No Bottom in Housing

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Housing faces another big wave of foreclosures. Jobs report: no cause for celebration.

LAST WEEK, MR. OBAMA VOYAGED TO EGYPT and delivered a truly remarkable speech. It wasn't so much the nicely crafted rhetoric or deftly glossed content that stirred our admiration. Rather, it was that he could speak for nearly an hour and verbally cover the globe, with its profusion of combustible hot spots threatening conflagrations that might consume continents, without once uttering the word "terrorist."

Guess from now on, we'll have to call those guys in Iraq and Pakistan who get up the in morning, brush their teeth and proceed to blow up themselves and everyone else who happens to be within spitting distance "misguided pyrotechnists" and the 9/11 bunch "malign tourists."

While Mr. Obama's trip to the land of the Pyramids got most of the play (for some reason, he neglected to take Joe Biden along and introduce him to the Sphinx to show him what a model vice president is like), the week was also newsworthy as providing still another example of a CE0 failing to follow the iron rule to never send an e-mail and never destroy one.

The culprit in this case is Angelo Mozilo, the man who founded and ran the infamous Countrywide Financial, which made a real contribution to the decline and fall of housing, the deep freeze of the credit market and all the calamitous things that issued from them. After the roof fell in, he walked away with $130 million, the fruits of opportune stock sales. That's not a record for being compensated for making a mess, but it still represents a decent payday.

Mr. Mozilo made the mistake of properly referring in e-mails to the loans his company was making as "toxic." And the SEC awoke long enough from its slumbers to charge him with fraud.

Mr. Obama, as it turns out, couldn't have picked a better week to be abroad, since his absence coincided with release of the May jobs report. It showed a leap in the unemployment rate to 9.4% from 8.9%, the highest in a quarter of a century. Apparently, that stimulus program unveiled with so much hoopla isn't doing much in the way of stimulating employment.

While payrolls slid by 345,000, much below the consensus guess, it was the usual hokey number, getting a lift from the wonderful birth/death model, which somehow summoned up 220,000 jobs and did so, magically, out of thin air.

The harsh truth is that, using the regular payroll data, a rather formidable 14.5 million people are out of work. Moreover, if we look at the category we feel gives a more accurate picture -- the so-called U-6 tally -- which includes people too discouraged to keep looking for a job and those working part-time because they can't find full-time slots, the unemployment rate shot up to a new high of 16.4%. That means that something around 25 million folks are effectively on the dole. Ugh!

CALL US ORNERY (it'll probably shock you to learn we've been called worse). Or, if you're in a forgiving mood, call us grumpy, mulish, obstinate. But, with a willful tenacity that we fear approaches obsession, we find ourselves clinging to the notion -- in the face of the mounting insistence in Wall Street, Washington and other seamy precincts that less bad is the equivalent of good -- that the impaired economy is still a long way from anything worthy of being called a recovery. And what's more, it will stay in that sorry state until housing, whose collapse triggered the chain reaction that threatened to all but demolish the economy, pulls itself up from the depths.

Ah, we can hear the fluttering flocks of cheerful chirpers scolding us for not opening our eyes and catching the luminous signs of a turn in housing's fortunes. Well, our eyes are wide open, and what we see is something quite different: the mother of all head fakes.

Our dour perception coincides with that of Whitney Tilson and Glenn Tongue of T2 Partners, from whose latest tome -- on housing, mortgages, meltdown and all that -- we've filched that superlative. And we couldn't be in better company. For, as perhaps you recall, we've used this space to quote extensively from their earlier warnings, which proved right on target.

Their latest effort runs a mere 75 pages and is adorned with an array of attractive graphics that help make its reading not only informative but relatively pleasurable. In it, they argue persuasively that recent indications of stabilization in housing are the product of some short-term and seasonal factors, and emphatically not, as the wild bulls have been snorting, a true bottom.

In particular, the lifting of a temporary moratorium on foreclosures has prompted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the other usual suspect lenders to move quickly to save homeowners who can be saved -- but foreclose on those who can't. Tilson and Tongue see this as necessary if we're ever going to lay to rest what the bubble and its dreary aftermath have wrought. But it also seems destined to produce exactly what we need least -- a surge in housing inventory later this year. And, alas, that in turn means further pressure on prices.

As any poor soul who has been trying to peddle his abode can mournfully attest, prices are plenty weak already, having declined for 33 months in a row. They're down some 40% from their peak, the T2 pair reckons, and have at least 5%-10% more to go, with a real risk of falling even further than that, owing to homeowner frustration and despair and a continuing ample oversupply of shelter because of the tidal wave of foreclosures, millions more of which they think are in the cards over the next few years.

Tilson and Tongue don't see housing bottoming until the middle of next year, and the recovery, they suggest, will be conspicuous by its lack of vigor.

One of the scarier charts in the report -- but which, we think, brings into jarring focus mortgage credit's current perilous condition -- lists how much each of the various types of loans is severely underwater. To wit: 73% of option ARMs, 50% of subprime, 45% of Alt-A and 25% of prime mortgages are in that uncomfortable category.

T2 posits five waves of losses, two of which have crested, while the remaining three have yet to peak. In the first two waves, the losses of which appear largely behind us, the chief causes of distress were rooted in fraud, feckless speculation and payment shock induced by mortgage resets.

The last three waves, the big losses of which have still to come, include prime loans (mostly owned or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie); jumbo primes, second liens and home-equity lines of credit (most of these are on banks' books), and loans outside housing, notably the tidy $3.5 trillion of commercial real estate.

Toward the end of their report, as a kind of second opinion, the T2 duo cite some observations last month by Mark Hanson of the Field Check Group, a seasoned research outfit that specializes in real estate and mortgages. And not surprisingly, he's at one with their downbeat analysis. In fact, if anything, he's even more bearish and puts a lot of the blame squarely on ill-conceived attempts to ease the plight of troubled homeowners by tinkering with their loans.

More specifically, he cites all of those "terrible kick-the- can-down-the-road modifications that leave borrowers in five-year teaser, ultra-high leverage, 150% loan-to value balloon loans" that when they start adjusting upward will "turn millions of homeowners into overlevered, underwater, renters, and ensure housing is a dead asset class for years to come."

Field Check's data, he says, show "that the mid-to-upper-end housing market is on the precipice of the exact cliff that the market fell off of in 2007, led by new loan defaults. What happens to the economy when you hit the mid-to-upper-end earners the same way the low-to-mid end was hit with the subprime implosion? We will find out soon enough."

And he concludes on this grim note: "When we look back at the end of 2009, anyone that made positive predictions this year will not believe how far off they were."

WE EARNESTLY HOPE THAT SHOULD he chance to glance at these scribblings, Timothy Geithner isn't disconcerted to the point that he's unable to give his undivided attention to the serious business of running the Treasury. We'd feel just awful if we thought that something we've written had distracted Mr. Geithner from formulating another way to reward the banks for their gross imprudence.

Our concern here springs from a report by the AP last week that Mr. Geithner, who has a house in a posh part of Westchester County in New York, has been unable to sell it, even though he cut the price below the $1.602 million he paid for it in 2004.

Since he has new digs in Washington, but has to shell out $27,000 a year in property taxes, plus the payments on $1.2 million in two mortgages on his old home, he likely figured if he sold it, at the very least he could begin to have a decent lunch instead of the baloney sandwich his missus has been preparing for him to haul to the office.

He was able to rent out the five-bedroom Westchester Tudor for a mere $7,500 a month, but we're afraid, given his mortgage payments and all, he'll probably still have to make do with baloney for quite a spell. Oh, and don't be surprised if the administration unveils a new program to aid those deserving upper-end homeowners whose suffering has gone largely unremarked.

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