All Things in Moderation

Stocks are higher this morning on optimism for a Greek deal. Bonds and MBS are down.

New home sales rose 546k in May, higher than the 523k expectation and the upward-revised 534k April number. We will hear from homebuilding giant Lennar tomorrow. This is the highest number in 7 years, which will hopefully alleviate the problem of low inventory.

Durable Goods Orders fell 1.8% in May. April was revised downward from -0.5% to -1.5%. Capital Goods Orders ex defense and air (which is a proxy for business capital expenditures) rose 0.4% in May after falling a revised 0.3% in April. The low CAPEX numbers were largely driven by the decline in oil prices, which appear to have stabilized.

Home Prices rose 0.3% in April, according to the FHFA. The index is now roughly 2.3% below its March 2007 peak and corresponds to Feb 2006 prices. Note the FHFA index is narrower than the other indices like Case-Shiller in that it only looks at homes with a conforming mortgage. As usual, the West coast did the best, while the Northeast lagged.

Tspiras surrenders. That is the headline in Bloomberg regarding the Greek situation. Greece has more or less offered to meet the demands of their creditors. The glass of ouzo is close to being full.

Markets are lower after the ECB increased the size of its emergency liquidity program to Greece. Bonds and MBS are up.

No economic data today

We are getting to crunch time with Greece. Euro-area leaders are meeting Monday to try and hammer out some sort of gameplan. The ECB’s emergency liquidity package expires on June 30, which is also the day a big payment is due to the IMF. It is looking more and more likely that Greece is going to exit the Euro. While most Greek debt is owned by the Greek banking system, some is owned by the big European banks as well. Some could see a hit to their capital. This will probably be dollar (and Treasury) bullish.

Chinese stocks have been selling off, and have entered correction territory (defined as down 10%). The Chinese stock market has been in bubble territory for a while, and it looks like it is finally bursting. This market is being fueled by a toxic cocktail of margin debt and dumb money. Current margin debt is $368 billion. The market increased over 150% in one year (or about $6 trillion). While the index was higher in 2009, the Shanghai Composite P/E is currently about 95x earnings, versus 68x at the height of the 2009 market.

The bursting of the Chinese stock and real estate bubbles is going to complicate the Fed’s job of trying to normalize interest rates by causing a flight to quality in US Treasuries. The biggest headache for the Fed will be when China begins to export deflation. Inflation is still too low as far as the Fed is concerned. The biggest fear? Interest rates are already at the zero bound throughout the world, and central banks are largely out of ammunition.

Stocks are flattish this morning ahead of the FOMC decision. Bonds and MBS are down small.

The FOMC rate decision is scheduled for 2:00 pm EST today, so beware of volatility around that time. We will be getting a new set of economic projections and a new dot graph. Yellen will also hold a press conference afterward. What will investors focus on? the dot graph.

Mortgage Applications fell 5.5% last week. Purchases fell 4.2% while refis fell 6.9%.

It is looking like there might not be a deal with Greece, as Tsipras said Greece was willing to live with the consequences of saying “no” to their creditors. Bloomberg provides this helpful graph of where we are in the tug-of-war between creditors and Greece: The ouzo is definitely running out of the glass at this point

Barclay’s is exiting the US MBS market, following Royal Bank of Scotland’s lead. They will still trade risk sharing bonds and might still trade agency paper, but they are out of the market making business in pre-crisis paper.

Markets are lower this morning as the rhetoric between Greece and the EU gets heated. Bonds and MBS are up.

Housing starts dropped 11.1% in May to 1.036 million. April was revised higher from 1.135 to 1.165 million. Building permits rose 12% however to 1.275 million. Housing starts have been very volatile, so it makes more sense to look at the trend, which is generally up. You can see that April’s reading was exceptionally good, so a pullback in May is not all that surprising. The good building permits number (highest in 8 years) provides some basis for confidence in the housing recovery. Permits went way up in the Northeast.

Is the private label market coming back, at long last? Issuance of mortgage backed securities have increased to $32 billion this year from $18 billion last year. Much of this new paper is tied to rentals or distressed mortgages from the bubble years. To put the $32 billion into perspective, the private label market was $1 trillion before the crash. As far as new origination goes, pretty much only high quality jumbos are getting securitized, and even that is difficult as the banks prefer to portfolio these loans. We are still a long way from having any sort of robust non-conforming securitization market, but we are headed that way.

The FOMC meeting starts today, and tomorrow we will get the statement, along with the updated projections and a press conference from Janet Yellen. The Street is still thinking the first hike comes in September.

Homebuilders Standard Pacific and Ryland announced a merger of equals yesterday, which will create the 4th largest homebuilder in the US behind D.R. Horton, Lennar, and Pulte. Standard Pacific and Ryland have been discussing the deal for years and they think the timing is right for a push out to the East Coast. Part of the rationale for the deal was to diversify Standard Pacific’s footprint from the red-hot California market, which is showing signs of overheating.

Stocks are lower after talks between Greece and its creditors broke down over the weekend. Bonds and MBS are up.

This is supposedly “deal week” for Greece. They owe the IMF $1.7 billion. If they don’t pay (and they have already missed one payment), then it makes it hard for the ECB to continue providing emergency liquidity. The current program with the ECB expires at the end of the month. Rhetoric is getting more and more heated between Germany and Greece at this point. At issue are the pensions. Greece is steadfastly resisting restructuring the country’s pension system. And the Germans are getting sick of it: ‘We will not let the German workers and their families pay for the overblown election promises of a partially communist government,’’ Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel wrote in a Bild opinion column on Monday. If they can’t get a deal, then the ECB will probably stop supporting the Greek banks and the county will have to impose capital controls to keep hard assets from fleeing the country. It sounds like the Europe will consider allowing Tsipras some sort of face-saving change to the deal, but nothing really meaningful. The bond markets are getting nervous, as the Greek 10 year bond yield is up almost one full percentage point this morning at 12.723%. For us in the the US markets, any sort of Greek exit will probably cause a flight to quality, which means it would be bullish for US bonds.

Chart: Greek 10 year bond yield:

In other “bullish for US bonds” news, the manufacturing sector had a rough go of it in May. Industrial Production fell 0.2%, manufacturing production fell 0.2% and capacity utilization fell to 78.1%. Separately the New York State Empire Manufacturing Index fell to -1.98. While manufacturing is no longer the economic driver it used to be, these are still lousy numbers, and reinforces the idea that the Fed will stand pat this week.

The NAHB Homebuilder index rebounded to 59 in June, topping its post-crisis highs. Builder confidence is more or less back at “normalcy.” While homebuilder sentiment is back to normalcy, housing starts most certainly are not. The Street is forecasting housing starts to come in at 1.09 million tomorrow, which is still 27% below the normal, pre-bubble level of 1.5 million starts a year. Starts are only now approaching the recessionary lows of the past. So while builders may have positive sentiment, they aren’t putting their money where their mouth is, at least not yet.

Chart: housing starts, long term:

The FOMC meets on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. This will be the first FOMC meeting where a rate hike is in play. Given some of the weak economic data and persistent low inflation, it is unlikely the Fed will hike rates this week, however the language of the statement will certainly be important. Expect to see some volatility this week in bonds, between the FOMC and the Greek situation. LOs, be sure to tell your borrowers about the risks of floating.

If the Fed does in fact hike rates, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the 10 year bond yield (and by extension mortgage rates) will spike. When you look at the tightenings in the past, the yield curve flattened, which means the short end of the curve (overnight rates etc) moved higher, but the longer end of the curve largely ignored the increase. The 2004 tightening cycle is probably the most relevant, as we were still in the aftermath of the collapse of the stock market bubble. The Fed increased the Fed Funds target rate from 1% to 5.25% over the course of 2 years. The US 10 year basically went nowhere.

Chart: aftermath of 2004 rate hikes:

For a contrarian view on the Fed and long-term interest rates, listen to Bill Gross, who thinks the world’s central banks want higher long-term rates because they are worried about insurance companies and pension funds. These entities are not able to earn the returns they need in this low interest rate environment (the actuarial tables couldn’t care less that rates are zero), and they have been forced to take a lot of credit risk. The most painless way to avoid a crisis is to let long-term rates slowly creep up. It just goes to show how small the eye is in the needle the world’s central banks need to thread.

Elizabeth Warren and the left are not fans of share buybacks And there are legitimate questions about companies levering up to fund buybacks. And yes, buybacks are more tax efficient than dividend hikes because investors can defer taxes on capital gains by not selling. . However they are trying to conflate stock buybacks with “market manipulation,” which is fraud and illegal. I think the gameplan is twofold here: The first is to weaken the presumption that management’s first priority is to maximize shareholder value. The second is to shame companies into raising wages for workers.

Stocks are lower as both the EU and Greece dig in their heels over a rescue package. Bonds and MBS are up small.

Inflation remains muted at the wholesale level. The Producer Price Index rose 0.5% in May, however that is energy driven. Ex food and energy, it was up 0.1%, or 0.6% year-over-year. The PPI is not that critical of an inflation index – the Fed uses the PCE deflator – but it shows that inflationary pressures remain contained. IMO we won’t see any sort of inflation until we see wage gains, and we are only just starting to see that.

Higher energy prices are not denting consumer sentiment according to the University of Michigan. June Consumer sentiment rose to 94.6 from 90.7 in May.

A couple Fed researchers have crunched the numbers and believe that the natural rate of unemployment is about 4.3%, versus the 5.2% number the Fed currently uses. They focus on labor’s share of income, which has fallen from 72.2% in 2001 to 62.9% now. If correct, that means the Fed has room to let the economy run. The bigger question is why the number has fallen so much. Is it weak bargaining power? Is it the fact that the emerging companies in the US need less employees? (For example, GE has a market cap of $276B and has 305,000 employees. Facebook has a market cap of $228B and has only 10,000 employees). IMO, it will come down to the labor force participation rate. Are the people who have involuntarily exited the labor force coming back?