Banking and Real Estate: The Problems Are Still There

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke just informed Congress that people were not anxious to buy homes. He commented that “there’s no demand for construction to build homes and so the construction industry is quite reduced.”

As a consequence, the Fed will continue to purchase Treasury securities up to some $900 billion, $300 billion to replace maturing mortgage-backed securities that have rested in the Fed’s portfolio and an additional $600 billion to expand reserves in the banking system.

My feeling has been that this injection of reserves into the banking system has been to protect the banking system, especially the smaller banks, and keep failing institutions open for as long as possible so that the FDIC can close these insolvent banks in an orderly fashion.

This, of course, is different from what the Fed has been telling us. The Fed has argued that their reason for the injection of liquidity into the banking system has been to help spur on bank lending and help accelerate economic growth.

The data that continues to come in from the real estate sector does nothing to convince me that the Fed’s statement is the correct one.

Data coming in from the real estate sector, I believe, continues to support my contention that the loan portfolios of many smaller financial institutions remain seriously underwater.

The median sales price of a house sold in February, the Commerce Department has just reported, was $202,100, down from $221,900 a year earlier. This is a drop of almost 9%.

Just one added piece of information: last month’s price was at it lowest level since December 2003 when the median sales price stood at $196,000.

This just exacerbated the problem of “underwater” mortgages. CoreLogic, Inc., reported in early March that about 23%, or roughly one out of every four, mortgages in the United States had outstanding balances that were higher than the reported value of the secured properties.

In addition, a record 2.2 million homes were in foreclosure in January of this year. The number of homes in foreclosure had slowed down in the last half of 2010 because of all the fuss being made about how banks had not used proper methods to foreclose on many properties. This slowdown seems to have ended.

Furthermore, the purchases of new homes declined to the slowest pace on record.

Housing starts dropped in February to an annual rate of 479,000, the lowest level since April 2009.

And, construction permits slumped to a record low.

The commercial real estate sector is now getting hit with a new phenomenon…state governments and municipalities that are under tremendous budget pressures are downsizing and cutting back on office space. As a consequence, a lot of commercial office buildings are standing empty and their owners, who are not the states or municipalities, are faced with the task of trying to fill up the empty space.

The banking system holds the paper on a lot of this real estate.

The question is, how big a write-down is the commercial banking system going to have to take…and how fast is it going to have to take it.

The credit inflation the Federal Reserve is trying to create, I don’t believe, will cause housing prices to turn around any time soon in the magnitude needed to save their asset values.

Sooner or later these asset values are going to have to be written down.

Therefore, the efforts of the Fed are just allowing banks to stay liquid enough so that the assets do not have to be written down precipitously. In that way the regulators can control the situation and close the banks that must be closed in an orderly fashion.

But, this raises another question. This question pertains to the length of time the Fed will need to continue to provide liquidity to the financial markets? That is, how long will QE2 be maintained?

The original plans of the Federal Reserve were to call an end to QE2 in June. But, will we need to add on QE3?

My guess is that the Fed will need to continue some kind of program to maintain the “peace and quiet” on the banking front for an “extended period.”

This is a “good news” and “bad news” situation. The “good news” is that events in the banking sector are relatively quiet. The FDIC continues to close banks in an orderly fashion.

The “bad news” is that events in the banking sector are relatively quiet. The Fed must continue some kind of financial support to the banking industry because there are so many real estate related assets in the banking system that are troubled and are in need of a “write down.”

It would seem that as long as there are problems like the ones described above in the real estate sector, there will continue to be problems in the banking sector.

And, as long as there are problems in the real estate sector and the banking sector of this magnitude, the desired pickup in the economy will not be forthcoming.

No Housing Recovery In Sight

Households, as a group, are gaining ground financially, but are still far below where they were in 2007. This, along with other weaknesses in the economy, is going to continue to contribute to the weakness in the economic recovery now taking place.

One place this weakness is particularly evident is in the housing sector. The recovery of the housing market helped to lead the economy out of every previous recession in the post-World War II period. In the recent experience, this has not been the case, even with special incentive programs created by the federal government to spur along a rebound.

The figure on housing starts in May 2010, an annual rate of 593,000, confirmed this continued weakness.

The recession ended in July 2009, yet housing starts have hovered around a 600,000 unit annual rate ever since. The highest figure recorded during this time period was an annual rate of 659,000 in April of this year, but the pace dropped off once again in May.

At this time, Americans are just not in a position to acquire housing. If we look at the financial position of United States households since the year 2007, according to the Flow of Funds accounts released by the Federal Reserve, the net worth of households has decline by slightly less than $10 trillion. Year-over-year, from the first quarter of 2009 through the first quarter of 2010, household net worth has risen by a little more than $6 trillion, but almost all of this increase has been in the value of equity shares, something that is not a part of the balance sheets of Main Street America. The value of tangible assets, including the value of homes, has fallen by $5 trillion since 2007 and increased only modestly year-over-year. Again, the beneficiary of any gain here has not been Main Street America.

The plight of the American household is captured in the percentage of households owning their own home and who actually have no equity in the home they are living in. David Wessel captures this dilemma in his Wall Street Journal article this morning, “Rethinking Part of the American Dream,” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703513604575310383542102668.html?mod=WSJ_hps_RIGHTTopCarousel_1. He cites data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: for example, in San Diego, 55% of households owned their own home, but the fraction of these households that had equity in their homes was between 35% and 39%; in Las Vegas, only 15% to 19% of households had equity in their homes, even though 59% of those households owned their own home. In the cities reported, Boston, Chicago, and Atlanta scored the highest in owners having equity in their own home.

And, with one out of every four or five working age people being under-employed, it is highly unlikely that there will be a stronger recovery in the housing market in the near future.

Ethan Harris of Bank of America Merrill Lynch is quoted as saying “We’re not going to see a real recovery in the housing market until the foreclosure process gets worked out. That’s…a 2012 event.” (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704009804575309692681916212.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_5)

Delinquencies on mortgages seem to have leveled out but they still remain at a high level. Also, foreclosures remain at a high level.

The performance of loans that have been restructured remain dismal: see my post “Eventually Debt Must Be Repaid, http://seekingalpha.com/article/210365-eventually-debt-must-be-repaid. Sixty-five to seventy-five percent of the loans restructured in the Treasury’s loan restructuring plan “re-default.”

And, banks continue to stay on the sidelines in terms of making new loans, especially mortgage loans. With one out of every eight commercial banks on the FDIC list of problem banks and many more on the edge, housing is just not going to show much bounce in upcoming months.

Households, according to the Federal Reserve data, are reducing the amount of debt outstanding, but at a relatively slow pace. This is where, I think, it is important to think about how the country is dividing along two lines, between those that are doing quite well, thank you, and those that are really struggling.

As I mentioned, the value of the financial assets of U. S. Households rose by about $5.5 billion last year, most of the increase coming in the market value of equity shares. However, those benefitting from the rise in the value of equities are generally not the ones that own a home with no equity in it. They are generally the people that are still employed and have a sufficient income. Also, they are not the ones that are in debt in a major way.

In my post on debt repayment, I quoted a report by Fitch Ratings Ltd. indicating that the individuals that were in the mortgage re-structuring program were also heavily in debt on credit cards, car loans, and other obligations. People in this second group are the ones that are excessively in debt and have neither the accumulated wealth nor the current income to pay down their debt.

It is this debt that still must be worked off before the recovery can have any bounce to it. Resolving this debt burden will also go a long way to helping the banking system regain its legs.

Consumer spending may increase modestly, housing starts may gain some, but the Americans that are in this second group will not be the ones contributing to these increases until they get their finances back in order and that may take a long time. To see this in another way, check out what is actually being purchased by consumers. Much of it is up-scale, not ordinary “stuff.”