Posted by Larry Doyle on March 18th, 2009 1:11 PM |
A week or so ago, I introduced two indexes that track the outlook for housing in our country. The S&P/Case-Shiller Indexis released on a monthly basis. The ABX is an index that can be traded daily by institutional money managers and thus allows them to reflect their opinions on the outlook for housing. The ABX is a very broadly defined index that tracks housing by the underlying year of origination of the mortgage.
Yesterday, the monthly housing starts number surprisingly jumped 22%. The government program TALF (Term Asset-Backed Lending Facility) to restart the consumer finance markets is set to launch next week. Hopefully that program will bring added liquidity to our consumer finance markets and support housing as well. The mortgage modification program to support housing is underway. (more…)
Posted by Larry Doyle on March 11th, 2009 12:54 PM |
I will provide my insights and perspectives on Charlie Rose’s interview of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner last evening. The interview has been broken down into 6 separate clips, with my commentary preceding each clip.
Part 1
In this clip, Geithner wears both the political and policy hats. While promoting the Obama agenda initially (housing, education, healthcare, energy), he then turns toward the specifics of unlocking the consumer credit securitization markets via the TALF (Term Asset Backed Securities Loan Facility). This facility attempts to restart the securitization market and model which I wrote was broken back on November 12th (The Wall Street Model Is Broken…and Won’t Soon be Fixed). That market provides approximately 40% of the financing to a wide array of consumer finance markets. Geithner attempts to portray a measure of confidence and aggressiveness. The market has currently responded with a vote of no confidence.