The Housing Bubble is Deflating

With the recent surge in the mortgage yields, let's see how the housing market is doing. The two key metrics to look at are mortgage rates and household income. Let's analyze the mortgage rates first.

Historically, there is a high correlation between 30 year U.S. treasuries and 30 year mortgage rates (Chart 1). The chart shows that the 30 year treasury yield has spiked upwards starting in 2013, so I expect that the 30 year mortgage rates will spike upwards too. 30 year mortgage rates have already gone up from 3% to 4.9%, which had negative consequences for the real estate market, which is not priced in yet in the housing index.

Chart 1: Correlation between 30 year treasury yield and 30 year mortgage yield

As Zero Hedge reports, the affordability of housing is declining rapidly with rising mortgage yields. Every percentage increase in yields on 30 year mortgages will result in a 10% decline in affordability as the chart shows. If yields continue to go up to 6%, affordability would have declined about 40% since 2013.

Chart 2: House Purchasing Power

The question is, will mortgage rates go up further? And what about the savings rate of the average citizen?

The answer is that real estate should be sold out of. Kyle Bass for example sold out of three of his real estate holdings: Newcastle Investment Corp (NCT), Hyatt Hotels Corporation (H) and Realogy Holdings Corp. (RLG ) - Real Estate Services.


=> Read it here.

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Warning: Deflation is on the horizon

As we know, Ben Bernanke sinked the markets yesterday and this has consequences.

As the premium on silver of some silver miners soars to 30%, we are getting to a point where mining companies are actually losing money, especially when they have mining projects in development. At these prices, nobody is going to invest in exploration companies as they would lose money in doing so.

On the other front, namely bonds, we see the U.S. treasury market decline in price while yields rise.

These high yields in bonds and mortgage yields will in turn crash the stock market and the housing market respectively, if the Federal Reserve stops its monetary easing.

These events are very deflationary, if Ben Bernanke doesn't up its QE, we will need to position ourselves in deflationary assets like cash and bonds.

Michael Pento warns for deflation in this status update.
http://www.pentoport.com/mp3/MRC130619.mp3

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How Likely is QE3? 70% likely.

Ben Bernanke has been saving his ammo in the past months. Each time the fed meeting was held, markets were hoping for QE3, but they didn't receive any. This is evidence by the U.S. federal reserve balance sheet on Chart 1.

Chart 1: U.S. Federal Reserve Balance Sheet

Today, we have passed several months and we already see that the economy is starting to deteriorate. Not only in Europe and the emerging markets, but especially in the United States. In this article I will focus on the key macroeconomic data in the U.S.

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