Month: April 2009

So, longtime readers know ValuePlays is a big fan of Jim Grant.

Take a look at Grant’s view of the government response to the current recession.

Disclosure (“none” means no position):

Summary:
Reports from the Federal Reserve Banks indicate that overall economic activity contracted further or remained weak. However, five of the twelve Districts noted a moderation in the pace of decline, and several saw signs that activity in some sectors was stabilizing at a low level.

Manufacturing activity weakened across a broad range of industries in most Districts, with only a few exceptions. Nonfinancial service activity continued to contract across Districts. Retail spending remained sluggish, although some Districts noted a slight improvement in sales compared with the previous reporting period. Residential real estate markets continued to be weak. Home prices and construction were still falling in most areas, but better-than-expected buyer traffic led to a scattered pickup in sales in a number of Districts. Nonresidential real estate conditions continued to deteriorate. Difficulty obtaining commercial real estate financing was constraining construction and investment activity. Spending on business travel declined as corporations cut back. Reports on tourism were mixed. Bankers reported tight credit conditions, rising delinquencies, and some deterioration of loan quality.

Fed Beige Book t 2009-4-15

Folks, a “slowing rate of decline” is another way of saying “things don’t suck as bad”. It by no means should be taken to mean “things are getting better”.

Just be careful if you are putting money to work. Make sure the prices you pay reflects economic reality, not what you hope is going to happen

Disclosure (“none” means no position):

For anyone who thought housing might have been stabilizing, here is a cold dose of reality. The bottom line? If you bought a house in California after 2005 and want to sell it for what you paid, you’ve got a decade to get it ready.

From the WSJ:

Some of the nation’s largest mortgage companies are stepping up foreclosures on delinquent homeowners. That will likely lead to more Americans losing their homes just as the Obama administration’s housing-rescue plan gets into gear.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) all say they have increased foreclosure activity in recent weeks. Those companies say they have lifted internal moratoriums which temporarily halted foreclosures.

It continues:

Foreclosure sales had dropped in the second half of 2008 as mortgage companies delayed taking action against delinquent borrowers. But sales have been edging up this year, according to LPS Applied Analytics, which tracks loan performance. Foreclosure-related filings increased by nearly 6% in February from the month earlier, and were up almost 30% from February 2008, according to RealtyTrac. The backlog of seriously delinquent loans has been growing.

Completed Foreclosures Jumped 44% in March

In California, notices of trustee sales, which are preludes to foreclosure sales, climbed by more than 80% to 33,178 in March, from February, according to data from ForeclosureRadar.com and the Field Check Group. The increase reflects both the expiration of foreclosure moratoriums and a California law enacted late last year that temporarily delayed default and foreclosure notices, says Mark Hanson, president of the Field Check Group, a research firm.

Ronald Temple, co-director of research at Lazard Asset Management, expects home prices to fall 22% to 27% from their January levels. More than 2.1 million homes will be lost this year because borrowers can’t meet their loan payments, up from about 1.7 million in 2008, according to Moody’s Economy.com.

Mortgage-servicing companies, such as J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo, collect mortgage payments and work with troubled borrowers, both for loans they own and those held by investors.

J.P. Morgan Chase has increased foreclosure actions since the expiration of a moratorium on new foreclosures that began on Oct. 31, and a later moratorium put in place at President Obama’s request. The Oct. 31 moratorium delayed foreclosures on more than $22 billion of Chase-owned mortgages involving more than 80,000 homeowners.

Remember this chart from last October?

It hasn’t significantly changed people.  These loans, when they reset will mean payments double or triple their current level for homes not worth near the amount of the loan. Result? People will continue to walk away from homes. 

This is brilliant stuff. Hayek is the author of “Road to Serfdom”.

John Chamberlain characterised the period immediately following World War II in his foreword to the first edition of The Road to Serfdom as ‘a time of hesitation’. Britain and the European continent were faced with the daunting task of reconstruction and reconstitution. The United States, spared from the physical destruction that marked Western Europe, was nevertheless recovering from the economic whiplash of a war-driven economic recovery from the Great Depression. Everywhere there was a desire for security and a return to stability.

The intellectual environment was no more steady. The rise and subsequent defeat of fascism had provided an extremely wide flank for intellectuals who were free to battle for any idea short of ethnic cleansing and dictatorial political control. At the same time, the mistaken but widely accepted notion that the unpredictability of the free market had caused the depression, coupled with four years of war-driven, centrally directed production, and the fact that Russia had been a wartime ally of the United States and England, increased the mainstream acceptance of peace-time government planning of the economy.

Hayek employed economics to investigate the mind of man, using the knowledge he had gained to unveil the totalitarian nature of socialism and to explain how it inevitably leads to ‘serfdom’. His greatest contribution lay in the discovery of a simple yet profound truth: man does not and cannot know everything, and when he acts as if he does, disaster follows.

He recognized that socialism, the collectivist state, and planned economies represent
the ultimate form of hubris, for those who plan them attempt – with insufficient knowledge – to redesign the nature of man. In so doing, would-be planners arrogantly ignore traditions that embody the wisdom of generations; impetuously disregard customs whose purpose they do not understand; and blithely confuse the law written on the hearts of men – which they cannot change – with administrative rules that they can alter at whim. For Hayek, such presumption was not only a ‘fatal conceit’, but also ‘the road to serfdom’.

F.A. Hayek Interviewed By John O’Sullivan from FEE on Vimeo.

Buy the book here:

Disclosure (“none” means no position):

Say what you want about GM (GM) and my beloved Suburban, in any of these crashes, I and my family walk away.

I’ll happily pay take my 14mpg over crushed femurs and coma anytime…anytime

Disclosure (“none” means no position):None in GM, Long Suburbans

Killer flu, WSM, Recession, Oil

– This is scary

– Kunal is right, this market is due to roll over

– How to survive one

– Thought provoking

Disclosure (“none” means no position):

Markets have rallied and the common refrain is “the worst is over”. But, “things not sucking that bad” ought not to be the reason for a 20% market rally. We are a long time from being out of the woods…….a long time..

Here is the news…

PPI & Retail Sales numbers from this morning…

But wait…

From the Fed’s Feb. report to Congress

Participants’ projections for the change in real GDP in 2009 had a central tendency of -1.3 to -0.5 percent, compared with the central tendency of -0.2 to 1.1 percent for their projections last October. In explaining these downward revisions, participants referred to the further intensification of the financial crisis and its effect on credit and wealth, the waning of consumer and business confidence, the marked deceleration in global economic activity, and the weakness of incoming data on spending and employment. Participants anticipated a broad-based decline in aggregate output during the first half of this year; they noted that consumer spending would likely be damped by the deterioration in labor markets, the tightness of credit conditions, the continuing decline in house prices, and the recent sharp reduction in stock market wealth, and they saw reductions in consumer demand contributing to further weakness in business investment. However, participants expected that the economy would begin to recover–albeit gradually–during the second half of the year, mainly reflecting the effects of fiscal stimulus and of Federal Reserve measures providing support to credit markets.

Looking further ahead, participants’ growth projections had a central tendency of 2.5 to 3.3 percent for 2010 and 3.8 to 5.0 percent for 2011. Participants generally expected that strains in financial markets would ebb only slowly and hence that the pace of recovery in 2010 would be damped. Nonetheless, participants generally anticipated that real GDP growth would gain further momentum in 2011, reaching a pace that would temporarily exceed their estimates of the longer-run sustainable rate of economic growth and would thereby help reduce the slack in resource utilization. Most participants expected that, absent further shocks, economic growth would eventually converge to a rate of 2.5 to 2.7 percent, reflecting longer-term trends in the growth of productivity and the labor force.

Participants anticipated that labor market conditions would deteriorate substantially further over the course of this year, and nearly all expected that unemployment would still be well above its longer-run sustainable rate at the end of 2011. Participants’ projections for the average unemployment rate during the fourth quarter of 2009 had a central tendency of 8.5 to 8.8 percent, markedly higher than last December’s actual unemployment rate of 7.2 percent–the latest available figure at the time of the January FOMC meeting. Nearly all participants’ projections were more than a percentage point higher than their previous forecasts made last October, reflecting the sharp rise in actual unemployment that occurred during the final months of 2008 as well as participants’ weaker outlook for economic activity this year. Most participants anticipated that output growth in 2010 would not be substantially above its longer-run trend rate and hence that unemployment would decline only modestly next year. With economic activity and job creation generally projected to accelerate in 2011, participants anticipated that joblessness would decline more appreciably that year, as is evident from the central tendency of 6.7 to 7.5 percent for their unemployment rate projections. Participants expected that the unemployment rate would decline further after 2011, and most saw it settling in at a rate of 4.8 to 5.0 percent over time.

It was just last October the Fed thought things would be better than they are now. By this summer they were predicting improvement. Now, we are looking at “end of the year”. Soon it will be “early 2010”. Every time the Fed talks, the projection time for recovery gets pushed out.

If the consumer is not spending, it is all moot. We the consumer are 2/3 of all economic activity. Until we begin to spend again, nothing gets appreciably better. Note the Fed projection of 8.5% to 8.8% unemployment for 2009. Um…we are already there as of March. That means the number will get worse and then the forecast the Fed made in February will have to be downgraded again.

With higher taxes coming down the road for those with the greatest ability to spend, one ought not assume that recovery time is right around the corner.

Disclosure (“none” means no position):

Look’s like CNBC got on the Natural Gas (UNG) bandwagon yesterday. The trader in the video picks EOG (EOH), Chesapeake(CHK) and Quicksilver (KWK). I disagree.

Why? Remember the Chesapeake CEO said under $7 or $8 for natural gas no one makes money? Well, that mean gas can rise near 100% before most producers start turning a profit. Because of that, I would avoid the producers here. If gas rallies to $6 from its current sub $4 level, these guys still do not make any money and the thesis for buying the stock remains null. I like either the pure gas, (UNG) OR the Oil (USE) and Gas Services plays like last week’s Exterran Holdings (EXH).

Disclosure (“none” means no position):None ……yet

Here is the speech Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke will give today. Pay attention to the section on inflation. I am very concerned at the almost dismissive attitude about the possible inflation risk.

We have had unprecedented action by the Fed and Treasury and the supply of money has exploded to before unimaginable levels yet, the thought of hyper-inflation is met with an “oh we’ll just withdraw liquidity lickety split”. Oh…that easy is it?

But, what if the inflation is met with no growth? Then what do we do? All the commentary of the subject just assumes growth returns and Fed action then foloows the playbook. Withdrawing liquidity in a no growth (or negative growth) environment suppresses activity and then will cause another perhaps deeper recession and this one is accompanied by rising prices (see late 1970’s). For those not sure, this is very bad.

Why isn’t anyone asking Bernanke about this scenario? I have watched the Congressional hearings and the question has not come up save for Ron Paul and he is dismissed as a kook for lack of a better word.

This is troubling…

Bernanke Speech on Crisis

Disclosure (“none” means no position):

I know Wesbury has been a perma-bull and for that many folks discount what he has to say. With that being said, he does nail the current situation (problem) with the US Government and its attempts to “fix” things.

Disclosure (“none” means no position):

Retail, Retail, Consumers, Consumers

– Davidowitz is wrong on Sears

– Value is where it is at

– Behavior in recession

– 2/3 of the economy leads it

Disclosure (“none” means no position):

I apologize before you view it for the voice. Was suffering from the worst head cold of my life last Friday.

Anyway, time ti talk more about Exterran Holdings (EXH):

Disclosure (“none” means no position):none, yet…