Morning Report – looks like housing reform isn’t happening this year.

Vital Statistics:

Last Change Percent
S&P Futures 1870.5 -1.8 -0.10%
Eurostoxx Index 3186.8 -17.5 -0.55%
Oil (WTI) 100.7 0.5 0.46%
LIBOR 0.224 0.001 0.34%
US Dollar Index (DXY) 79.74 0.375 0.47%
10 Year Govt Bond Yield 2.62% 0.00%
Current Coupon Ginnie Mae TBA 106.4 0.1
Current Coupon Fannie Mae TBA 105 0.0
BankRate 30 Year Fixed Rate Mortgage 4.21

 

Markets are flattish on no real news. Bonds and MBS are down small.
Job openings decreased to 4 million from 4.1 million in March
J.P. Morgan is getting into the jumbo business. Jumbo rates are still about 12 basis points lower than rates on a conventional loan. It is also a way to leverage the private client business, which makes sense. At BNY – clients can get 100% financing by pledging investment assets as collateral. They also offer 90 day locks. Again, this is largely for high net worth clients who are paying the bank asset management fees.
Liberals on the Senate Banking Committee have rejected the housing finance reform bill. The bill will probably still clear the committee, but the left is complaining that there is not enough mandates for affordable housing lending. That said, given the rejection on the part of the left housing reform is probably dead for this year. If Republicans end up taking the Senate, the left will wish it played ball.

19 Responses

  1. “Jumbo rates are still about 12 basis points lower than rates on a conventional loan.”

    Did I read this correctly? Back in the “normal” days, jumbos were always higher than conventional loans, correct?

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  2. yup, jumbos are lower… the guarantee fees have been hiked up for conventional loans. Also jumbos have lower fees as a % of loan amount (not necessarily lower in $$, but lower in basis points), which lowers the rate below conventional..

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  3. But only you 1%’s get Jumbos, right? I can barely scrape together $5 for my refrigerator box.

    And Ionly get that because of my privilege. .

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  4. Prolly so Juicebox can speak Truth to Power, right?

    I wonder how butthurt Hack Sargent was at reading that?

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  5. ” $5 for my refrigerator box.”

    Cardboard box?

    Aye.

    You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

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  6. At least you got bread. Not only did we not have food, we’d be forced to vomit.

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  7. “And I only get that because of my privilege.”

    A lengthy Salon piece on the whole “privilege” concept that’s actually quite revealing of the mindset behind it.

    http://www.salon.com/2014/05/09/white_privilege_101_heres_the_basic_lesson_paul_ryan_tal_fortgang_and_donald_sterling/

    Two points jump out:

    1. The entire premise is that no one is individually responsible for their successes or failures in life. It’s all about societal factors. Everyone is a victim (or beneficiary) of circumstance.

    2. The privilege arguments only work as long as the majority buy into them. Once that ceases, then the whole edifice collapses. It’s interesting that the author states this explicitly.

    It’s a interesting read because of the level of detail the author goes into trying to make his points, but if anyone is familiar with the old moral relativism arguments from the 1980’s & 1990’s campus PC movements there’s nothing new here, just another effort at deconstructionism.

    This I find more compelling as an explanation:

    “To call someone “privileged” is to say that his or her successes are undeserved. It’s a personal insult posing as social critique.”

    http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/check-your-check-your-privilege/361898/

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  8. “Everyone is a victim (or beneficiary) of circumstance.”

    It’s just gussied up loser and/or excuses talk.

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  9. The Salon piece also implicitly assumes that “if I feel like I am being discriminated against, I am being discriminated against”

    Everyone with a kid understands that one; “But dad, everyone in the class screws around but I am the only one the teacher sends to the principal. – It is unfair.”

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  10. It’s not implicit, It’s explicitly stated – see the whole section on “Perceptual Segregation”.

    It’s all part of the “discrimination occurs whenever the victim perceived it to have by definition” arguments.

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  11. Victory is within our grasp:

    “He described the public’s dissatisfaction with Washington as nearly at a tipping point, where working-class Americans see leaders as unresponsive to their most basic concerns. If that were to continue, he said, more middle-class Americans could dismiss the political process completely.

    “You’ve got a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Obama said Wednesday evening in Los Angeles at the home of Disney chief executive Alan Horn and his wife, Cindy. “People who have the most at stake in a government that works opt out of the system. Those who don’t believe that government can do anything are empowered. Gridlock reigns, and we get this downward spiral of even more cynicism and more dysfunction.””

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-warns-democrats-that-midterms-could-imperil-his-agenda–and-america/2014/05/09/0b37c6ae-d655-11e3-95d3-3bcd77cd4e11_story.html?hpid=z1

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  12. Uh oh.

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  13. guess that Salon story yesterday was a waste of 1s and 0s

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  14. And the cherry on top:

    “Complicating things for the White House, Obama on Thursday attended a fundraiser hosted by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who sits on Wal-Mart’s board of directors.”

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  15. All things considered, this sounds like a positive development:

    “The current debate is actually about two other things: The 2014 congressional midterms. And comprehensive tax reform.

    The election connection is easy to explain: In recent years, Congress has waited until after the election to deal with extenders, a collection of special-interest provisions that mainly benefit business. This time around, Senate Democrats saw an opening to attack House Republicans as being unfriendly to business because House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) was determined to advance his sweeping tax reform plan instead. That created the possibility that the research credit would be languishing in the House come November. Senate action to revive it could give vulnerable Senate Democrats a useful pro-business credential.

    But House Republicans caught on quickly. And since they had no intention of staging a vote on Camp’s ambitious but politically perilous tax reform plan, Camp switched gears and began moving on tax extenders. But he has insisted on reviving only those provisions that should be made permanent (i.e., the research credit) while allowing the rest to die a quiet death (hello, accelerated depreciation for NASCAR tracks).”

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/09/deficit-schmeficit-why-the-fight-over-the-research-credit-is-really-about-tax-reform/

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  16. This is pretty good: Piketty as the progressives’ version of Reinhart and Rogoff.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2014/05/09/the-piketty-party/

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    • JNC, under Ch. 11 in a corporate bkcy a class of claims has accepted the plan if at least two-thirds in amount and more than one-half in number of the allowed creditors in that class vote in favor of the plan.
      So if the bondholders and the pensioners are treated as being in the same class they get to vote on this, assuming there is not different treatment for a municipality.

      Of course, the bondholders and pensioners might be considered to be in different classes. Are the bondholders “secured” if they only have “revenue” bonds? IDK. You have been following this Detroit disaster; do you know how the classes shook out? They are kind of fluid even in corporate bkcies from my experience [as a lawyer for creditors, not as a bkcy specialist].

      Addendum: the character and quality of the classification problems I dealt with were not like this – they were usually questions like the relative priority of the landlord’s statutory and/or contractual liens vs. the equipment liens vs. the bank’s LOC blanket lien.

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