Time for some property porn.
It comes from the 2013 Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey – a piece of work often quoted by bubble hunters and rubbished by the property bulls who babble on about flawed methodology. Read more
Most finance ministers would give their right arm to be in the same position as Sigbjørn Johnsen, their Norwegian counterpart. But even very rich countries have problems…
What it boils down to is that Norway has lots of things lots of people want. Namely oil, currency and houses. The result is a growing property bubble alongside a fast appreciating currency, which the central bank is struggling to control due to a catch-22 associated with hiking interest rates — (higher rates help to curb the property boom but only exacerbate the currency appreciation problem). Read more
And why Norway’s property market is still looking ever so slightly peaky.
First, some charts courtesy of Alan Ruskin at Deutsche Bank which point to those countries which maybe haven’t seen the end of their house-price pains. The first chart shows the pain already taken: Read more
As Monday’s Lex notes regarding the US stock bounce has a sting in the tail
Don’t look now but amid the negative news on everything from the shambles in Europe, America’s debt wranglings or worries over China, the good old US of A seems to be stringing together a nice run of positive data… Read more
As FT Alphaville and others have duly noted, the search for the ultimate safe haven alternative is on.
RBS now points to one possible alternative, London luxury-home prices. Read more
Beijing’s efforts to cool the country’s sizzling residential property market are finally beginning to work after a year of moral suasion and threats to local governments, banks and developers, writes the FT. For some, including China’s cash-strapped local authorities, they may be working too well. The average transaction price for land sales across the country fell 32 per cent in April from a month earlier and has dropped 51 per cent since the start of the year, according to government data published by Credit Suisse. FT Alphaville notes that the supply of Chinese housing is also increasing, while the central goernment moved on Tuesday to shore up its local finances with a bailout of municipal debt worth up to $463bn. Read more
The US housing double-dip — it’s official:
Data through March 2011, released today by Standard & Poor’s for its S&P/Case-Shiller1 Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices, show that the U.S. National Home Price Index declined by 4.2% in the first quarter of 2011, after having fallen 3.6% in the fourth quarter of 2010. The National Index hit a new recession low with the first quarter’s data and posted an annual decline of 5.1% versus the first quarter of 2010. Nationally, home prices are back to their mid-2002 levels. Read more
Douse your double-dip fears, house prices are actually going up.
At least that’s the contention by Citi analysts in a note published on Friday. Read more
Another day, another piece of gloomy data from the UK economy.
This time it’s real estate. Read more
The “Further further readings” post usually runs in the late afternoon US time, but in this case you can file it under “we forgot to hit publish”. Doh! Or consider it a Tokyo special. Either way, sorry about this.
For the commute home, where you always pass your Irish stress tests,
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Ouch, nearly everywhere.
The Case-Shiller house price numbers are out for December — and as always, they show a three monthly average (in this case for October, November and December) with a two month lag. Read more
Here’s something the US market may have missed on Monday.
It’s the battle of the housing data providers — with CoreLogic challenging the National Association of Realtors on their recent home sales figures. Read more
Inflation in (simplified) Chinese is 通 货膨胀.
Standard Chartered are back with another ‘wisdom of China’s online crowds‘ piece, or a look at Chinese consumer trends through internet searches. There’s a difference this year though. Instead of just using Google Trends, StanChart have made use of a new search trends-analyser, the Baidu Index (BI). Baidu has a has an 80 per cent share of the search market amongst China’s online population of 300m, according to StanChart, and the bank says it’s the first to use the BI to gauge China trends. Read more
David Rosenberg’s gone all cartoony.
The Gluskin Sheff analyst seems to have given up on on words and is instead using charts — and Loony Tunes — to illustrate his (very salient) points. Read more
Non-performing loans — those defaulted or nearly-defaulted loans — have naturally grabbed headlines during the US housing crisis. In fact, they tend to be a focus for nearly every bond or bank investor in gauging investment risk. What though of their current counterparts, asks FT Alphaville? Laurie Goodman over at Amherst Securities makes the case this week, that the market is significantly underestimating the default probabilities of loans made to borrowers who have been paying on time — in other words current loans. Read more
US house prices fell for the third month running in September as the residential real estate market continues to suffer from persistent unemployment and high rates of foreclosure, the FT reports. Separately, US consumer confidence climbed to its highest level in five months in November on hopes that the labour market is beginning to improve. Prices fell by 0.8 per cent on a seasonally adjusted basis from August to September, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index. That was worse than economists expected and left prices up by a modest 0.6 per cent from the same month a year ago. Nineteen of the 20 big US cities that S&P tracks recorded monthly declines, with prices in Washington DC remaining flat. Tampa, Phoenix, Minneapolis and Cleveland suffered the biggest falls. Meanwhile Reuters reports that the Senate Banking Committe is to hold a hearing today concerning mortgage foreclosures, to examine whether they pose a risk to the overall economy or are an isolated problem. Read more
A top-read story on Bloomberg this Thursday morning?
One that combines the words ‘foreclosed homes’ with ‘Spain’ and ‘tripled’ : Read more
Pressure can do funny things. Just ask Steve Morgan.
The chairman and biggest shareholder of housebuilder Redrow has let rip at the company’s AGM on Thursday morning, accusing the government and regulators of deliberately suppressing housing demand at the very time a chronic housing shortage is laying the foundations for the next boom and bust cycle. Read more
And the UK housing market pain continues…
Following Monday’s news that UK mortgage approvals fell to an 18-month low in September, comes Thursday’s Nationwide house price index, showing that prices fell 0.7 per cent in October. The October fall means the three-month rate of decline has accelerated to -1.5 per cent — the largest decrease over three months since April last year. Read more
Foreclosure worries are now (finally) seeping into bank shares and credit.
Four US financials — Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, GMac/Ally, PNC — have halted foreclosures in all or some US states while they sort out technical deficiencies in their paperwork process. Read more
Crash, bang and wallop.
Or, the sound of the UK house building sector on Thursday morning: Read more
Here’s an, erm, brave discussion paper out from the Boston Fed.
In it, authors Kristopher S. Gerardi, Christopher L. Foote, and Paul S. Willen examine “optimism” and “pessimism” about the US housing market before the recent crash. In other words, they’re looking at why some people missed the imminent house price implosion entirely and why some didn’t. Read more
So the US Treasury’s centrepiece mortgage modification programme — Hamp — is something of a failure. That much we knew already.
But Laurie Goodman over at Amherst Securities brings up another point. Read more
BIS analyst Előd Takáts is worried about ageing, reports FT Alphaville. And not in a personal way, either. In a caveat-heavy but very interesting Bank for International Settlements working paper, the economist seeks to investigate how ageing populations will impact asset prices — specifically, housing. While he doesn’t forecast a 47 per cent “meltdown” in asset prices — a la Mankiw and Weil in 1989 — he does expect “some significant negative effects”. Read more
Chinese property prices fell in June for the first time in nearly 18 months, a sign that the government’s campaign to reduce real estate speculation and cool the economy is beginning to bite, the FT reports. The average price of houses in 70 main cities in June fell by 0.1 per cent from May, the sort of moderate cooling in the property market policymakers are hoping to engineer. Read more
It’s no secret that the US government is trying to prop up house prices.
Its various programmes, Hamp, MHA, tax incentives, etc., have been explicitly linked to higher house prices before — most notably in Sigtarp’s first-quarter report to Congress. Raising house prices can be politically popular, and helps out the banks — at least in the short-term. Read more
Knock 5.6 percentage points off the American dream: US home ownership.
Doing that will effectively strip out those homeowners currently in negative equity, according to a Federal Reserve paper by Andrew Haughwout, Richard Peach and Joseph Tracy. Read more
The latest edition of the St Louis Fed’s Monetary Trends is literally off the chart, FT Alphaville finds — which should prompt some reflection on the relationship of monetary policy to asset prices. Read more
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