"Don't confuse Bad Brains with a bull market." - Humphrey Neill Young

Accelerating the completion of the design of a new anti-fragmentation instrument.

• “I learned that my assets were ephemeral, while my debts were money-good.” - Rick Rule

• “…markets are what happen when you are busy misinterpreting other things.” - Robert Prechter

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Seven of the 10 largest refinance lenders in 2021 were nonbanks, according to Inside Mortgage Finance…Nonbanks issued about 70% of U.S. mortgages last year, the highest share on record

Americans Are Building Vacation-Home Empires With Easy-Money Loans Brenna Carles drives along a winding country road in the Great Smoky Mountains, a get-rich real estate podcast playing on the speakers of her brand-new Lincoln SUV. Not long ago, Carles was belting out tunes at Nashville honky-tonks as she struggled to make it as a country singer. Now, at 32, she’s one of the region’s most successful mortgage brokers specializing in loans for vacation home rentals. [Reminded me of this.]

Builders Are Slashing Prices to Sell Homes in Fast-Cooling US Markets The Dallas area has a record of more than 41,500 homes under construction, a 10.7-month supply at the current sales pace, about twice the normal level

• Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States

• Housing Under Construction is at a record

• Housing Starts are dropping

• ARM’s are back

• Need a HELOC?

• “This is absolutely the end of TINA for the foreseeable future.” Good riddance.

Ford CFO flags increase in car loan delinquencies Average monthly car loan payments hit a record of $656 for new vehicles, $546 for used vehicles in May: Edmunds…the average loan term for a used vehicle hit a record of 70.8 months.

California May 2022 home sales and price report With both closed sales and pending sales slowing by double-digits, total active listings experienced a gain of 46.7 percent in May, the largest year-over-year growth in at least the last 89 months. Active listings in May also climbed to the highest level since July 2020 and had a month-to-month increase of 26.4 percent from April.

Memory Lane: Top Subprime Lenders, Q2 2006

Top 10 ZIPS with Worst Foreclosure Rates in May 2022 My first thought was how bad must things be in some locales if they have foreclosures at the peak of the greatest housing bubble ever. My second thought was wow, Plano, is on this list - but it’s Plano, Illinois, not Texas (thanks to those whe set me straight.)

Distressed Deals Pile Up in Canada’s Once-Booming Housing Market “I’ve seen an influx in cases that are beyond anything anybody’s ever seen,” said Greg Weedon, a Toronto-based real estate lawyer who says 20 files related to buyers unable to fulfill their purchase contracts have hit his desk in just the last two weeks. “I’ve restructured my whole business at this point to exclusively take in files related to buyers in breach. That’s going to be my business model going forward for the foreseeable future.”…Through the pandemic, variable rate mortgages came to account for more than half of all new home loans as buyers sought the lowest rates they could get to afford the record high prices.

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How does Paul Krugman still have a job? June 21, 2021

Remember when everyone was panicking about inflation, warning ominously about 1970s-type stagflation? OK, many people are still saying such things, some because that’s what they always say, some because that’s what they say when there’s a Democratic president, some because they’re extrapolating from the big price increases that took place in the first five months of this year.

But for those paying closer attention to the flow of new information, inflation panic is, you know, so last week.

Seriously, both recent data and recent statements from the Federal Reserve have, well, deflated the case for a sustained outbreak of inflation. For that case has always depended on asserting that the Fed is either intellectually or morally deficient (or both). That is, to panic over inflation, you had to believe either that the Fed’s model of how inflation works is all wrong or that the Fed would lack the political courage to cool off the economy if it were to become dangerously overheated.

Both beliefs have now lost most of whatever credibility they may have had.

“A 75 basis point increase is not something we’re actively considering.” - Jerome Powell, May 4, 2022

You get so much confusing information - look at the information Powell has been giving you the last year. He’s been wrong about all kinds of stuff. If Powell whispered in your ear 5 minutes before he said whatever he said publicly, you still have lost a lot of money. - Noel Smith

For 2022, the benchmark S&P 500 will gain 7.5% from Tuesday's close of 4,567 to end the year at 4,910, according to the median forecast of 45 strategists polled by Reuters over the last two weeks. (December 2021. Currently at 3,675. Who knows.)

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• Thanks Chris Irons for the shout out in his new article, the aptly titled, “Janet Yellen: The Lingering 'Legacy' Of A Decades-Old Monetary Policy Circus Freak Show.” Chris does the invigorating Quoth the Raven podcast. Give Chris a follow on the Substack too.

• Speaking of the Substack, check out friend of the show Stephen Clapham. Besides writing, he does podcasts. Here’s the latest, with the FT’s Dan McCrum on the Wirecard fraud.

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• Sergey Brin Seeks Divorce, Joining Gates and Bezos in Split Interesting that all three men had ongoing ties to Jeff Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, or both.

• High-Ranking Afghan Officials Escaped to Luxury Homes Abroad [Deep sigh]

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• “This is not a market economy anymore. This is now a Soviet command economy…if the market for baseball cards was ten-trillion dollars, the Fed would be buying baseball cards.” - James Hickman, June 2021

• "Science, though, is one thing, finance another. In science, progress is cumulative — we stand on the shoulders of giants. In finance, progress is cyclical — we keep stepping on the same rake." - Jim Grant

• “When you stand at the pinnacle of financial journalism, you are standing at sea level." - Jim Grant

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July 28, 2017