My colleague Chris Swann says to beware of housing false dawns. I couldn’t agree more.  While the pace of decline in house prices moderated in April, one has to consider the stupendous monetary stimulus that helped drive that improvement.  With rates about as low as they can go, the only way to drive a sustainable increase in prices is to increase buyers’ income.  With the employment picture continuing to deteriorate, don’t look for rising incomes any time soon.

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The chart above plots the month-over-month change in the composite 20 index compared to average 30-year fixed-rate mortgages.

Bulls would point to an improvement in the so-called “second derivative,” a decline in the rate of decline.  From March to April prices dropped only 0.6%, far better than the 2%+ declines each of the prior six months.

Bears would argue that the data showed a similar increase a year ago, and then promptly turned back down.

But prices have fallen 18% since last year, bulls might say.  They can’t fall forever.

The trump card, however, falls to the Bears in my view:  Mortgage rates are 110 basis points lower today than they were just last fall.  That’s a lot of monetary stimulus.

When rates go down, prices go up (all else equal).  A quick present value calculation shows that a $3,000 monthly payment can pay off a $500,000 30-year mortgage priced at 6%.  Drop rates to 5% and that same monthly payment will support a $558,000 mortgage.

Admittedly, this is a simplistic way to look at house prices.  But it serves to show how incredibly sensitive they are to interest rates.

But low interest rates, along with lending structures that allow people to borrow more relative to their income, only offer a temporary sugar high for house prices.  There won’t be a sustainable increase in prices until there’s a sustainable increase in buyers’ income.  And that’s not happening any time soon, not with unemployment speeding towards double-digits.

For more charts analyzing today’s Case-Shiller data, see below.

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Democratic Congresswoman Laura Richardson has even Hillary Clinton beat for selective memory problems. Remember how Hillary kept repeating the Bosnia story? That she dodged sniper fire, etc.? She always knew it was a lie, but she needed a concrete example of her foreign policy experience. It was telling that that was the only story she could come up with. I hope the Clintons (and the Bushes) disappear from American politics permanently.

But I digress. Here’s what Richardson said of her property in Sacramento in a statement this past Wednesday:

the residential property in Sacramento California is not in foreclosure and has NOT been seized by the bank.

Moreover:

I have worked with my lender to complete a loan modification and have renegotiated the terms of the agreement — with no special provisions. I fully intend to fulfill all financial obligations of this property.

These are bald-faced lies. According to the WSJ:

The Sacramento home of Rep. Laura Richardson was sold in a public auction two weeks ago for $388,000….James York, the Sacramento broker who bought the three-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom home, rejected the idea that the home hadn’t been seized. The sale of the home was announced in March. “She’s walked away from the property,” he said. “I would be happy to resell her the home for the $535,000.”

Recall from the original story:

The Southern California Democrat bought the house for $535,000 with no money down in January 2007 and owed nearly $575,000 to Washington Mutual when the mortgage was sold earlier this month at a significant loss to Red Rock Mortgage Inc.

And there is additional irony here:

Richardson didn’t vote on the housing rescue deal that passed the House of Representatives two weeks ago and in a statement attributed her absence to her father’s funeral. But Richardson did vote last fall in favor of the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, which passed and prevents the federal government from charging income tax on debt forgiven as a consequence of foreclosure.

Let us pause for a moment of silence in memory of the institution that WAS the Wall Street Journal. As a long-time subscriber to the paper, I’ve noticed it’s devolution since Rupert Murdoch took over. Here’s a clue from the paper itself:

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch named Wall Street Journal Publisher Robert Thomson as the paper’s new managing editor, succeeding Marcus Brauchli, who left under pressure last month….The move is expected to speed the pace of change at the nation’s second-largest newspaper, creating a more direct pipeline from News Corp. to the paper’s editors….

For the first few months under the new ownership, Mr. Brauchli ran the operations of the paper. Mr. Thomson remained in the background….

Mr. Brauchli presided over a number of changes — more general news, a more urgent and splashy front page, shorter stories — but Mr. Murdoch decided that change wasn’t happening as quickly as he would like…..

Indeed. Now the news page is littered with “general interest” stories: daily updates on the Myanmar Junta refusing aid for cyclone survivors, multiple articles per day about the recent Chinese earthquake. We get it, the Burmese Generals don’t want aid and an earthquake killed lots of Chinese.

I don’t mean to make light of those stories. But the fact is, if I wanted daily updates on those topics, then I’d read the New York Times.

And that’s the point: Murdoch wants to move the Journal away from its roots covering all-things business so that it can compete with the Times more effectively in general interest news.

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The BBC reports on the latest subprime writedown at a major bank. The conventional wisdom is that most of the subprime related credit losses that have to be taken already have been. Going forward, a larger problem for bank net income will likely be increasing provisions for loan losses, as opposed to straight writedowns on holdings gone South. Here’s a list of writedowns to date for major banks worldwide:

MAIN CREDIT LOSSES SO FAR

• Citigroup: $40.7bn
• UBS: $38bn
• Merrill Lynch: $31.7bn
• HSBC: $15.6bn
• Bank of America: $14.9bn
• Morgan Stanley $12.6bn
• Royal Bank of Scotland: $12bn
• JP Morgan Chase: $9.7bn
• Washington Mutual: $8.3bn
• Deutsche Bank: $7.5bn
• Wachovia: $7.3bn
• Credit Agricole: $6.6bn
• Credit Suisse: $6.3bn
• Mizuho Financial $5.5bn
• Bear Stearns: $3.2bn
• Barclays: $3.2bn

Source: Bloomberg and company reports

The main impact of credit losses is that they reduce bank lending. A handy way to think about it, is that banks typically lend out $10 for every $1 in capital on the books. So credit losses of this magnitude can be incredibly DEflationary.

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For Central Banking junkies out there, Grep Ip is the journalist you need to read. He covers all things Fed for the WSJ. Yesterday he published a fascinating article about the Fed’s request to start paying interest on reserves held in its vaults. This would give the Fed yet more power to control the money supply, and would help avoid the consequence of pushing the Federal Funds rate toward 0% if they’re forced to act more aggressively to pump liquidity into the markets (see Economic Busts: Japan, circa the last 18 years).  It would probably also discourage banks from hiding assets in off balance sheet vehicles.  The more assets banks have ON the balance sheet, the more 0% interest reserves they must park at the Fed.

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The bad news on housing keeps coming:

WASHINGTON — U.S. new-home sales slid further in March to their lowest level since 1991 while the supply of homes for sale soared to nearly a three-decade high, suggesting little prospect of any near-term turnaround.

Sales of single-family homes slumped 8.5% last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 526,000, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That’s the lowest level since October 1991. Economists had expected a much smaller drop of 1.9%, according to a Dow Jones Newswires survey.

February new-home sales fell 5.3% to an annual rate to 575,000. Originally, the government said February sales dropped by only 1.8% to 590,000. Year over year, new-home sales were down 36.6%.

Other recent data confirm the headwinds the housing sector faces. Earlier this week, the National Association of Realtors said sales of pre-owned homes fell 2% in March. Prospects for a recovery in the broader economy are closely tied to housing, given its effect on construction, employment and consumer spending. With housing still under pressure, Federal Reserve officials are likely to lower official interest rates again when they meet next week.

The median price of a new home decreased by 13.3% to $227,600 in March from the previous year, according to Thursday’s report. The average price tumbled by 11.3% to $292,200 from a year earlier.

Regionally last month, new-home sales decreased 12.5% in the Midwest and 19.4% in the Northeast. Sales fell 4.6% in the South and 12.9% in the West.

The month’s supply of homes for sale rose last month to 11 months, the highest since September 1981.

Inventories of various housing assets (single-family homes, condos, etc.) are the key to determining the path or prices. High inventories mean supply is outstripping demand, putting the onus on sellers to cut prices in order to bring buyers back to the market.

Didn’t think I’d see an op-ed like this in the Journal. The editors themselves hate Fed easing, and for good reason. Inflation hurts everyone in the economy except for those in debt; those who, financially-speaking, have behaved most irresponsibly. But this opinion piece says the Fed shouldn’t feel ashamed about printing money in order to get us through the housing crisis.

The author’s fundamental argument is that if the Fed just prints money, and lots of it, that the ensuing inflation will rescue the housing market and, thus, the economy. He says this would be preferable to nationalizing the housing market, which seems to be the only alternative in his mind.

Nationalizing the housing market may be a fait accompli…..but done correctly it probably doesn’t have to be a huge burden for taxpayers. Lenders who want to be bailed-out should be forced to take massive writedowns on the bad loans they want to pawn off on taxpayers. If the Treasury buys bad home loans at a really good price, taxpayers don’t have to lose that much in the long-run….

If the Fed “prints money”, the ensuing inflation would only serve the interests of those in debt by reducing the value of their debts in real terms.

Inflation happens when the supply of money increases relative to the supply of goods and services in the economy. More paper currency chasing the same amount of goods and services means each individual unit of currency has less purchasing power; it has less value. Savers lose because the dollars they’ve saved buy less after a period of inflation. Debtors win b/c the debts they owe are smaller in real terms after that same period of inflation.

Say I take out a $100,000 loan due next year. To make the math easy, let’s assume my lender isn’t going to charge interest….a rich uncle perhaps. If the value of the dollar declines 6% over the year, then $94,000 of today’s dollars will be sufficient to pay back the $100,000 loan next year.

Of course, most lenders do charge interest and if they EXPECT inflation will decrease the value of the dollars with which they’re paid back, they’ll simply charge HIGHER interest rates to offset the loss in value of those dollars.

Folks who have already taken out loans at fixed interest rates would benefit from higher inflation. New borrowers and those with adjustable rates would be forced to pay higher interest rates.

More inflation could also spark a run on dollar assets.

But perhaps the main reason this is foolish is that if the Fed lets inflation run wild now, it will just take more draconian monetary measures to get it back under control in the future. Take a look at the steps Paul Volcker was forced to resort to in order to tame inflation back in the early 80s. To beat inflation he had to increase the Fed Funds rate to 20%(!) by late 1980. It’s at 2.25% now. How many of my readers who bought a house in the early 80s recall what mortgage rates were back then? Would you believe they got as high as 18% for a 30 year fixed rate mortgage?

According to Wikipedia, raising rates that high to tame inflation “contributed to the significant recession the U.S. economy experienced in the early 1980s, which included the highest unemployment levels since the Great Depression.”

So far Bernanke has laid off the inflation lever. All of us who avoided overpaying for a house should pray that he continues to.

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Arthur Kimball-Stanley published a fascinating op-ed on Credit Default Swaps in the Providence Journal on Monday. I spoke with the author and he gave me permission to republish his piece in its entirety. A 30-page version of this argument was accepted for publication in a law journal to be published this fall. The author gave me a recent draft, though the article below offers the essential elements of the argument. Hopefully it gets traction……

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