying fuckers that run this country. It seems those Boomers desperately need jobs because they forgot to save for retirement. Those leased BMWs don’t pay for themselves. The people in their prime earning years lost 142,000 jobs in July. This age group still has 2.5 million less jobs than they had in 2007. If you were wondering why the housing market is tanking and consumer companies are announcing horrible quarterly profits, there is your answer.

Government data – like the American Dream – you’d have to be asleep to believe it.

SHYSTERS, SCAM ARTISTS & SCUMBAGS

When I came home earlier this week there was a flier on the kitchen counter that had been taped on our mailbox. It was from a company called SAS Claims Service. In big bold capital letters shaded in yellow at the top of the flier was:

YOUR ROOF NEEDS REPAIR….CONSIDER YOUR OPTIONS

 

The entire business plan for this company is based upon driving around neighborhoods looking for houses with missing roof tiles and then convincing them to scam their insurance companies. The flier then goes on to try and scare you about mold, home price devaluation, expensive roof repairs, and evil insurance companies denying claims.

But guess who can come to my rescue?

That’s right, Myron Mendelow will fight for my right to commit insurance fraud. He doesn’t get paid until I get paid. He wants to be my advocate. Here is his pitch, directly from the flier:

We make the calls, file the claim and take on all the aggravation of negotiating with your insurance company adjuster on your behalf, to get you the FREE MONEY that you deserve.

Myron is going to get me some free money for my non-existent damage. He even promises to find more associated damages I didn’t notice.

A couple roof tiles did fly off during a storm several years ago. I had someone replace them, and the tiles are not the exact color of the original tiles. Myron assumed the different colored tiles were actually missing tiles.

Fast forward to Saturday morning. My youngest son and I were finishing up spreading the six yards of mulch dumped in my driveway earlier in the day. I was drenched in sweat and filthy from head to toe. Up the street comes a silver Mercedes who parks in front of my house. A wheeler dealer type gets out and boisterously tells me he wishes he were me. I’m thinking to myself WTF are you talking about dude. He explains that he lives in a condo and can’t get his hands dirty anymore.

I was in the presence of Myron Mendelow. His shirt was unbuttoned to show a massive gold star of david necklace. His picture should be next to the term Shyster in the dictionary. He then proceeded to make his pitch about my damaged roof. Even though I explained my roof was not damaged, he insisted he could get an insurance payout if I put my trust in him. He seemed exasperated that I didn’t want some of that FREE MONEY. After I made it clear he wasn’t talking to someone with interest in committing insurance fraud, he handed me the parting gift of a refrigerator magnet. Now when I’m grabbing a brewsky from the fridge, I can be reminded there is FREE MONEY with my name on it just a phone call away.

This is the kind of country we’ve become. Everyone has an angle to get something for nothing. Everyone is doing it, so why shouldn’t I get in on the scam. The oligarchs set the tone. Politicians set the tone. Everyone is on the take. Greed and avarice are considered legitimate goals of all Americans. The country revolves around fraud, corruption, scams, and swindles. Wall Street bankers rig the system, politicians accept bribes to pass legislation benefiting whichever special interest pays the most, millions watch shyster law firm commercials and realize they are eligible for Social Security disability, or have been wronged by some corporation. What’s a little food stamp fraud or earned income tax credit fraud? I really need to get with the game. This honesty and taking responsibility for my own life concept is really antiquated. I must have been mentally scared by those twelve years of Catholic teaching. Maybe Myron can help me file a claim.

 

AMERICA ENERGY INDEPENDENCE: NOW THAT’S SOME FUNNY SHIT

I love all those imminent American energy independence propaganda stories reported by the corporate media, paid for by the energy industry, and stated as fact by corrupt bought off politicians across the land. The shale oil miracle is the biggest scam in energy history. The boobs spouting about shale oil saving America either have IQs of 75 or are being paid off by Wall Street shysters or the energy industry.

The nitwits spouting this gibberish always ignore the terms RECOVERABLE and ENERGY RETURN ON ENERGY INVESTED. How convenient. The story below blows a gaping hole in the bullshit spouted by these hacks and scam artists. The Monterey Shale Oil deposits were touted as saving America and generating millions of new jobs in California because it contained 67% of the entire country’s oil reserves.

One itsy bitsy problem revealed today – 96% of it is not RECOVERABLE, even with the fracking technology being employed in the Bakkan and Ford shale fields. Instead of 13.7 billion barrels of oil, we’ll be lucky to get 600 million of extremely expensive shale oil, if any at all. OOPS – missed by that much.

The boobs in Congress and in the White House will ignore these facts, just like they ignore how much energy and capital investment is needed to extract shale oil and gas. We get closer and closer to a 1 to 1 EROI. Once we reach that ratio, the game is up folks. Demographics and the depletion of cheap easy to access energy sources are leading to the Long Emergency and slow collapse of our society.

Storylines and propaganda will not change reality. Oil is $103 per barrel. All the talk of energy independence hasn’t changed the fact that you were paying $1.43 per gallon at the start of the Iraq War in 2003 and today you are paying $3.65 per gallon. What do you think you will be paying per gallon in 2020?

 

U.S. officials cut estimate of recoverable Monterey Shale oil by 96%

By Louis Sahagun

May 21, 2014, 12:00 a.m.

Federal energy authorities have slashed by 96% the estimated amount of recoverable oil buried in California’s vast Monterey Shale deposits, deflating its potential as a national “black gold mine” of petroleum.

Just 600 million barrels of oil can be extracted with existing technology, far below the 13.7 billion barrels once thought recoverable from the jumbled layers of subterranean rock spread across much of Central California, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said.

The new estimate, expected to be released publicly next month, is a blow to the nation’s oil future and to projections that an oil boom would bring as many as 2.8 million new jobs to California and boost tax revenue by $24.6 billion annually.

The Monterey Shale formation contains about two-thirds of the nation’s shale oil reserves. It had been seen as an enormous bonanza, reducing the nation’s need for foreign oil imports through the use of the latest in extraction techniques, including acid treatments, horizontal drilling and fracking.

The energy agency said the earlier estimate of recoverable oil, issued in 2011 by an independent firm under contract with the government, broadly assumed that deposits in the Monterey Shale formation were as easily recoverable as those found in shale formations elsewhere.

The estimate touched off a speculation boom among oil companies. The new findings seem certain to dampen that enthusiasm.

Kern County in particular has seen a flurry of oil activity since 2011, with most of the test wells drilled by independent exploratory companies. Major oil companies have expressed doubts for years about recovering much of the oil.

The problem lies with the geology of the Monterey Shale, a 1,750-mile formation running down the center of California roughly from Sacramento to the Los Angeles basin and including some coastal regions.

Unlike heavily fracked shale deposits in North Dakota and Texas, which are relatively even and layered like a cake, Monterey Shale has been folded and shattered by seismic activity, with the oil found at deeper strata.

Geologists have long known that the rich deposits existed but they were not thought recoverable until the price of oil rose and the industry developed acidization, which eats away rocks, and fracking, the process of injecting millions of gallons of water laced with sand and chemicals deep underground to crack shale formations.

The new analysis from the Energy Information Administration was based, in part, on a review of the output from wells where the new techniques were used.

“From the information we’ve been able to gather, we’ve not seen evidence that oil extraction in this area is very productive using techniques like fracking,” said John Staub, a petroleum exploration and production analyst who led the energy agency’s research.

“Our oil production estimates combined with a dearth of knowledge about geological differences among the oil fields led to erroneous predictions and estimates,” Staub said.

Compared with oil production from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas, “the Monterey formation is stagnant,” Staub said. He added that the potential for recovering the oil could rise if new technology is developed.

A spokesman for the oil industry expressed optimism that new techniques will eventually open up the Monterey formation.

“We have a lot of confidence in the intelligence and skill

of our engineers and geologists to find ways to adapt,” said Tupper Hull, spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Assn. “As the technologies change, the production rates could also change dramatically.”

Rock Zierman, chief executive of the trade group California Independent Petroleum Assn., which represents many independent exploration companies, also sounded hopeful.

“The smart money is still investing in California oil and gas,” Zierman said.

“The oil is there,” Zierman said. “But this is a tough business.”

Environmental organizations welcomed the news as a turning point in what had been a rush to frack for oil in the Monterey formation.

“The narrative of fracking in the Monterey Shale as necessary for energy independence just had a big hole blown in it,” said Seth B. Shonkoff, executive director of the nonprofit Physicians Scientists & Engineers for Healthy Energy.

J. David Hughes, a geoscientist and spokesman for the nonprofit Post Carbon Institute, said the Monterey formation “was always mythical mother lode puffed up by the oil industry — it never existed.”

Hughes wrote in a report last year that “California should consider its economic and energy future in the absence of an oil production boom from the Monterey Shale.”

The 2011 estimate was done by the Virginia engineering firm Intek Inc.

Christopher Dean, senior associate at Intek, said Tuesday that the firm’s work “was very broad, giving the federal government its first shot at an estimate of recoverable oil in the Monterey Shale. They got more data over time and refined the estimate.”

For California, the analysis throws cold water on economic projections built upon Intek’s projections.

In 2013, a USC analysis, funded in part by the Western States Petroleum Assn., predicted that the Monterey Shale formation could, by 2020, boost California’s gross domestic product by 14%, add $24.6 billion per year in tax revenue and generate 2.8 million new jobs.

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Via the LA Times