The Case-Shiller home price numbers are out for May. The national home price index is down -0.46% YoY as The Fed slows M2 Money growth into negative growth territory. No doubt Biden (and Karine Jean-Pierre) will take credit for slowing home price growth, although The Federal Reserve slowing monetary stimulus is mostly responsible.
The Fed is still slow walking shrinking its enormous balance sheet. Although The Fed is cranking up their target rate.
The Taylor Rule suggests a 10.42 target rate to cool inflation. They are only half way there!!!
Starwood Capital Group’s Barry Sternlicht recently told Bloomberg’s David Rubenstein about the ongoing crisis in the commercial real estate sector, equating it to a severe “Category 5 hurricane“. He cautioned, “It’s sort of a blackout hovering over the entire industry until we get some relief or some understanding of what the Fed’s going to do over the longer term.”
Currently, the biggest problem in the CRE space is sliding office and retail demand in downtown areas. Couple that with high-interest rates, and there’s a disaster lurking for building owners. According to Morgan Stanley, the elephant in the room is a massive debt maturity wall of CRE loans that totals $500 billion in 2024 and $2.5 trillion over the next five years.
Senior markets editor for Bloomberg, Michael Regan, chatted with John Fish, who is head of the construction firm Suffolk, chair of the Real Estate Roundtable think tank and former chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, in the What Goes Up podcast to discuss the biggest problems in the CRE market.
Fish warned that “capital markets nationally have frozen” and “nobody understands value.” He said, “We can’t evaluate price discovery because very few assets have traded during this period of time. Nobody understands where the bottom is.”
For a sense of recent price discovery trends, we were the first to point out to readers of a wicked firesale of office towers in the downtown area of Baltimore City:
As for the overall CRE industry, Goldman Sachs chief credit strategist Lotfi Karoui recently told clients, “The most accurate portrayal of current market conditions with Green Street indicating a 25% year-over-year drop in office property values.”
Sooooo, Powell and The Fed will likely raise rates this week. And maybe a few more times over the next few months. And The Fed remains defiant about taking away the Covid monetary stimulus.
I have never seen anything like this. The US Treasury 10Y-2Y yield curve is deep in inversion and has had a negative slope for 265 straight days. Bidenomics is born under a bad sign!
On the commodities front, heating oil is up almost 2% this morning and nickel (an important element in Biden’s green energy mandates) is up 1.78%.
On the crypto front, Bitcoin is up 0.47% and Dogecoin is up 5.58%.
You can always buy Kamala’s Own Word Salad Dressing!
Despite the open borders where millions of low wage workers and parasites pour across into the US, we still see 1-unit housing starts plunged -7.4% YoY in June as The Fed continues tightening.
Multifamily starts actually fell worse than 1 unit starts. 5+ unit starts were down -11.56% MoM. Multfamily permits were down -13.52%.
And it just isn’t little girls that Biden is creepy about (like the family member we all keep our kids away from), Biden is creepy towards adult women too! These guys, like most normal people, aren’t digging Old Joe’s creepiness.
The Federal Reserve, an organization that even George Orwell would find outrageous, is a Minsky Moment Machine!
A Minsky Moment refers to the onset of a market collapse brought on by the reckless speculative activity that defines an unsustainable bullish period. Minsky Moment crises generally occur because investors, engaging in excessively aggressive speculation, take on additional credit risk during bull markets.
And since Covid and the Great Monetary Expansion to fight it helped creates massive inflation and helps the 1% get wealthier and wealthier. BUT as M2 Money growth slows, the 1% are losing their position as top dogs in the economy. Not by much (see pink circle), but a little.
And The Federal Reserve helps create the monetary expansion through low rate policies, fueling credit and asset bubble expansion. Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen were the masters at creating a Minsky Moment (named after Hymen Minsky, the late Washington University of St Louis economist).
Then we have the latest bit of bad news. US Industrial Production year-over-year of -0.43% as M2 Money growth evaporates.
After The Fed’s insertion of massive monetary in 2008, continued stimulus until the second massive stimulus burst in 2020, unfunded liabilities of pension funds have worsened. Another possible Minsky Moment created by the Kafkaesque Fed. Kafedesque??
The Fed’s Powell: Let’s play a game … and make the 1% even wealthier!!!
The Fed. The beauty of failure. When the economy starts failing, The Fed goes wild.
What screams may come! Actually, the aftermath of excessive monetary policies under Bernanke, Yellen and Powell are coming home to bit the big banks.
Interest expenses at big US banks are rising much more quickly than interest income. Across the six largest US banks, interest expenses are set to climb to roughly $78.7 billion from $15.5 billion in the same period last year.
There is still $8.3 Trillion in monetary stimulus sloshing around the monetary system.
In June, the White House revealed a new public relations campaign called “Bidenomics” to define President Biden’s economic agenda ahead of the 2024 presidential election cycle.
“I don’t know what the hell that is, but it’s working,” Biden stated at a June 17 rally in Philadelphia, begging the question, is it actually working?
NO!!!!
Americans, particularly middle-class ones, have been crushed in the inflation storm. They’ve been battered by two years of negative real wage growth, forcing many to quickly draw down on savings while using credit cards in a high-interest-rate environment to make ends meet.
Washington DC saw a spike of 30% YoY in homelessness. Chicago at 82.2% YoY!
Bidenomics, a marketing ploy to sell trillions in monetary and fiscal stimulus for green nonsense. Highly directed, not bottom-up (or middle-out?) as Biden gloats.
New Bidenomics slogan! We helped move families from polluting houses into the fresh air and sunshine!!! Win, win! Living La Vida Bidenomics!
As The Federal Reserve is poised to continue it inflation-fighting crusade, the US economy is rapdily approaching DEFLATION. US Producer Price Index FINAL DEMAND fell to 0.1% YoY in June.
Bidenomics, the combination of insane monetary stimulus and insane directed Federal spending towards going green at all costs, is running out of steam. M2 Money growth was last measured to be -4% YoY and the US Dollar is down -8.2% since September 2022.
As M2 Money growth has stalled, we are seeing inflation cool a bit. Core inflation YoY is now down to 4.8% (still >2x Fed target).
The good news? REAL average hourly earnings YoY is finally positive for the second time under Bidenomics. It is now 1.2% YoY. Too bad rent CPI, typically the largest expense for Americans, is still up 8% YoY.
The Taylor Rule, given 4.8% core inflation, gives us a Fed Funds Target rate of 10.42%. So, yes, it looks like Powell and the Gang have more work to do.
Confounded Interest - Anthony B. Sanders 
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