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Debt Rattle June 20 2020

Jun 202020
 
 June 20, 2020  Posted by at 11:06 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  42 Responses »


Howard Hollem Assembly and Repairs Department Naval Air Base, Corpus Christi 1942

 

• Several US States See Coronavirus Infection Spikes (R.)
• Mainland China Reports 27 New Coronavirus Cases, Including 22 In Beijing (R.)
• US Attorney Berman Refuses To ‘Step Down’ After Barr Asks For Resignation (ZH)
• Coronavirus Was Already In Italy By December, Waste Water Study Finds (BBC)
• Trump Admin To Name Most Recipients Of Bailout Loans (ZH)
• The Crisis Goes Up A Gear (Macleod)
• House GOP Leader: Democratic Party Should Change Its Name (JTN)

 

 

I am definitely not in my normal morning rhythm today (hence only 7 articles in today’s aggregator). Part of that may be due to meeting up with some friends in Athens yesterday, but that’s certainly not the whole story. Athens is still mainly deserted, by the way, which is kind of nice and refreshing, but also very obviously hurtful to many people’s incomes.

But what really bumped me off my rhythm is reading the stories, and reactions to them, about AG Barr asking US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geffrey Berman to resign, and the latter refusing to comply. Reading through all the related articles had one notion, one fear, creep up on me: that the US is at a serious risk of becoming ungovernable. And I mean: serious.

Whoever wins on November 4, Trump or Biden(?!), may well be unacceptable and unaccepted by half the country. And what happens then? Are we going to have a civil war? I’ll get back to that soon. It’s not like this is the first time it ever occurred to me, but it has gained a lot of weight -and risk- lately.

 

 

I thought maybe I had erred yesterday when my count of new cases was so much higher than Worldometer. Instead, they are even higher.

Worldometer reports new cases for June 19 (midnight to midnight GMT+0) at + 181,005.

My count 6AM EDT to 6AM EDT based on Worldometer numbers is 184,233. Have we entered a new phase?

 

 

 

 

New cases past 24 hours in:

• US + 30,810
• Brazil + 54,771
• Russia + 7,790
• India + 14,721
• Pakistan +8,466
• Mexico + 5,662

 

 

Brazil was scary:

 

 

• Cases 8,786,592 (+ 184,233 from yesterday’s 8,602,359)

• Deaths 463,156 (+ 6,354 from yesterday’s 456,802)

 

 

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-:

I forgot to take a screen shot last night.

 

From Worldometer:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pandemic in the US is very far from over. Forget about that trip to Europe.

• Several US States See Coronavirus Infection Spikes (R.)

Troubling spikes in coronavirus infection rates were reported on Friday in several U.S. states, mainly in the South and West, a day before President Donald Trump was due to preside over an Oklahoma campaign rally that will be America’s largest indoor gathering in months. Wall Street jitters over a resurgence in COVID-19 cases as states moved to reopen long-stifled commerce and ease social-distancing measures helped drive down major U.S. stock indexes, reversing earlier gains. Experts say expanded diagnostic testing accounts for some, but not all, of the growth in cases – numbering at least 2.23 million nationwide on Friday – and that the mounting volume of infections was elevating hospitalizations in some places.

“Clearly the cases are rising rapidly. It’s not just a matter of testing more,” said Dr. Murtaza Akhter, an emergency room physician at Arizona hospitals, noting the lag time between a positive test and severe illness or death. “The real concern is what is coming up for us in the next week or two.” He said the latest wave of cases has put Arizona’s major hospitals at or near capacity, and placed the Southwestern state on track to surpass New York at its peak on a per-capita basis. More than 119,000 Americans have perished from COVID-19 to date, according to Reuters’ running tally. Particularly alarming has been the upward trends several states are reporting in the percentage of positive tests among individuals who are screened, a metric experts refer to as the positivity rate.

The World Health Organization considers positivity rates above 5% to be especially concerning, and widely watched data from Johns Hopkins University shows 16 states with average rates over the past week exceeding that level and climbing.

Read more …

Still don’t really understand how they missed this for so long.

• Mainland China Reports 27 New Coronavirus Cases, Including 22 In Beijing (R.)

Mainland China reported 27 new coronavirus cases as of the end of June 19, 22 of which were reported in the capital Beijing, China’s National Health Commission said on Saturday. This compared with 32 confirmed cases a day earlier, 25 of which were in Beijing, where local authorities are working to contain a new outbreak at a food wholesale market. Another seven asymptomatic COVID-19 patients, those who are infected with the coronavirus but show no symptoms, were also reported as of June 19 compared with five a day earlier. China does not count these patients as confirmed cases.

Read more …

Berman is a Republican who contributed to the Trump campaign. And, like Bolton, the DNC and MSM’s best new friend.

• US Attorney Berman Refuses To ‘Step Down’ After Barr Asks For Resignation (ZH)

Geffrey Berman is refusing to step down as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York after Attorney General William Barr asked him to resign, according to Bloomberg. “I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‘stepping down’ as United States Attorney,” said Berman, adding “I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position, to which I was appointed by the judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. “I will step down when a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate… …Until then, our investigations will move forward without delay or interruption.” Reacting to the news, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said “This late Friday night dismissal reeks of potential corruption of the legal process.”

[..] A Republican who contributed to Trump’s campaign, Berman was considered a highly qualified pick to succeed Preet Bharara, the previous occupant of his Berman’s soon-to-be-former office, which also features heavily in the TV show “Billions” (it’s the position held by the show’s antagonist, a corrupt federal prosecutor). AG Barr didn’t offer much in the way of an explanation, and Berman hasn’t said much either. Then again, we’re only just finding out about this, and it’s 10pmET on a holiday Friday. But even more surprising than the news of Berman’s sudden departure is the news of who will take his place. Following a brief interlude, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton will become the next US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

For those who aren’t familiar, Clayton is the same man who almost allowed Hertz and its creditors to sell hundreds of millions of dollars of stock to unsuspecting Robinhood day traders trying to flip their stimulus checks for quick cash with nary a word from the SEC. But even more extraordinary than his handling of the Hertz situation is Clayton’s decision to allow Tesla CEO Elon Musk walk away from a dispute with the SEC in which the CEO flagrantly and blithely violated basic securities regulations involving disclosures of material information to the public (remember “funding secured?” and the tedious legal melodrama that ensued in which Musk, in full blown tantrum mode, was repeatedly appeased by government regulators seemingly robbed of all willingness to hold him accountable).

Read more …

How many countries are doing similar studies? Could be revealing.

• Coronavirus Was Already In Italy By December, Waste Water Study Finds (BBC)

Italian scientists say sewage water from two cities contained coronavirus traces in December, long before the country’s first confirmed cases. The National Institute of Health (ISS) said water from Milan and Turin showed genetic virus traces on 18 December. It adds to evidence from other countries that the virus may have been circulating much earlier than thought. Chinese officials confirmed the first cases at the end of December. Italy’s first case was in mid-February. In May French scientists said tests on samples showed a patient treated for suspected pneumonia near Paris on 27 December actually had the coronavirus.


Meanwhile in Spain a study found virus traces in waste water collected in mid-January in Barcelona, some 40 days before the first local case was discovered. In their study, ISS scientists examined 40 sewage samples collected from wastewater treatment plants in northern Italy between last October and February. Samples from October and November came back negative, showing that the virus had not yet arrived, ISS water quality expert Giuseppina La Rosa said. Waste water from Bologna began showing traces of the virus in January. The findings could help scientists understand how the virus began spreading in Italy, Ms La Rosa said. However she said the research did not “automatically imply that the main transmission chains that led to the development of the epidemic in our country originated from these very first cases”.

Read more …

Go Tyler!

Gee, Barry Ritholtz has no clothes on.

• Trump Admin To Name Most Recipients Of Bailout Loans (ZH)

When the government said it would give out thousands of dollars in bailout loans grants under the Paycheck Protection Program, every eligible business – which was most small and medium businesses (that had no access to capital markets) with up to 500 employees, signed up. And why not: it was free money from a government that had launched helicopter money, and was seeking to ram the newly created money into the economy. There was no downside – the grants would be forgiven if used to pay wages or rent, and – at least according to widespread speculation – the loans would remain a secret. Which is why it was so surprising when it emerged that some “asset managers” such as Ritholtz Asset Management, led by Josh Brown and Barry Ritholtz, had also accepted bailout grants to stay in business. In retrospect, Ritholtz is the author of Bailout Nation so it probably should not have been a surprise.

What should have been a surprise is that an asset manager – i.e., a professional collecting generous fees to predict the future and entrusted with billions in capital not only failed to do that, but himself needed a bailout. It just goes to show how important it is to pick very calm and patient clients. Of course, we can’t blame them: like most other recipients, Ritholtz probably expected that his name would never see the light of day, even though technically he used taxpayer money to prop up his company. And since it is taxpayer money, everyone has a right to know how it would be used. Only in the case of just over half a trillion dollars in PPP grants that wasn’t the case, because for nearly 3 months after the PPP program was launched, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin persisted in keeping the names of all recipients secret, much to the growing anger of those who effectively funded the loans.

That all changed late on Friday, when Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration said it would disclose details about companies that received loans of $150,000 or more from a coronavirus relief program for small businesses, following a backlash against its earlier refusal to release data about which firms got billions of dollars in government aid. Eleven news organizations had sued to make details about PPP loan recipients public. Which is bad news for all those “financial advisors” like Ritholtz who will soon be revealed as getting paid to “predict” the future, yet not having the sense to even budget for a short-term crisis, let along have hedges in place for a downside scenario. As for the rest, it’s unclear how willing most small businesses would have been had they known that the very act of requesting a bailout would open them up to eventual public shaming.

Read more …

It has become useless to discuss the Fed at the same time you discuss markets. The former killed the latter.

• The Crisis Goes Up A Gear (Macleod)

The early morning of Monday, 23 March was a significant time, marking the top of the dollar’s trade-weighted index. At the same time, gold, silver and copper prices, having fallen in the weeks before turned sharply higher. And while oil initially followed, it was a month before it resumed its uptrend — delayed by the delivery hiatus in the futures markets which briefly drove the price negative. The S&P 500 rallied the following day, ending a near 30% decline before recovering all of it, and then some. Something had changed. Either markets decided that economic growth, both in the US and the rest of the world was going to continue following lockdowns, and growing demand for key commodities was going to be resumed. Or, as the decline in the dollar’s TWI indicated, the purchasing power of the dollar was going to decline, and commodity prices were reflecting an accelerating downtrend for the dollar’s purchasing power.

The performance of the S&P 500 since 23 March, being unhinged from any business conditions, gives us a clue: the flood of money emanating from the Fed is fuelling stock prices. It is also fuelling prices of all other financial assets. The turnaround in silver is a more subtle story, shown in the chart as the reciprocal of the more usual gold/silver ratio. Silver had been ignored, classed solely as an industrial metal. Gold was seen by the financial community as the only metallic hedge against uncertainty in the financial system. That changed on 23 March when the gold/silver ratio peaked at 125 on the previous business day. It is now beginning to outperform gold with the gold/silver ratio currently down to 98. We might look back and pinpoint this time as marking the beginning of a return to some moneyness in silver.

The weeks before had seen the Fed ease monetary policy. On 3 March, the Fed cut its funds rate from 1,5% to 1%. In the accompanying announcement the Fed said that the fundamentals of the economy remained strong, but the coronavirus posed evolving risks to the economy. On 15 March, the Fed cut its funds rate again, this time to zero, but the statement now said the coronavirus had harmed communities and disrupted economic activity in many countries, including the US. On a twelve-month basis, overall price inflation and price increases for other than food and energy were running at below 2%. The Fed announced renewed quantitative easing of at least $500bn of Treasury purchases and $200bn of mortgage-backed securities “in the coming months”. It was “prepared to use its full range of tools to support the flow of credit to households and businesses and thereby promote its maximum employment and price stability goals.”

Read more …

How many people know the history behind the Democratic Party?

• House GOP Leader: Democratic Party Should Change Its Name (JTN)

House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy suggested Thursday that the Democratic Party change its name, considering its ties to the Confederacy and segregation laws. The comments by McCarthy, the chamber’s top Republican, follow House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying she wants to remove Confederate-era statues from the Capitol, most of which honor registered Democrats. Pelosi, a California Democrat, on Thursday announced the removal of four portraits of former House speakers – three Democrats and one a Whig who later registered as a Democratic. “The speaker has the power to do that,” McCarthy said when asked about the portrait removal.


“If the speaker is concerned about that, should she also start talking about changing the name of her party and actually changing the nominee?” The California Republican also said that Pelosi should be “really concerned about the history of her party and what her party has done so shouldn’t they change the name if they’re going to be different?” McCarthy went further and said the Democrats should consider changing Joe Biden as their 2020 presidential nominee, given his remarks at the funeral of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.), a former member of the KKK who later denounced the group. Biden referred to Byrd as a “mentor” and “dear friend” at his funeral when he was vice president. McCarthy called on Pelosi to apply the “same standards” for the portrait removals to the name of her party and its 2020 nominee. “Shouldn’t they change the nominee if they want to be different?” McCarthy asked.

Read more …

 

 

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Word is Biden is close to picking Rice.

 

 

Steve Keen

 

 

Bob Dylan released his new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, yesterday. This is where the title comes from.

And these are some of the lyrics of the song Mother of Muses:

4 famous US generals – plus Georgi Zhukov, who led the Soviet Red Army’s assault on Nazi Germany

 

 

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime.

 

Don’t Buy A Home: You’ll Get Burned

Oct 272014
 
 October 27, 2014  Posted by at 8:28 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Albert Freeman Effect of gasoline shortage in Washington, DC 1942

Europe had hundreds of inspectors check 130 banks for a year in that stress test. Who do you think picked up the tab for that? And what did Europe’s taxpayers get in return? As I’m looking right now, they got falling stocks and 3 Italian banks in which trading was halted. What was the ECB’s goal with the tests again?

Oh right, to restore confidence in the markets … Well, with WTI oil falling fast below $80, I think we can now confidently say the Boys of Brussels are either not up to the job, or they’re letting the whole caboodle rapidly drift south on purpose. Probably a bit of both.

But don’t forget that if things continue on this present path, the next thing out of Draghi et al will be about the survival of the eurozone and likely the euro itself. Which means an outcome as awful as the one we’re seeing right now may be intended to be the final straw to break the Germans’ back, and make them give up their resistance to full blown outhouse paper purchases.

Meanwhile, the ECB bought a grand total of €1.7 billion in covered bonds last week, so at that pace it will take only 587 more weeks to get to the $1 trillion in purchases they aim for. Solid plan.

Sure, oil will rebound above $80 at some point today, the blows must be softened, and European stocks will cut losses on their plunge protection services, but if there was any idea of fooling the financial markets wit the tests, that went off the rails. Still, the people in the street, aka consumers, are still plenty fooled, and maybe that was all Brussels ever wanted. After all, Draghi is Goldman, so whaddaya know, right?

But I wanted to get back to some things I noticed late last week, about US housing. Though the call to not buy a home – at least one with a substantial loan attached – is a global one. Conditions in which you would own such a home, and pay for the loan, are set to change in radical ways, and the risks of the home becoming a trap are simply too high.

More importantly, you would be paying far too much. Fannie and Freddie and the rest of the US real estate five families will loosen requirements again soon, but they don’t do that because they want to do you a favor, they do it because they are looking to smoke out the last remaining greatest fools and suckers left out there. Don’t be one.

Leave the housing industry in your country alone, for five years or so, and allow for prices to come down to a level where homes become affordable again to young people. If the industry doesn’t get to that level, it has no future anyway. If the baby boomer generation can’t sell to their children at prices the latter can afford, US housing is dead. Already, a third of sales are cash only to investment companies, and that’s not a healthy development at all. Don’t go gently into that dark night.

Alexis Leondis and Clea Benson at Bloomberg had some major lamenting last Friday on how regulations stifle the US real estate business. And I’m thinking for once Washington bureaucracy has some positive side effects, but the authors don’t agree.

For me, US and many European housing industries have gone so far off track from, pick a date, 1997 to 2007, that it needs a major correction, something the industry itself, governments and central banks have only tried as hard and as expensively as they could muster, to prevent. We know that every bubble ends at a level below where it started, and housing is nowhere near that bottom yet.

Yes, builders and contractors and lenders and servicers and owners and borrowers will all be hit hard, but what’s the use of keeping up a virtual good face it that means killing off the future of the entire industry? Besides, don’t young people everywhere deserve a shot at a future, building a family etc., without having to bend over backwards just to be allowed to live somewhere?

And I don’t just mean the happy few kids, I want the 50% unemployed youth in southern Europe to be part of this as well, and the 25% or so in the US. You can’t just put out those kinds of numbers of people by the curb and expect to have a working society, let alone housing industry. Nor should you want to. Here’s that Bloomberg thing:

Lenders Facing Soaring Costs Shutting Out U.S. Homebuyers

Clem Ziroli Jr.’s mortgage firm, which has seen its costs soar to comply with new regulations, used to make about three loans a day. This year Ziroli said he’s lucky if one gets done. His First Mortgage Corp., which mostly loans to borrowers with lower FICO credit scores and thick, complicated files, must devote triple the time to ensure paperwork conforms to rules created after the housing crash.

Question no 1: what’s wrong with doing ‘only’ one mortgage a day? Is Mr. Ziroli modeling himself after Angelo Mozilo?

To ease the burden, Ziroli hired three executives a few months ago to also focus on lending to safe borrowers with simpler applications. “The biggest thing people are suffering from is the cost to manufacture a loan,” said Ziroli, president of the Ontario, California-based firm and a 22-year industry veteran. “If you have a high credit score, it’s easier. For deserving borrowers with lower scores, the cost for mistakes is prohibitive and is causing lenders to not want to make those loans.”

[..] Federal rules put in place after the 2008 financial crisis attempt to prevent such reckless lending. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in January began implementing the qualified mortgage rule, a 52-page document mandating that lenders must take detailed steps to prove that borrowers have the ability to repay their mortgages. The measure also cracks down on risky loan features such as balloon payments and large fees by leaving lenders exposed to legal liability if they issue such loans.

So far, nothing that upsets me. Lenders have to be more careful about loans they issue, and that costs them a bit more, but not so much that they go out of business. So is that the problem, or is the problem that until 2007 they had thrown all caution to the wind? I think I have an idea.

“The industry as a whole did a terrible job of self-policing and they should not be shocked that there’s now more oversight than there was before,” Gordon said. The CFPB has issued eight rules since 2011 governing everything from appraisals to compensation for loan officers. Six regulators including the Federal Reserve jointly issued a 553-page document this week containing instructions for when lenders must retain a stake in mortgages that they package for sale to investors. [..]

The higher costs and concerns about buybacks are driving the decline in mortgages for home purchases. It will slow to $635 billion this year, a 13% drop from 2013, according to MBA estimates. Banks have constrained home lending to many borrowers deemed creditworthy by mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Applicants approved for mortgages to purchase homes had an average FICO credit score of 755 in August, according to Ellie Mae, a company that makes software used to process mortgage applications. In contrast, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guidelines allow for credit scores as low as 620 for fixed-rate mortgages in some cases. Lenders reported a 30% median increase in compliance costs this year from 2013 …

That’s a steep fall alright, but don’t let’s forget we came from a time of complete lunacy. And that banks are more cautious than the government agencies should perhaps tell you something about the latter. But what’s the real worry? Looks to me like a pretty normal comedown from an abnormally exultant high. Which cost everyone dearly.

Banks are passing some of the costs of compliance to borrowers. Initial fees and charges paid by consumers on agency fixed-rate purchase loans have increased 10% to 1.21% as of August compared with a year earlier [..] Smaller lenders may be hurt the most by compliance costs, said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, a trade publication. They have fewer resources to maintain records and train employees, which is essential to protecting lenders in the new regulatory environment, he said. “There’s no question in this newer market it’s harder for smaller lenders to survive,” Cecala said.

These lenders, which have smaller balance sheets, generally can’t hold the loans on their books and have to sell them to government agencies or investors. At 1st Priority Mortgage, based outside of Buffalo, New York, one investor who buys the company’s loans requires employees to fill out a seven-page form verifying compliance with qualified mortgage standards. Other investors each require different forms, said 1st Priority’s President Brooke Anderson Tompkins.

That last bit is typical of Washington ineptitude, but as I said, for once that works out well, and besides, US screw ups on the ebola file have far more serious implications.

Then, the same day, Barry Ritholtz whined about his own difficulties in getting a mortgage. Which of course, he got anyway, because Barry’s a Wall Street man, investor man, analyst etc. Just like Ben Bernanke got his loan refinanced after some much talked about ‘trouble’. Pardon me, but I’m much more interested in the people who don’t get things done, like anything at all.

I remember Barry as an astute guy at his Big Picture blog back when the crisis hit 7 years ago, and would have liked to see quite a bit more self-criticism, but there you go. Here’s the crux of Barry’s whine:

It Shouldn’t Hurt This Much to Get a Mortgage

Under normal circumstances, approving my mortgage application should be a no-brainer: High income, no debt, good credit score. The missus also makes a good income, has an almost-perfect credit score and has been working for the same business for 28 years. But these are not normal circumstances. Let me jump to the end: Yes, we got our mortgage. We put 20% down, bought a house that appraised for more than the purchase price and got a 3.25% rate on a mortgage that resets after seven years. We moved in last month. But the process was surreal. Indeed, it was such a bizarre experience that I started hunting for explanations from people in the industry about why mortgage lending has gone astray.

I spoke to numerous experts, many of whom spoke only on background. Today’s column is about what I learned. By just about any measure, credit is tighter today than it has been in decades. Although former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s inability to refinance a mortgage is merely anecdotal, consider instead the gauge CoreLogic developed. It used 1998 as a baseline and considered six quantitative measurements to evaluate how loose or easy mortgage lending is. By those metrics, this is the tightest credit market for mortgage lending in at least 16 years.

The absurdities of my experience are worthy of its own rant, but rather than do that, I wanted to focus on what went wrong. The factors that led to the financial crisis were many …

Do read the rest at the link. My take on this is that when Barry says “credit is tighter today than it has been in decades” and “this is the tightest credit market for mortgage lending in at least 16 years”, I’m thinking not long ago he would have agreed that’s a good thing. We can argue about why this has come to pass, and blame regulation, not banks, but we all agreed in 2007 that too loose lending was a problem (both Barry and the Automatic Earth warned back then that the crisis would come, before it did a year later).

And anyway, I’m not here to show compassion with Ritholtz, I’m here because of all the other people, the young who see their dreams of a decent future cut off cold because of unemployment, low wages etc., and the old who see their pensions evaporate like so much smoke. And for both young and old, a further correction and demise of real estate will, largely – though not in every case – be a blessing. So, you’re wrong, Barry, it should hurt at least this much for you and everyone else to get a loan, if only because the pendulum was that far off its equilibrium in the other direction for so long.

Which is why I’m much more partial to what David Weidner said at MarketWatch on Thursday:

It Will Soon Get Easier To Buy A Home – But Don’t Do It

After an extended drought of credit available to consumers, it’s going to get easier to buy a home. The Federal Housing Finance Agency this week polished off a new set of guidelines that will allow government backing of loans that it had shunned since the mortgage crisis. And in a surprise move, the guidelines include a provision to consider some mortgages without down payments.

The FHFA and the Obama administration are both worried about the amount of credit available to the average American. It’s an epidemic problem. About a third of housing sales were to cash buyers in the first quarter, according to the National Association of Realtors. As I’ve written before, this is extraordinarily high, indicative of a housing market that favors the wealthy. So by lowering the standards of what types of loans are acceptable to the big mortgage giants, it’s obvious that the FHFA’s effort is about encouraging banks to provide more loans. The government is essentially saying: “Go ahead and lend; we’ll hold the paper.”

But in trying to ease credit and turn a mythic housing recovery into a real one, the FHFA may be overreaching. That’s because you know exactly who’s going to be taking out those loans: people who can’t afford them. And because there will always be some people who believe that because they can borrow, they can afford these loans, you know how this new policy is going to play out.

Consider a study issued Oct. 13 by mortgage data provider HSH.com. It found that 80% of homeowners had a regret about their purchase. Surprisingly, most of the regrets weren’t about costs. They were about the size of the home, the neighbors, the schools and other gripes. Then again, this was a post-foreclosure wave survey of 2,000 homeowners. The more than 4 million borrowers who lost their homes to foreclosure since the crisis probably weren’t asked and would have different regrets.

So, while the FHFA is certainly opening the door to another mortgage problem, it’s not ultimately the one to blame. That falls to the home buyer who bites off too much. [..] borrowers can no longer depend on banks and regulators to measure creditworthiness.

Historically, it was difficult to get a home loan. And down payments weren’t an option. They were the price of admission to the lending officer’s desk. But a series of government programs, low interest rates and tax breaks along with loosening standards at banks eroded this institutional test. So today it’s incumbent on the borrower to ask himself if he can afford the American Dream.

For many, the answer is probably “no.” [..] The FHFA will, in the end, encourage more lending. And this will translate into more credit for people who have been denied. But that policy isn’t the one that matters. It’s my policy, your policy, based on what we truly can afford that does.

Before the US, and the UK, Netherlands, Ireland, Spain and many other countries can ever have a healthy housing industry again, that industry will first have to come crashing down to levels indeed not seen in decades. Hurtful for some, beneficial for many others.

So it’s not such a bad thing if regulators choke that market, and people can’t buy properties they can only ‘afford’ is they can borrow 90%+ of the purchase price. After decades of insanity, the only way to get back to health is a severely strict diet and fitness regime. The one ultimate goal must be to make homes affordable to young people, the future of every single community and nation.

Reading through these kinds of articles, I don’t get the idea that anyone at all is aware of that, or even thinking about it. Our societies face a major economic – and therefore overall – reset, and housing is a big part of that, simply because it’s a huge percentage of the real economy. And pumping it up in artificial ways is a short term ‘policy’ that can only end in tears. It’s not exactly rocket science. If you can make a cup of coffee, you can figure this one out.