Bubbles Don’t Correct, They BURST!

it’s time to put the word out that the second greatest bull march in history is finally coming to an end. It’s done.

Wall Street thinks this is a correction – a 10% drop, maybe 20% at worst, followed by more gains. They think we’re just six years into a 10 if not 20 year bull market. This is just a healthy breather.

Of course they think that! It’s the same “bubble-head” logic you find at the top of any extreme market in history!

Every single time – without exception – we delude ourselves into believing there is no bubble. We think: “Life’s good, why should we argue with it?”

And every time, we’re shocked when it’s over. Only in retrospect do we realize, yes, that was clearly a bubble, and oh, how stupid we were for not seeing it.

Bubbles don’t correct. They burst. They always do. And if anyone is still doubting whether this is a bubble, they need to get with the program – now!

China’s stock market will also keep crashing – it’s already down 42%. When it does, its real estate will follow – with devastating consequences to real estate in the U.S. and the globe. And over the next several years, we’ll see the greatest global crash in real estate in modern history.

More single women are 1st-time homeowners

Single women are buying homes at nearly twice the rate of single men.

They now account for 23% of first-time buyers and 16% of repeat buyers, according to the 2014 National Association of Realtors Profile of Homebuyers and Sellers. Single men make up 15% of first-timers and 8% of repeats.

“You’re in the suburbs of Manhattan, so you’ve got highly capable women who are working in the city and are looking to invest, and real estate is still a great investment for people,” said Denise Friend of Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty in White Plains, N.Y.

U.S. Foreclosure Activity Increases 7 Percent in July as Bank Repossessions Reach 30-Month High

Foreclosure Starts Decrease to Lowest Level in Since November 2005;
Atlantic City Posts Top Metro Foreclosure Rate, Activity up in 13 of 20 Largest Metros

IRVINE, Calif. – Aug. 20, 2015 — RealtyTrac® (www.realtytrac.com), the nation’s leading source for comprehensive housing data, today released its July 2015 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report™, which shows a total of 124,910 U.S. properties with foreclosure filings — default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — in July, up 7 percent from the previous month and up 14 percent from a year ago. July was the fifth consecutive month with a year-over-year increase in overall foreclosure activity following 53 consecutive months of decreases.

“The increase in overall foreclosure activity over the last five months has been driven primarily by rapidly rising bank repossessions, which in July reached the highest level since January 2013,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrac. “Meanwhile foreclosure starts in July were at the lowest level since November 2005 — a nearly 10-year low that demonstrates the recent rise in bank repossessions represents banks flushing out old distress rather than new distress being pushed into the pipeline.

“This clearing of old distress is evident in the fact that properties foreclosed in the second quarter had been in the foreclosure process an average of 629 days, the longest in any quarter since we began tracking in the first quarter of 2007,” Blomquist continued. “It’s also evident that the recent surge in REOs is in fact clearing out more of the bad bubble-era loans from the so-called shadow inventory. RealtyTrac data now shows 61 percent of loans still in the foreclosure process were originated during the housing bubble years of 2004 to 2008, down from 68 percent last year and 75 percent two years ago.”

Disparity between home prices and what’s affordable

C.A.R. analysis finds significant disparity between home prices and what buyers can truly afford

Dearth of housing supply at affordable prices exacerbates housing affordability issue.

– Only seven of 32 reporting counties in California had a home price that a typical median-income household in the counties can afford.

– Less than one-third of the state’s housing inventory was at or below the home price a typical household earning the median income can afford.

– San Francisco’s second quarter median home price was 225 percent higher than what a typical median-income household in that county can purchase.

LOS ANGELES (Aug. 20) – Only seven of California’s counties are affordable to home buyers who earn the areas’ median household income, while homes in 25 counties were out of reach for the typical household, according to analysis by the CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® (C.A.R.). Furthermore, less than a third of the state’s inventory of available single-family homes, condominiums, and townhomes for sale was at or below the home price that a household earning the California median income of $60,244 can afford.

“The significant disparity between what home buyers can realistically afford and actual home price is discouraging, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area,” said C.A.R. President Chris Kutzkey. “While housing is affordable in some regions of the state, California lacks an adequate supply and mix of affordable housing in locations where the majority of the state’s workforce resides.”

In the second quarter of 2015, the statewide median price of $446,980 was nearly 50 percent higher than what a California household with the median income of $60,244 could afford to purchase.

St. Louis Fed official: No evidence QE boosted economy

The Federal Reserve is putting some of its post-crisis actions under a magnifying glass and not liking everything it sees.

In a white paper dissecting the U.S. central bank’s actions to stem the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, Stephen D. Williamson, vice president of the St. Louis Fed, finds fault with three key policy tenets.

Specifically, he believes the zero interest rates in place since 2008 that were designed to spark good inflation actually have resulted in just the opposite. And he believes the “forward guidance” the Fed has used to communicate its intentions has instead been a muddle of broken vows that has served only to confuse investors. Finally, he asserts that quantitative easing, or the monthly debt purchases that swelled the central bank’s balance sheet past the $4.5 trillion mark, have at best a tenuous link to actual economic improvements.

Williamson is quick to acknowledge that then-Chairman Ben Bernanke’s Fed, through liquidity programs like the Term Auction Facility that injected cash into banks, “helped to assure that the Fed’s Great Depression errors were not repeated.”

But as for spurring inflation, reducing employment or otherwise generating sustained economic activity, the results, particularly for QE, are “at best best mixed.” In addition to muted inflation, gross domestic product has yet to eclipse 2.5 percent for any calendar year during the recovery, while wage gains, and consequently living standards, have been mired around 2 percent or less.

“There is no work, to my knowledge, that establishes a link from QE to the ultimate goals of the Fed—inflation and real economic activity. Indeed, casual evidence suggests that QE has been ineffective in increasing inflation,” Williamson wrote.

“For example, in spite of massive central bank asset purchases in the U.S., the Fed is currently falling short of its 2 percent inflation target,” he added. “Further, Switzerland and Japan, which have balance sheets that are much larger than that of the U.S., relative to GDP, have been experiencing very low inflation or deflation.”

Computers are the new Dumb Money

You want the box score on this latest weekly battle in the stock market?

No problem: Humans 1, Machines o

Because if you think it was human beings executing sales of Starbucks (SBUX) down 22% on Monday’s open, you’re dreaming. And if you believe that it was thinking, sentient people blowing out of Vanguard’s Dividend Appreciation ETF (VIG) at a one-day loss of 26% at 9:30 am, you’ve got another thing coming.

By and large, people did the right thing this week. They recognized that JPMorgan and Facebook and Netflix should not have printed at prices down 15 to 20% within the first few minutes of trading and they reacted with buy orders, not sales. They processed the news about the 1200+ individual issue circuit-breakers and they let the system clear itself.

Rational, experienced people understood that an ETF with holdings that were down an average of 5% should not have a share price down 30%.

Conversely, machines can only do what they’ve been programmed to do. There’s no art, there’s no philosophy and there’s no common sense involved. And volatility-shy trading programs have been programmed to de-risk when prices get wild and wooly, period. Their programmers can’t afford to have an algo blow-up so the algos are set up to pull their own plug, regardless of any qualitative assessment during a special situation that is obvious to the rest of the marketplace.

Warren Buffett once explained that “Paradoxically, when ‘dumb’ money acknowledges its limitations, it ceases to be dumb.” Ordinary investors, in the aggregate, have learned their limitations the hard way over the last few decades. This is why 25% of all invested assets are in passive investment vehicles and Vanguard is now the largest fund family on the planet. Retail players gave up on the fever dream of Mad Money long ago; Mom and Pop are now investing in the missionary position from here on out.

Software, on the other hand, has not learned this lesson. The problem with computers is that they can’t be programmed with humility.

Opinion: Now’s the right time for Yellen to kill the ‘Greenspan put’

The Federal Reserve says the timing of its first interest rate hike in nine years depends on the data, but that doesn’t mean the Fed will be digging through the jobs, growth and inflation reports for the all-clear signal.

Instead, the Fed will be doing what millions of people have been doing for the past couple of weeks: Watching the stock market.

Many investors have assumed that the recent selloffs in markets from Shanghai to New York meant that the Fed definitely won’t pull the trigger on a rate hike at its Sept. 16-17 meeting. Many prominent talking heads – from Suze Orman to Jim Cramer – are explicitly begging the Fed to hold off on higher interest rates as a way to protect stock prices.

It seems they still fervently believe in the “Greenspan put.” They assume that the Fed will always come riding to the rescue of the markets, as Fed Chair Alan Greenspan did so many times.

You can’t blame them for believing that, because from 1987 to today, the Fed has reacted to nearly every market hiccough and tantrum by flooding markets with liquidity and reassurances. They’ve given the markets rate cuts, quantitative easing and promises that easy-money policies will continue for a long time, if not forever.

This “Greenspan put” means investing in the stock market is a one-way bet.

I believe the market selloff has made a September rate hike even more compelling than it was before, because it gives Fed Chair Janet Yellen the opportunity she needs to kill the “Greenspan put” once and for all.