Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Should We Let the Housing Market Crash?

Many are firm believers in the free market? Will you still believe in the free market if the price of your home drops another 10% - 20%? How about 30% - 50%? The Administration is low on ammo when it comes to the housing market. Should the Administration spend its last remaining ammo on creating more jobs or propping up a dying asset class? This is a good game in which to be a spectator. Text in bold is my emphasis. From Yahoo:

The unexpectedly deep plunge in home sales this summer is likely to force the Obama administration to choose between future homeowners and current ones, a predicament officials had been eager to avoid.

Over the last 18 months, the administration has rolled out just about every program it could think of to prop up the ailing housing market, using tax credits, mortgage modification programs, low interest rates, government-backed loans and other assistance intended to keep values up and delinquent borrowers out of foreclosure. The goal was to stabilize the market until a resurgent economy created new households that demanded places to live.

As the economy again sputters and potential buyers flee — July housing sales sank 26 percent from July 2009 — there is a growing sense of exhaustion with government intervention. Some economists and analysts are now urging a dose of shock therapy that would greatly shift the benefits to future homeowners: Let the housing market crash.

When prices are lower, these experts argue, buyers will pour in, creating the elusive stability the government has spent billions upon billions trying to achieve.

“Housing needs to go back to reasonable levels,” said Anthony B. Sanders, a professor of real estate finance at George Mason University. “If we keep trying to stimulate the market, that’s the definition of insanity.”

The further the market descends, however, the more miserable one group — important both politically and economically — will be: the tens of millions of homeowners who have already seen their home values drop an average of 30 percent.

The poorer these owners feel, the less likely they will indulge in the sort of consumer spending the economy needs to recover. If they see an identical house down the street going for half what they owe, the temptation to default might be irresistible. That could make the market’s current malaise seem minor.

Caught in the middle is an administration that gambled on a recovery that is not happening.

“The administration made a bet that a rising economy would solve the housing problem and now they are out of chips,” said Howard Glaser, a former Clinton administration housing official with close ties to policy makers in the administration. “They are deeply worried and don’t really know what to do.”

That was clear last week, when the secretary of housing and urban development, Shaun Donovan, appeared to side with current homeowners, telling CNN that the administration would “go everywhere we can” to make sure the slumping market recovers.

Mr. Donovan even opened the door to another housing tax credit like the one that expired last spring, which paid first-time buyers as much as $8,000 and buyers who were moving up $6,500. The cost to taxpayers was in the neighborhood of $30 billion, much of which went to people who would have bought anyway.

Administration press officers quickly backpedaled from Mr. Donovan’s comment, saying a revived credit was either highly unlikely or flat-out impossible. Mr. Donovan declined to be interviewed for this article. In a statement, a White House spokeswoman responded to questions about possible new stimulus measures by pointing to those already in the works.

“In the weeks ahead, we will focus on successfully getting off the ground programs we have recently announced,” the spokeswoman, Amy Brundage, said.

Among those initiatives are $3 billion to keep the unemployed from losing their homes and a refinancing program that will try to cut the mortgage balances of owners who owe more than their property is worth. A previous program with similar goals had limited success.

If last year’s tax credit was supposed to be a bridge over a rough patch, it ended with a glimpse of the abyss. The average home now takes more than a year to sell. Add in the homes that are foreclosed but not yet for sale and the total is greater still.

Builders are in even worse shape. Sales of new homes are lower than they were in the depths of the recession of the early 1980s, when mortgage rates were double what they are now, unemployment was pervasive and the gloom was at least as thick.

The deteriorating circumstances have given a new voice to the “do nothing” chorus, whose members think the era of trying to buy stability while hoping the market will catch fire — called “extend and pretend” or “delay and pray” — has run its course.

“We have had enough artificial support and need to let the free market do its thing,” said the housing analyst Ivy Zelman.

Michael L. Moskowitz, president of Equity Now, a direct mortgage lender that operates in New York and five other states, also advocates letting the market fall. “Prices are still artificially high,” he said. “The government is discriminating against the renters who are able to buy at $200,000 but can’t at $250,000.”

A small decline in home prices might not make too much of a difference to a slack economy. But an unchecked drop of 10 percent or more might prove entirely discouraging to the millions of owners who are just hanging on, especially those who bought in the last few years under the impression that a turnaround had already begun.

The government is on the hook for many of these mortgages, another reason policy makers have been aggressively seeking stability. What helped support the market last year could now cause it to crumble.

Since 2006, the Federal Housing Administration has insured millions of low down payment loans. During the first two years, officials now concede, the credit quality of the borrowers was too low.

With little at stake and a queasy economy, buyers bailed: nearly 12 percent were delinquent after a year. Last fall, F.H.A. cash reserves fell below the Congressionally mandated minimum, and the agency had to shore up its finances.

Government-backed loans in 2009 went to buyers with higher credit scores. Yet the percentage of first-year defaults was still 5 percent, according to data compiled by the research firm CoreLogic.

“These are at-risk buyers,” said Sam Khater, a CoreLogic economist. “They have very little equity, and that’s the largest predictor of default.”

This is the risk policy makers face. “If home prices begin to fall again with any serious velocity, borrowers may stay away in such numbers that the market never recovers,” said Mr. Glaser, a consultant whose clients include the National Association of Realtors. “Then we’re back to Depression-era problems.”

Those sorts of worries have a few people from the world of finance suggesting that the administration should do much more, not less.

William H. Gross, managing director at Pimco, a giant manager of bond funds, has proposed the government refinance at lower rates millions of mortgages it owns or insures. Such a bold action, Mr. Gross said in a recent speech, would “provide a crucial stimulus of $50 to $60 billion in consumption, as well as a potential lift of 5 to 10 percent in terms of housing prices.”

The idea has gained little traction. Instead, there is a sense that, even with much more modest notions, government intervention is not the answer. The National Association of Realtors, the driving force behind the credit last year, is not calling for a new round of stimulus.

Some members of the National Association of Home Builders say a new credit of $25,000 would spark demand, but they realize their chances of getting this through Congress are nonexistent.

“Our members are saying that if we can’t get a very large tax credit — one that really brings people off the bench — why use our political capital at all?” said David Crowe, the chief economist for the home builders.

That might give the Obama administration permission to take the risk of doing nothing.

Monday, September 6, 2010

The American People Speak on the Economy and It Ain't Good

The American people as a group have always had a fairly good grasp of the condition of the US economy. They may not always be smart, but they know what they see. As we move into the mid-term elections the economy will weigh heavily on the elections. All the media hype about the Republicans re-capturing the Congress is necessarily true. Also in the final analysis it makes no difference for 2 reasons:

1. Uncle Sam and the Fed are largely out of policy options. After all how do you get the US consumer to start spending when they are tapped out and they face unemployment rates hovering around 10%? The cover story in the Investors Business Daily that came on Saturday states that at the current trend the unemployment rate would not return to pre-2008 levels until 2017.

2. Ultimately Washing DC is so out of touch with the American people. They don't know what to do.

Test in bold is my emphasis. From CNNMoney.com:

A new national poll released Sunday indicates that eight in 10 Americans say that the economy is in poor shape, and the number that say conditions are very poor is on the upswing after steady declines through the spring.


And according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, more people blame the Republicans over the Democrats for the country's economic problems.

Eighty-one percent of the public rates the county's economic conditions as poor, with 18% describing the economy as good. Forty-four percent of people questioned describe economic conditions as very poor, up seven points from July.

The poll indicates that roughly half the country says that conditions have not improved in the past two years. The other half says that the economy has gotten better, but many of them expect things will get worse in the near future.

"Roughly a third of all Americans say that the economy has gotten better and will continue to do so," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "But one in five say that things have gotten better but will take a turn for the worse in the months ahead -- essentially predicting the "double-dip" that many economists are worried about."

So which party gets the blame for the country's current economic problems?

According to the survey, more Americans hold the Republicans responsible than the Democrats, with 44% blaming the GOP and 35% picking the Democrats.

"And when George W. Bush's name is added to the mix, the number who blame the Republicans rises to 53%, with just a third saying that Barack Obama and his party are at fault. That indicates why the Democrats are likely to mention Bush's name every chance they get between now and election day," Holland said.

But according to numbers released Friday, just four in 10 Americans say they approve of the job President Barack Obama is doing on the economy.

The 40% who give Obama a thumbs up is a new low for the president on the economy in CNN polling.


The CNN/Opinon Research Corp. poll was conducted Wednesday and Thursday, with 1,024 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.