Empiric Student Property Share Discussion Threads

[briarberry] 16/5/2007 22:55

commercial property not keeping up with the rally...

CBOE DJ Reit Index

[briarberry] 16/5/2007 22:37

someones expecting lower rates ?

[briarberry] 16/5/2007 22:37

The Telegraph. "Spain's foreign reserves have plummeted to wafer-thin levels, leaving the country exposed to a possible banking crisis if the property market swings from boom to bust, despite membership of the eurozone."

[briarberry] 15/5/2007 18:56

Justin Lahart (on ITulip website), has the best answer to our question about why the markets are not discounting the way they used to. Much as consumer confidence is no longer a measure of consumers' future employment and wage expectations but is instead a measure of consumers' expectations of future access to credit, the stock market is now an indicator of the market's expectations of future access to credit to finance new deals."

[briarberry] 14/5/2007 16:33

Record Bets Against Two-Year Notes (Update1)

May 14 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke's inflation concerns have prompted investors to make a record bet against $88.8 billion of two-year Treasuries.

That's the amount of futures contracts on notes traders have sold at the Chicago Board of Trade, the most since the Commodity Futures and Trading Commission began keeping track of the data in 1993. It exceeds wagers to profit from rising prices by $51.8 billion, the largest so-called net short position ever, according to CFTC data released May 11.

[briarberry] 13/5/2007 18:31

mortgage purchase index - looks very slightly higher than summer 06 ? although it's only picked up in the last 2 weeks, so we'll see...


the seasonally adjusted Purchase Index increased 2.6 percent to 438.3 from 427.3 one week earlier.

although the 4wk ma is still lower than last year...

The four week moving average is up 1.5 percent to 418.3 from 412.2 for the Purchase Index

in summer of 2005 the index spiked above 500 a few times

but a recession would take it down to 300

we're only 1 month away from the yearly peak in activity for US home sales

inventory still very high

peak resets starting too

[briarberry] 11/5/2007 20:01

US food inflation...

Finished goods - Finished consumer foods + 7.7 y-o-y

Special groupings - Intermediate foods and feeds + 13.6% y-o-y

Crude materials for further processing - Foodstuffs and feedstuffs + 26.7 y-o-y

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/news.release/ppi.txt



Economists now forecast first-quarter growth, reported last month at a 1.3 percent annual rate, may actually have been as low as 0.5 percent.

[briarberry] 10/5/2007 20:51

Anonymous said...

Initial claims is a little contrary to the other numbers we're seeing. I checked and the unadjusted numbers had an increase of 5,849. I don't like jumping to unadjusted, but it does show an uptrend although small.

[briarberry] 10/5/2007 16:36

consumption is 70% of GDP in the USA...


Wal-Mart stores posted a 4.6% decline

Target's same-store sales dropped 6.1%

Gap stores' results were a big blow to investors, plunging 16%

American Eagle turned in an eye-popping 10% drop in comparable-store sales

Pacific Sunwear of California, same-store sales dropped 16.5%

Bebe Stores, the trendy apparel and accessories retailer for young women. Its same-store sales fell 6.5%

Chico's FAS, a fashionable apparel and accessories retailer for older women, also let down investors with a 7.3% decline in comparable-store sales

Abercrombie and Fitch said their same-store sales were down a whopping fifteen percent.

Federated posted a 2.2% decrease, and expects May to be down as well.

Kohls down 7.7%

Dillards, dept store, down 14%!

AnnTaylor Stores Corp. said Thursday its April sales at stores open at least one year fell 12.8%

JC Penny. same store sales reported down 4.7%,


yeah don't worry they've all gone to Costco...

Not all was gloom and doom. Costco Wholesale said its comparable-store sales jumped 7%

[ian56] 10/5/2007 14:59

The US has just gone into recession.

Insight Economics analyst Steve Wood said, "this month's trade deficit was much worse than the Commerce Department's estimates in the advance first quarter GDP report." He said the report and other data mean that "it appears that first quarter GDP will be revised downward by 0.8 percentage points." The first quarter gain was a meager 1.3%.

Revised GDP circa 0.5%.
Together with the under reporting of inflation, means that the US is in negative growth.

April retail sales and last weeks jobs numbers back this up.

Regards,
Ian

[briarberry] 09/5/2007 19:27

Fed stays the same...

2:20 FOMC repeats core inflation remains 'somewhat elevated'
2:18 FOMC repeats future rate moves depend on data

federal-funds interest rates, remains 5.25%.
The vote to hold rates steady was 10-0.



May 9 (Bloomberg) -- Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Officer Ken Lewis said a so-called credit bubble is about to break after six years of historically low interest rates and relaxed lending criteria.

``We are close to a time when we'll look back and say we did some stupid things,'' Lewis said, speaking at a lunch at the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce in Zurich. ``We need a little more sanity in a period in which everyone feels invincible and thinks this is different.''

[briarberry] 08/5/2007 20:58

shorts on CFC getting squeezed


the fact that half of their customers wouldn't qualify for their loans under more sensible, stricker lending conditions is obviously bullish :) :)


page 5 - MEW proportional to HPI



If lending standards had remained steady, then we would have a pipeline of people who spent the past 5 to 10 years saving for a down payment. Instead, they already got that house, and the savings don't exist. So, if we go back to decent lending standards (i.e., 20% down), we have a LONG wait before we have significant numbers of new buyers, on top of all of the other reasons you cite. - Bob L.
http://patrick.net/wp/

[briarberry] 07/5/2007 22:07

The Indian rupee's 5 percent gain in the past month has prompted speculation the Reserve Bank of India stopped buying dollars after a record $11.9 billion of purchases in February.

[briarberry] 06/5/2007 14:07

NEW's subprime mortgages sold for only 34 cents on the dollar...


New Century assets are sold - LATimes - May 5, 2007

A hedge fund made a $58-million winning bid for the remaining mortgage portfolio of bankrupt sub-prime lender New Century Financial. Ellington Management Group's bid amounted to only 34 cents on the dollar but easily exceeded the $47.3-million price at which New Century last month agreed to sell the assets to a Royal Bank of Scotland unit. The portfolio includes home loans and mortgage securities with a face value of $170 million




(when loans die, money goes to money heaven (66% gone), although this, below, still sounds like a lot of money?)


May 1 – Bloomberg (Alex Tanzi): "In the first quarter of 2007, the dollar volume of Freddie Mac owned loans that was cashed-out by homeowner refinancing fell to $70.5 billion from $77.0 billion in the fourth quarter of 2006... In the first quarter of 2007, 82% of Freddie Mac owned loans that were refinanced resulted in new mortgages of at least five percent more than the original mortgages. That was unchanged from 82% the previous quarter."

[briarberry] 05/5/2007 19:53

May 2 – Bloomberg (Bill Rochelle): "U.S. bankruptcy filings in April were 47% higher than the same month last year, according to statistics compiled from government records by Automated Access to Court Electronic Records."

Tracks the movement of foreclosures in San Diego County (top 10 bubble hot spot).

[ian56] 04/5/2007 15:17

Nonfarm payrolls rose just 88,000 in April, according to the establishment survey. That's the weakest job growth in 29 months. Payrolls have grown by an average of 129,000 per month so far this year, down from 189,000 last year.

In the separate household survey, employment plunged by 468,000, the most since November 2002.

The unemployment rate rose to 4.5% from 4.4%, but the increase would have been larger except 392,000 potential workers dropped out of the labor force altogether. Unemployment grew by 77,000 to 6.8 million.

The average workweek declined, and total hours worked in the economy dropped by 0.4%.
Average wage growth was tepid, rising just 4 cents to $17.21, a 0.2% gain. Wages are up 3.7% in the past year, well off of the peak of 4.3%.

[ian56] 04/5/2007 13:41

Looks like the US is heading for recession later this year on those job numbers.

They went for +317k on the Birth Death model which is totally unrealistic, including large gains in construction and financial services.
Well over inflated - it was +271k for April last year. But then the economy was growing.

Reported job numbers +88k.

Therefore -229k real jobs.
Reported unemployment rate ticked up.

Birth Death model



Regards,
Ian

[briarberry] 03/5/2007 21:50

The Fed will be claiming deflation next...


Q1 unit labor costs decelerated sharply to an annualized 0.6 percent increase, following a 6.2 percent spike in the fourth quarter. Q4 was fuelled in part by year-end bonuses.

plus the high inventory of vacant homes should keep rents down




House prices are high but ordinary peoples wages are still relatively low, hence the credit boom.

[briarberry] 03/5/2007 12:12

The graph depicts the exponential growth of GDP and also the US Housing Valuation, both in Trillions of USD.



(some brilliant work on this website)