All Things in Moderation

Vital Statistics:

Stocks are flattish after the jobs report. Bonds and MBS are flat as well.

Jobs report data dump:

• Nonfarm payrolls down 710,000
• Unemployment rate 4.4%
• Labor force participation rate 62.7%
• Average hourly earnings up 3.1%

Job losses were concentrated in the service sector, with leisure and hospitality losing 459k jobs. Health care lost 61k jobs (mainly support people) and construction was down as well. FWIW, the 710k number is probably not representative of what is really going on – it will be the cumulative weekly initial jobless claims, which are at something like 10 million.

The government is supposed to launch its SBA loan program next week. Apparently many banks will be sitting out. The biggest concern will be reps and warrants, especially when it comes to preventing fraud. The banking system remembers well when the Obama Administration used the False Claims Act to extract massive penalties with FHA lending. Many of those banks, like JPM, never returned to the sector. Also, the requirements to prevent terrorist financing and money laundering, which under the best circumstances takes weeks to do. Finally, the rate the banks will be forced to charge will be too low and will cost them money. But there will have to be reps and warrants relief to get banks to participate. They remember what happened in 2009 and 2010 too well.

All of the Fed’s buying has driven its balance sheet up to 5.86 trillion in assets. Before 2008, it was about $800 billion.

While most of us are focused on what COVID-19 is doing to the residential market, the commercial market is even worse. The CMBS market is completely frozen. Multifamily, retail, office tenants etc are simply not paying rent right now, and that is going to cascade onto the balance sheets of the banks.

There had been talk of a Fed facility to allow servicers to borrow to make advances to bondholders. It looks like that isn’t going to happen, at least not yet. Treasury wants to get a read on how many borrowers actually take advantage of the program. The problem is that if you tell someone that they can skip the next few payments on their mortgage, with no hit to their credit rating, no penalties, and the missed payments will just get tacked on to the end of the mortgage, who isn’t going to take advantage of it? A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.

Moody’s has downgraded the non-bank mortgage sector from “stable” to “negative” as the financial markets seize up. We have seen the big non-agency mortgage REITs like New Rez, Two Harbors, and Redwood make distressed asset sales in order to meet margin calls.

Filed under: Economy, Morning Report |