Empiric Student Property Share Discussion Threads

[briarberry] 20/1/2010 12:22

Bank of America loss widens to $5.2 billion

[briarberry] 19/1/2010 21:08

not much difference

IBM Q4 net income $3.59 vs $3.27
IBM Q4 revenue $27.23 bln vs $27.01 bln

[briarberry] 19/1/2010 13:27

Citigroup Q4 net loss $7.6 bln, or 33 cents/share

[briarberry] 17/1/2010 21:24

some good results from JPM (helped by funny money) and Intel (helped a bit by Windows7???) but still questions remain about the state of the real economy...



But not all the news from JPMorgan Chase was good. Signs of lingering weakness in its consumer banking business unnerved Wall Street and drove down its share price along with those of other banks.

Chase's consumer businesses are still hemorrhaging money. Chase Card Services, its big credit card unit, lost $2.23 billion in 2009 and is unlikely to turn a profit this year. Chase retail services eked out a $97 million profit for 2009, though it posted a $399 million loss in the fourth quarter. To try to stop the bleeding, the bank agreed to temporarily modify about 600,000 mortgages. Only about 89,000 of those adjustments have been made permanent. In a statementon Friday, Jamie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan, said that bank "fell short" of its earnings potential and remained cautious about 2010 considering that the job and housing markets continued to be weak.

The bank set aside another $1.9 billion for its consumer loan loss reserves - a hefty sum, but less than in previous periods. The bank has now stockpiled more than $32.5 billion to cover future losses.

[briarberry] 17/1/2010 16:45

The latest year over year inflation figures

CPI - Y/Y change +2.8 %
Export Prices - Y/Y change +3.4 %
Import Prices - Y/Y change +8.6 %

[briarberry] 11/1/2010 01:22

US stats, we're back to the under reported price inflation game...


Factory Orders - M/M change 1.1 %

A price related jump in petroleum and coal prices made for a big 1.8 percent month-to-month jump in nondurable factory orders for November, a gain that lifted total factory orders to an increase of 1.1 percent. Durable orders showed only marginal strength, up 0.2 percent despite an easy comparison with a weak October when durable orders fell 0.7 percent.

[briarberry] 11/1/2010 01:11

The real, non bailout economy is still deflating both in the USA and in the UK

US Consumer Credit (G19) November: -$17.5 bil

[briarberry] 11/1/2010 00:53

America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels - Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters.

...
Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody's Economy.com expects another 2.4m homes to go this year. Taken together, this looks awfully like Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

...
The Fed's own Monetary Multiplier crashed to an all-time low of 0.809 in mid-December. Commercial paper has shrunk by $280bn ($175bn) in since October. Bank credit has been racing down a hair-raising black run since June. It has dropped from $10.844 trillion to $9.013 trillion since November 25. The MZM money supply is contracting at a 3pc annual rate. Broad M3 money is contracting at over 5pc.

Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said the Fed is baking deflation into the pie later this year, and perhaps a double-dip recession. Europe is even worse.

[briarberry] 11/1/2010 00:51

EU unemployment up from 9.8% to 10.0%, the highest since the currency began in 1999.
EU GDP rose 0.3% in Q3, but fell 4.3% YoY
EU retail sales fell 0.8% MoM and 2.1% YoY
EU industrial new orders fell 1.6% MoM and down 14.1% YoY
Euro area CPI rose 0.9% YoY in December

EU Industrial production fell 0.7% in October and down 10.2% YoY

[briarberry] 03/1/2010 13:34

China Property Bubble May Lead to U.S.-Style Real Estate Slump

Millions of Chinese are pursuing property with a zeal once typical of house-happy Americans. Some Chinese are plunking down wads of cash for homes. Others are taking out mortgages at record levels. Developers are snapping up land for luxury high- rises and villas, and the banks are eagerly funding them. Some local officials are even building towns from scratch in the desert, certain that demand won't flag. And if families can swing it, they buy two apartments: one to live in, one to flip when prices jump further.

And jump they have. In Shanghai, prices for high-end real estate were up 54 percent through September, to $500 per square foot. In November alone, housing prices in 70 major cities rose 5.7 percent, while housing starts nationwide rose a staggering 194 percent. The real estate rush is fueling fears of a bubble that could burst later in 2010, devastating homeowners, banks, developers, stock markets, and local governments.

...
How did this bubble get going? Low interest rates, official encouragement of bank lending, and then Beijing's half-trillion- dollar stimulus plan all made funds readily available. City and provincial governments have been gladly cooperating with developers: Economists estimate that half of all local government revenue comes from selling state-owned land.
...

The government is reluctant to crack down too hard because construction, steel, cement, furniture, and other sectors are directly tied to growth in real estate. In November, for example, retail sales of furniture and construction materials jumped more than 40 percent.

[briarberry] 29/12/2009 13:29

The bailout/stimulus bubble has been given more room to grow...

quote, "the Treasury relaxed the portfolio limits on Fannie and Freddie, allowing them to grow their holdings to $900 billion, while promising to cover unlimited losses"....



Mortgage Anxieties Mean Limbo for Fannie and Freddie

The Treasury last week relaxed its timeline for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to shrink their portfolios of mortgage assets. Previously, the companies were instructed to do so at a rate of 10 percent a year. Now, they will be required to keep the value of their portfolios below a maximum limit, currently $900 billion, that will go down by 10 percent a year.

This means they won't need to take immediate action to trim their holdings and could allow them to rise. Fannie Mae's portfolio ended October at $771.5 billion and Freddie Mac's holdings at the end of November were $761.8 billion, according to the latest figures released by the companies.

...
The Federal Reserve has bought $1.1 trillion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's home-loan bonds and $124.1 billion of their corporate debt this year. Those actions have lowered the companies' funding costs and pushed mortgage rates to a record low 4.71 percent this month.

[briarberry] 28/12/2009 15:18

Rates (TNX etc) have moved back up to their summer highs, but most peeps seem to be saying that they think that Ben Banky will start printing again as soon as the economy starts to slow ???

[briarberry] 17/12/2009 23:12

WASHINGTON (AP) -- About 1.7 million homeowners were on the verge of foreclosure in the fall, a looming "shadow inventory" of homes that will be put up for sale in the coming years and weigh down prices, a report said Thursday.

The number, up from 1.1 million a year earlier, is likely to keep rising through the middle of next year or later, said Mark Fleming, chief economist of First American CoreLogic, the real estate research firm that released the study.

Already, the foreclosure backlog is equal to nearly half the 3.8 million unsold new and existing homes currently on the market, First American said.

"We're going to be dealing with high levels of distressed (sales) in the marketplace for at least a couple of years," Fleming said. "It's not just all going to disappear."

[briarberry] 16/12/2009 16:36

China's M2 money supply rose 29.7% YoY

[briarberry] 16/12/2009 14:36

Rosenberg: We've Barely Begun The Deleveraging Process

As Chart 1 illustrates, and employing Bob Farrell's first Market Rule on the time- honored trend towards mean reversion, this develeraging process that began two years ago is really in its infancy stage. The current level of U.S. outstanding nonfederal debt is $27 trillion, which is astounding both in absolute terms and even more so relative to nonfederal GDP - a 206% ratio. It is down fractionally from the 208% peak, but here is the rub. If mean-reversion means that we get back to some norm of the 1990s, then we are talking about the need to extinguish $8 trillion of nonfederal debt. The only question is how this happens, not if. If we're talking about mean reverting to the very table trend of the 1960s and 1970s, then the credit contraction is very likely o exceed $11 trillion.

[briarberry] 15/12/2009 13:32

Producer prices rise 1.8% in Nov on energy prices

PPI up 2.4% in past 12 months

PPI core up 1.2% in past 12 months

Nov. PPI energy prices up 6.9%

[briarberry] 14/12/2009 13:50

About Those Strong November US Retail Sales Numbers

Gasoline Purchases...



The annual rate of change has gone positive, but only because it is compared to the worst economic performance in generations in November of 2008.

(2 charts)

[briarberry] 11/12/2009 18:07

Import prices swung to +ve this month...

Import Prices - Y/Y change +3.7 % (from -5.7 % Y/Y change last month)

[briarberry] 01/12/2009 17:15

France Producer Price Index October: -6.6%

India Consumer Price Index October: +11.5%