Enough

Inflation is coolin' Baby you must be foolin'

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have…Enough.”

John Bogle, 2007

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My guess is that food probably doesn’t make up a meaningful percentage of Christine Lagarde’s income.

“Cooling”

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Top Property Owners Are Creditworthy—They Might Default Anyway

It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business.

Loved this comment:

[These are] highly leveraged commercial office investment groups we are talking about here…mortgaged to the gills to maximize real estate capital gains under eternal ZIRP that has ended and the only thing keeping the cash flowing was unsustainably low cost of money now cut off. Because if they had any more cash flowing they would have leveraged it into more property again. Basically, most of the market. The fast money flippers. The smartest guys in the room.

Barry Sternlicht

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Here’s 4,000 more homes our kids will never own:

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Dow Jones REIT Index since 1999 Everyone freaks out about the recent unpleasantness, but they forget the previous meteoric rise.

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• Simon Johnson Podcast: AI is Overhyped as an Investment, Will Only Worsen Inequality

• ZipRecruiter Lays off 20% Workforce, 270 Employees Doesn’t seem fair.

• Miami and Miami Beach commercial sales volume plunges 80% in first quarter

• New Twitter Spaces on Florida

• Norman Solomon and David Barsamian, Living in a Warfare State

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Former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Paul Tucker, with Grant Williams:

In 2019, the US regulatory authorities, including the central bank, the Federal Reserve, decided to cease planning for how to handle the failure of large regional banks. I was chair of something called the Systemic Risk Council, which was a transatlantic group of former top central bankers and regulators…and we wrote to them, public letter and said, “You don’t want to stop planning for how to resolve these large regional banks because it’s not as though, we don’t think you’ve got a plan already and you can put that on the shelf and be ready. We don’t think you’ve got a plan.”…

And so they hadn’t got a plan and then they end up effectively saying, “Here’s a government guarantee,” rather like the Irish did for the whole of their banking system. In the previous crisis, I can remember exactly where I was standing when I heard about the Irish guarantee, and it was one of the few moments of the whole crisis where I was kind of, “Oh my God,” because I thought all the money is going to flow from everywhere into the Irish banks because they’re now guaranteed until they realize that size of the banking sector is now beyond the capacity of the Irish state to guarantee it, and then it will also all flow out again.

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Mike Rothman of Cornerstone Analytics with Grant Williams

…the global oil balance is structurally tight and not easing. That’s what I think is going to ultimately be the big story here. And it’s not talked about a lot because the anti-carbon rally, the ESG, the idea that oil’s going to go away, we’ll be able to get rid of oil, et cetera, et cetera, I think people just want to believe that. And it’s a false hope. I plan on doing this till I die. There’s no reason I would ever stop doing this kind of work. But even if I live to be 100, the notion that oil demand goes away in my lifetime I think is a nonstarter. There’s still structurally nothing that can substitute forward of scale.

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Realtor.com May 2023 Monthly Housing Market Trends Report

• The number of homes actively for sale increased by 21.5% compared to last year.

• The total number of unsold homes, including homes that are under contract, decreased by 0.2% compared to last year.

• Home sellers were less active this May, with 22.7% fewer homes newly listed for sale compared to last year.

• The median price of homes for sale increased by just 0.9% annually in May, lower than April’s growth rate.

• Homes spent 43 days on the market, which is 14 days longer than last year but still shorter than before the pandemic.

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Looks like construction spending is still chugging along - though single-family is slowing:

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New Build-to-Rent Homes Hit Record With 3 Times as Many Houses Under Construction There are 44,700 build-to-rent houses under construction — triple the number of new homes completed in 2022.

There’s a lot of supply in the pipeline now - maybe not where it’s most needed, or affordable, but it is supply.

Then again…banks are getting tougher on lending (and have been for a year).

Chart 1: Banks Reporting Change in Underwriting for Multifamily

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Cities With the Most Expensive Airbnb Rentals

Cities With the Most Airbnb Listings Per 100,000 Residents

Aa couple weeks ago I wrote:

How many AirBnb listings are there?

There are 6 million active listings on Airbnb as of March 2022. There were only 300 thousand listings in 2013, which shows a twenty-times growth in only nine years.

This is an astounding number compared to the 742,728 hotels and resorts worldwide.

The way I look at the above is that - largely due to a desperate reach for yield from the Fed’s idiotic ZIRP policies - excluding extra rooms in occupied homes, millions of housing units were taken away from potential buyers so that someone could set up a motel in your neighborhood.

I think this is fake, but I’m not positive.

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Private Equity Purchases Drop Beneath Pandemic Low

Then again, How Private Equity Plans to Capitalize on Commercial Real Estate Distress There’s blood in the water, as hundreds of billions of proverbial dry powder sits poised to enter the financing market. Here’s how and where.

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UK Nationwide Housing Prices

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Can’t prove anything, but I feel like the GFC (Great Depression II for many) really broke something in the country.

Then again, per capita sales have been dropping for a long time…

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Interesting.