Government Watchdog Warns – Fannie, Freddie Could Need Another Bailout

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It’s always nice to be reminded of how far we’ve come since the dark days of 2008/09 ,when American plebs involuntarily bailed out the oligarchy generally, and Wall Street specifically, to the tune of trillions. Sure, all the gains went to the 0.001%, but the wounds have healed, and we’re in the midst of a stellar economic recovery.

The latest proof of how far we’ve come was laid bare by an article in the Wall Street Journal:

Mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could be at risk of needing more government bailouts, a watchdog said in a report set to be released Wednesday.

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Housing Fraud is Back – Real Estate Industry Intentionally Inflating Home Appraisals

Almost 40% of appraisers surveyed from Sept. 15 through Nov. 7 reported experiencing pressure to inflate values, according to Allterra Group LLC, a for-profit appraiser-advocacy firm based in Salisbury, Md. That figure was 37% in the survey for the previous year.

“If you thought what was happening before was an embarrassment, wait until the second time around,” said Joan Trice, Allterra’s chief executive and founder of the Collateral Risk Network, which represents appraisers employed by lenders and other companies and has been meeting with regulators to discuss concerns about appraisers being pressured into inflating values.

– From the Wall Street Journal article: Dodgy Home Appraisals Make a Comeback

When in doubt, just make shit up.

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Chinese Purchases of U.S. Real Estate Jump 72% as The Bank of China Facilitates Money Laundering

Screen Shot 2014-07-09 at 12.01.36 PMAmerican citizens already have a hard enough time affording a home. Squeezed out by financial oligarchs buying tens of thousands of properties for rental income, and faced with real wages that haven’t budged since the mid-1970s, the demographic of U.S. citizens that historically dominated the new home market has been forced to live in their parents’ basements. Just to kick em’ when they’re down, Americans now face the impossible task of competing with laundered Chinese money.

Of course, this isn’t a new trend. I first covered it in January 2013 in the post: Corrupt Chinese Politicians are Buying Billions in U.S. Real Estate. This was then followed up a couple of months ago in the piece: Zillow Opens the Floodgates to Chinese Buyers in Order to Keep Housing Bubble 2.0 Inflated.

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Leverage in PE Deals Soars Despite Fed Warnings; Amidst Insatiable Demand for Risky Fannie Mae Debt

Barely a day goes by anymore when I’m not confronted with a slew of articles flashing warning signs about the latest Federal Reserve fueled credit bubble. Just yesterday, I highlighted the investor feeding frenzy happening in junk bonds, driving yield spreads to the lowest levels since the prior peak year of credit exuberance in 2007 in my post: Credit Mania Update – The Chase for CCC-Rated Bonds.

Today, I am going to highlight two articles on very different aspects of the credit market, but both are illustrative of the investor buying panic happening in debt markets. All of this is terrifying, and it appears to represent the final stages of another crackup boom. One that is likely to implode sometime in 2015.

Let’s first take a look at this article from the Wall Street Journal that highlights the fact that the Federal Reserve is becoming increasingly concerned by leverage ratios financing the latest round of private equity deals. Apparently, the Fed is “warning” banks about this, which is complete disingenuous bullshit considering it is their low interest rate policy that is leading to all of this nonsense. Of course, they could always raise rates and put and end to this, but they know this will collapse the gigantic house of cards they have created. This is a total mess and one gigantic joke.

The WSJ reports that:

Wall Street banks are financing more private-equity takeovers with high levels of debt, despite warnings by regulators to reduce the amount of risky loans they make.

The Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency last year issued guidance urging banks to avoid financing leveraged buyouts in most industries that would put debt on a company of more than six times its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda. The Fed and the OCC also told banks to limit borrowing agreements that stretch out payment timelines or don’t contain lender protections known as covenants.

Still, 40% of U.S. private-equity deals this year have used leverage above that six-times ratio deemed the upper acceptable limit by regulators, according to data compiled by S&P Capital IQ LCD. That is the highest percentage since the prefinancial-crisis peak of 52% of buyout loans in 2007. Such lending all but disappeared during the crisis but has risen each year since 2009.

More references to 2007…

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Zillow Opens the Floodgates to Chinese Buyers in Order to Keep Housing Bubble 2.0 Inflated

Earlier this week, Michael Snyder made quite a splash in the alternative media world with his article: The Chinese Are Acquiring Large Chunks Of Land In Communities All Over America. Meanwhile, just last year I covered how corrupt Chinese are laundering their money through U.S. real estate in my post: Corrupt Chinese Politicians are Buying Billions in … Read more

Blackstone’s Home Buying Binge Drops 70% from its Peak Last Year

The whole story about how private equity firms and hedge funds have steamrolled into the residential home market to become this decade’s slumlords is a story covered on this blog before mainstream media even knew it was happening. I first identified the trend in January of last year in one of my most popular posts of 2013: America Meet Your New Slumlord: Wall Street.

Since then, I’ve done my best to cover the various twists and turns in this fascinating and disturbing saga. Some of my follow up pieces can be read below:

March 2013: Is the “Buy to Rent” Party Over?
May 2013: Carrington Bails: More Smart Money Leaves the “Buy to Rent” Game
July 2013: The Las Vegas Housing Market has Gone Full Chinese
August 2013: Welcome to the Housing Recovery: Rents are Rising, Incomes are Falling
October 2013: A Closer Look at the Decrepit World of Wall Street Rental Homes
February 2014: Is “Buy to Rent” Dead? – Rents on Blackstone Housing Bonds Plunge 7.6%

With all that in mind, let’s now take a look at the latest article from Bloomberg, which points out that Blackstone’s home purchases have plunged 70% from their peak last year. Perhaps they overestimated the rental cash flow potential of indebted youth living in their parents’ basements?

From Bloomberg:

Blackstone Group LP is slowing its purchases of houses to rent amid soaring prices after a buying binge made it the biggest U.S. single-family home landlord.

Blackstone’s acquisition pace has declined 70 percent from its peak last year, when the private equity firm was spending more than $100 million a week on properties, said Jonathan Gray, global head of real estate for the New York-based firm. After investing $8 billion since April 2012 to buy 43,000 homes in 14 cities, the company has narrowed most of its purchasing to Seattle, Atlanta, Miami, Orlando and Tampa.

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Seth Klarman Compares Phony U.S. Economy to “The Truman Show”

Seth Klarman is one of the most talented fund managers of our time. I have been consistently awed by his intelligence and consistent performance, as well as a strong sense character and honestly.

ValueWalk just put together a synopsis of his latest investor letter, and there are some choice phrases in there. While I completely disagree with him on Bitcoin (he seems to see it as merely a currency rather than an efficient, global, P2P, decentralized payment system), I’m not going to hold that against him.

Now from ValueWalk:

Baupost Group, among the largest hedge funds in the world, returned $4 billion in assets to clients at the end of 2013 because it didn’t want to grow too quickly and dilute performance, according to an investor letter reviewed by ValueWalk.  Seth Klarman’s fund, which in 2013 had a high of 50% of his portfolio in cash, up from 36% in 2012, posted 2013 returns in the mid-teens consistent with the fund’s nearly 22-year track record.

Like many of the best market analysts, Seth Klarman looks at both sides of the issue, the bull and bear case, in depth.  “If you’re more focused on downside than upside, if you’re more interested in return of capital than return on capital, if you have any sense of market history, then there’s more than enough to be concerned about,” he wrote.  Citing a policy of near-zero short-term interest rates that continues to distort reality and will have long term consequences, he ominously noted “we can draw no legitimate conclusions about the Fed’s ability to end QE without severe consequences,” a thought pervasive among many top fund managers. “Fiscal stimulus, in the form of sizable deficits, has propped up the consumer, thereby inflating corporate revenues and earnings. But what is the right multiple to pay on juiced corporate earnings?”

“In an ominous sign, a recent survey of U.S. investment newsletters by Investors Intelligence found the lowest proportion of bears since the ill-fated year of 1987,” he wrote. “A paucity of bears is one of the most reliable reverse indicators of market psychology. In the financial world, things are hunky dory; in the real world, not so much. Is the feel-good upward march of people’s 401(k)s, mutual fund balances, CNBC hype, and hedge fund bonuses eroding the objectivity of their assessments of the real world? We can say with some conviction that it almost always does. Frankly, wouldn’t it be easier if the Fed would just announce the proper level for the S&P, and spare us all the policy announcements and market gyrations?” he said in a somewhat hilarious moment that bears a degree of truth.

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Is “Buy to Rent” Dead? – Rents on Blackstone Housing Bonds Plunge 7.6%

Just last week, I highlighted the fact that the return of subprime home loans was just another bankster scam to get private equity players and hedge funds out of the properties they had rushed into throughout the U.S. by dumping them on retail muppets. More evidence that this may indeed be the case emerged today … Read more

Subprime Mortgages are Back…This Time Marketed as “Second Chance Purchase Programs”

With interest rates up sharply from the lows and Blackstone and other private equity firms holding billions of dollars with of properties with no one to sell to, the time is ripe for a little muppet fleecing. Leading the charge to find new tax-payer backed subprime loans to take some properties off the hands of Mr. Schwarzman is none other than Wells Fargo. I previously forecasted this in my piece: Stage Two of the Housing Bubble Begins: Blackstone to Lend to Others for “Buy to Rent.”

They aren’t the only ones though. Citadel Servicing Corp, the country’s biggest subprime lender, is also getting in the action. The best and worst part of this story is the way these new loans are being marketed. Specifically, as “Low Credit Score Debt Consolidation Program” as well as a “Second Chance Purchase Program.”

This Central Bankster game isn’t complicated. Provide access to cheap funds to financial cronies, pump the bubble, fleece the serfs. Rinse. Repeat.

From Reuters:

(Reuters) – Wells Fargo & Co, the largest U.S. mortgage lender, is tiptoeing back into subprime home loans again.

The bank is looking for opportunities to stem its revenue decline as overall mortgage lending volume plunges. It believes it has worked through enough of its crisis-era mortgage problems, particularly with U.S. home loan agencies, to be comfortable extending credit to some borrowers with higher credit risks.

So far few other big banks seem poised to follow Wells Fargo’s lead, but some smaller companies outside the banking system, such as Citadel Servicing Corp, are already ramping up their subprime lending. To avoid the taint associated with the word “subprime,” lenders are calling their loans “another chance mortgages” or “alternative mortgage programs.”

It is looking at customers with credit scores as low as 600. Its prior limit was 640, which is often seen as the cutoff point between prime and subprime borrowers. U.S. credit scores range from 300 to 850.

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Manhattan Apartment Rental Rates Drop for Third Month in a Row

Now this is interesting. Investors looking at real estate should be aware of two main things at the moment. Those two things relate to what is really driving this centrally planned, manufactured rebound in U.S. real estate. It’s really a tale of two distinct trends. In formerly hurting markets such as Arizona, Nevada and Florida, private equity investors have flooded into what is a now gigantically crowded to “buy-to-rent” trade. Meanwhile, in the prime markets such as New York City and San Francisco, we have seen the “money laundering trade,” where rich oligarchs move their often ill-gotten gains into trophy real estate assets abroad.

We have seen many signs all year that the first key pillar to the manufactured rise in housing was becoming strained, as rents continued to rise while incomes continued to fall. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that this can only last so long, and many of the early investors in “buy-to-rent” have already gotten out or are trying to.

As far as the second pillar, well at some point the oligarchs will have purchased enough homes in London and Manhattan and then what? Interestingly, the seemingly unstoppable rental market in Manhattan is showing signs of cracking. What this ultimately means is unknown, but it’s an interesting data point nonetheless.

From Bloomberg:

Manhattan apartment rents fell for a third month in November and the vacancy rate reached the highest in at least seven years, signs the market is weakening amid a spike in homebuying and the lure of leasing in Brooklyn.

The median monthly rent in Manhattan dropped 3 percent from a year earlier to $3,100, according to a report today by appraiserMiller Samuel Inc. and brokerageDouglas Elliman Real Estate. The vacancy rate climbed to 2.8 percent, the highest since the firms began tracking the data in August 2006.

“With the scare about rising mortgage rates, it poached a lot of demand from the rental market,”Jonathan Miller, president of New York-based Miller Samuel, said in an interview. “On top of that, what else is poaching demand from the Manhattan rental market is Brooklyn.”

Manhattan landlords agreed to offer concessions, such as a month’s free rent, on 7.2 percent of all new leases in November, up from 4.2 percent a year earlier.

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