Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
| Last | Change | Percent | |
| S&P Futures | 1693.5 | 5.2 | 0.31% |
| Eurostoxx Index | 2756.0 | 33.1 | 1.22% |
| Oil (WTI) | 106.8 | -0.4 | -0.36% |
| LIBOR | 0.264 | -0.002 | -0.60% |
| US Dollar Index (DXY) | 81.99 | 0.043 | 0.05% |
| 10 Year Govt Bond Yield | 2.57% | 0.07% | |
| Current Coupon Ginnie Mae TBA | 104.4 | 0.0 | |
| Current Coupon Fannie Mae TBA | 103.8 | -0.3 | |
| RPX Composite Real Estate Index | 200.7 | -0.2 | |
| BankRate 30 Year Fixed Rate Mortgage | 4.3 |
Markets are higher this morning after a good earnings report out of Apple. Bonds are again victims of the risk-on trade.
Michael Dell and Silver Lake boosted their buyout offer for Dell by ten cents to $13.75. It is their best and final offer. Dude, you’re getting a dime.
Mortgage Applications fell 1.2% last week. Purchase apps were down 2.1%, while refis were more or less flat. Refi volume has dropped to 63% of total applications. The conventional index rose about 60 bps, while the govvie index dropped 7%.
The U.S. taxpayer bears the credit risk of roughly half the U.S. mortgage market and 90% of all new origination. In a true “eureka” moment, the braintrust in Washington may have finally figured out that the problem is not that they haven’t slugged the banks hard enough. There is a proposal to relax the “skin in the game” rules for private label securitizations in the hopes that something other than 60% LTV / 740 FICO jumbos can be securitized in the future. The original rule was that banks would have to maintain 5% of all MBS they securitize, unless the LTV was lower than 80%. Now, they propose to require a 5% holding only for IO and stated income products. Never mind that IO and stated income are outside of the QM rules and very few market participants are willing to take non-QM risk.
The ARM is coming back.
Filed under: Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
Weird, no? Musta been an oversight.
http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/networks-give-pro-abortion-texas-sen.-wendy-davis-three-times-coverage-of-entire-kermit-gosnell-trial/article/2533393
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Important news.
http://t.co/pODHfqxERR
I feel that the Country’s 4th estate is doing the work it should. The Republic is in good hands.
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This poor bastard can’t catch a break. If only he had some sort of position of influence.
Obama told OFA he will use the speech to kick off a long period “of us trying to get Washington and the press to refocus on the economy and the struggles that middle-class families are going through.”
Pity really. If only he could be an insider.
http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/polls-falling-agenda-stalling-obama-turns-to-economy/article/2533414
Serious question, who believes this pap?
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Greg Sargent vie’s for the dumbest tweet ever.
@ThePlumLineGS: Genuinely sad to see supposedly neutral news orgs mocking the idea of a “pivot” to jobs.
Course, MMfA did say he’d print anything…
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FYI – I’ll be traveling through 8/5. Posting will be minimal if at all. This does not mean I’ve quit the board.
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Hey, I moved yesterday and still posted.
Slacker.
Up your game!
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This is pretty outrageous.
http://www.10tv.com/content/stories/2013/07/22/athens-county-woman-wants-possessions-back-after-bank-tried-to-repossess-wrong-house.html
One day the banks agents are going to break into the wrong house and get themselves shot.
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jnc:
This is pretty outrageous.
Indeed. From the article:
“[The bank president] got very firm with me and said, ‘We’re not paying you retail here, that’s just the way it is,’”
I’m guessing that isn’t just the way it is, and the longer he takes to pony up, the bigger the premium over retail he will ultimately pay. BTW, I know they can seize the house on foreclosure, but can they really seize property inside? That seems nuts. The house itself is collateral, not anything inside it.
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NoVA linked this over at PL. It’s great.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2011/06/07/us-foreclosure-bank.html
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Great story, jnc/nova.
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“BTW, I know they can seize the house on foreclosure, but can they really seize property inside? That seems nuts. The house itself is collateral, not anything inside it.”
The whole nuts piece is the bank being able to use it’s own private agents to enforce the eviction notices. That’s supposed to be done by the Sheriffs department which piles the personal positions on the front lawn. The bank can’t seize them legally.
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Just what I always wanted a bunch of old bank furniture………haha. Good for them though. After going through two evictions on our rental property last year, all this foreclosure talk makes me really nervous. That and lawyers and banks. Between the two they owe us about 8 grand plus attorney’s fees that we’ll never see.
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At some point presumably you can write that off against your rental income for tax purposes.
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Scott, to your point:
“I’m guessing that isn’t just the way it is, and the longer he takes to pony up, the bigger the premium over retail he will ultimately pay. ”
From the BoA article:
Original judgement: $2,534 attorney fees
What BoA had to end up paying to keep their furniture: $5,772.88
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JNC, it just means we don’t have to pay income taxes on that because we didn’t receive it, I think. We won’t get our taxes done until early October. We can claim the lawyers and other eviction expenses though.
Safe travels btw. Hope you’re going somewhere fun. I was in Vegas and then Utah last week…………….whoopee doo. I did win a little though.
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Did the President successfully pivot to the economy cause the current <2% growth sucks.
You'd think 5 years'd be enough, wouldn't you?
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McWing:
You’d think 5 years’d be enough, wouldn’t you?
I thought 4 years was enough, but I was unfortunately in the minority.
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Me too!
Thank Gosh he went Bullworth today!
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“Thank Gosh he went Bullworth today!”
Thank Gosh I had him on mute in the trading room.
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I didn’t have time today to either listen to or read “the speech”, but personally I doubt anyone in a political position of authority truly cares about the middle class as they fall further and further behind.
http://www.alternet.org/economy/10-reasons-us-economy-stuck?page=0%2C0
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Another Steven King moment:
When the House Republican leadership found out that Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) claimed that for every undocumented high school valedictorian there were another 100 “hauling…marijuana across the desert,” they correctly reacted in horror.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) called the comments “hateful,” and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said they were “inexcusable.”
But King refuses to back down. In fact, he thinks he’s winning the debate.
King gave this explanation to Breitbart News: “You know when people attack you — in this business, when you’re in this business, you know that when people attack you, and they call you names, they’re diverting from the topic matter. You know they’ve lost the debate when they do that. We’ve talked about it for years. Tom Tancredo and I joked about it that that’s the pattern. When people start calling you names, that’s what confirms you’ve won the debate.”
King is trying desperately to derail any attempt to legalize undocumented immigrants who came into the country as children and graduated from high school.
http://theweek.com/article/index/247365/republicans-have-a-steve-king-problem
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Mark, here’s another piece re Summers. Quotes from lots of economists, most of them liberal.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/07/fed-watch-shock-and-aweful.html
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History’s Greatest Monster continues to cause mayhem.
http://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=19758908&ref=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2F3HO4huvADp
They must be sacrificed to be cleansed.
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Jeebus.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/24/chris-hayes-i-found-the-defense-of-weiner-by-his-wife-surprisingly-persuasive/
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60 trillion? I heard it would cost 60 quadrillion!
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100912062
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Speaking of climate change. It looks like the polling is running against Republicans. I guess you’d have to believe the polls first though.
The bipartisan poll conducted for the League of Conservation Voters found solid 80% support among under-35 voters for Barack Obama’s climate change plan – and majority support even among those who oppose the president.
Some 55% of Republicans in the House of Representatives and 65% of those in the Senate reject the science behind climate change or oppose action on climate change, according to an analysis by the Centre for American Progress.
The house speaker, John Boehner, dismissed Obama’s plan to reduce carbon emissions as “absolutely crazy”. If the poll is right that would hurt Boehner even among members of his own party, with the poll finding 52% of young Republicans less inclined to support a candidate who opposed Obama on climate change.
The implications were even more harsh for those Republicans who block Obama on climate action and dispute the entire body of science behind climate change. “For voters under 35, denying climate change signals a much broader failure of values and leadership,” the polling memo said. Many young voters would write such candidates off completely, with 37% describing climate change deniers as “ignorant”, 29% as “out of touch” and 7% simply as “crazy”.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/25/voters-think-republican-climate-dissenters-ignorant-out-of-touch-or-crazy-bipartisan-poll-finds/
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Taranto does a hilarious takedown of Obama’s speach.
http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/a/SB10001424127887324564704578625973354325756?mg=reno64-wsj
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Lms, for the sake of argument, suppose the everything Climate Scientists say about global warming is true. What are you willing to sacrifice personally, as long as everyone else does too, in order to reverse it?
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McWing
What are you willing to sacrifice personally
That’s a big question isn’t it? I’m not sure about getting everyone else to do the things we do around here already but we do what we can personally. We don’t eat any red meat and only the occasional free range chicken or turkey and wild caught fish about once a week. Our pool is heated using solar and we’ve already made a commitment to install solar panels on our rental property. Our warehouse is unheated and un-air conditioned and we generally don’t bother with lights when we’re working out there because the sky lights provide enough light. We use only energy efficient appliances, turn everything off when not in use, limit our laundry, errands, eat from our garden year round, compost, don’t purchase bottled water, recycle whenever possible, even in our business, etc.
We already pay a higher gas price in CA than the rest of the country which doesn’t bother us in the least. We’re hoping to purchase a hybrid next year if finances hold.
Legislatively, I think there are probably some good ideas out there for a carbon tax or regulated carbon trading but I don’t really see how we get there. I DO think it’s important not to completely undermine business development or competition so I’m not sure how to do that. I also think that Internationally we will face as many hurdles as we do domestically. So for now, we do what we can personally and hope someone comes up with a good idea in the next generation or so.
Did you read the piece I linked a couple of days ago re compost? It absorbs an awful lot of carbon dioxide.
I realize the little bit we do doesn’t make much difference but I suppose that cumulatively it might and again, I would feel “guilty” if I didn’t try.
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Lms, assume a direct personal tax everyone pays. Why should the tax rate be?
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I don’t know McWing. In order to have the desired effect of reducing emissions you would have to tax differently depending on how much carbon is emitted when the fuel is burned. Then you’d have to decide who you’re going to tax; producers, distributors or consumers.
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Hypothetical, assume it to be a direct personal tax on income (including investment income). What should the percentage per person be?
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McWing, I don’t believe a direct personal tax on income would be the appropriate way to tax carbon so I can’t say………..sorry. That’s too hypothetical for me. It would need to be a use or consumption tax IMO. Has anyone actually suggested a tax on income to reduce emissions? It’s not something I would support if so.
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I guess that all taxes, no matter on what entity result in a personal cost. Tax gas for example and drivers pay more at the pump and there is a cost for non drivers as well as the price of goods and services go up to compensate. So everythig rolls down hill to the consumer. Would you be willing, if everybody else had to as well, be willing to sacrifice 25% of your income/lifestyle to reverse global warming?
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McWing, I don’t know what the point of this little hypothetical exercise is but if, hypothetically, we were scientifically certain of life as we know it ending at a certain point in the not too distant future, and the only thing that would miraculously save us was a 25% tax on income…………then yeah. I do have grandchildren after all. I’d even pay more than that and learn to survive with less.
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Thanks lms! What would be too much? I’m just trying to assess the AGW believer’s tolerance is all, no tricks. For the record I’m in the “Not one Penny” category.
Anybody else care to weigh in?
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McWing:
Anybody else care to weigh in?
I am in the not-one-penny camp as well. And if I ever become convinced that catastrophic warming is occurring, whether human-caused or otherwise, I will probably favor a relatively cheap “geo-egineering” remedy like those described in Super Freakonomics.
If we need to cool the Earth in a hurry, what is the best way to do it?
Our answer to that question follows directly from the three sets of facts I presented above. Reducing carbon emissions is not a great way of cooling the Earth in a hurry for two key reasons: (1) even if we cut carbon emissions today, the Earth will continue warming for decades; and (2) reducing carbon emissions is expensive, with a price tag of at least $1 trillion per year. (There is a third problem with reducing carbon emissions, which is that it requires worldwide behavioral change, which will be hard to achieve. But even beyond that, carbon mitigation is not a great solution to the question posed above. There might be other significant benefits tor reducing carbon emissions — addressing ocean acidification, for instance.)
A much better approach, we conclude, is geoengineering. The scientific evidence suggests that either the stratoshield or increased oceanic clouds would have a large and immediate impact on cooling the Earth, unlike carbon-emission reductions. The cost of these solutions is trivial compared to the cost of lowering carbon emissions — literally thousands of times cheaper! Perhaps best of all, if something goes wrong and we decide we don’t like the results of the stratoshield or the oceanic clouds, we can stop the programs immediately and any effects will quickly disappear. These two geo-engineering solutions are completely reversible. Given the huge costs of global cataclysm and how cheap the solutions are, it would be crazy not to move forward with geoengineering research in order to have these solutions ready to go in case we decide we need to cool the Earth.
“
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I’m in the “Not one Penny” category
I knew that already. You never asked if I was an AGW believer though. I’m in the cutting emissions is good for the planet and the air we breathe category. I’d need more proof before giving up 25% of my income but that wasn’t part of your hypothetical exercise.
Have you seen the pictures coming out of China lately? CA was headed in that direction and now we’re not. I don’t think building exercise domes on school playgrounds is very cost effective. We raised an asthmatic so I’m partial to clean air.
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Fascinating comments from Z juror.
http://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=19770659&ref=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FsrjcggaZSV
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Scott:
This is the same guy who wants to cool the earth by floating two balloons 25 km above the North and South poles emitting sulfur dioxide in order to scatter light.
Yes, the man is brilliant, but even brilliant people get totally loony ideas.
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Why wouldn’t it work?
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McWing:
Why wouldn’t it work.
How would floating two balloons above the poles “work” to control the economy and the way people live?
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Obama shows how important Japan is to the US by nominating a complete lightweight with virtually no political or business experience anywhere, much less with Japan or Asia.
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“How would floating two balloons above the poles “work” to control the economy and the way people live?”
Pay the man, Shirley
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Scott, two words re Japan: Kennedy.
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Oh my.
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/25/how_nancy_pelosi_saved_the_nsa_surveillance_program
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I’m embarrassed to admit I just got that.
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