Question for Bernanke: "Do you have the cojones to raise rates?"

Smirking Chimp | August 13, 2009
By Mike Whitney

Booyah, it's morning in America. The jobless numbers are stabilizing, the stock market is on a tear, quarterly earnings came in better than expected, traders have turned bullish, housing is showing signs of life, and clunker-swaps have given Detroit a well-needed boost of adrenalin. Even Cassandra economists --like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini--have been uncharacteristically optimistic. Is is true; did we avoid a Second Great Depression? Is the worst really behind us?

Maybe. But there is only one way to find out for sure. Raise rates.

Bernanke should welcome the opportunity to show everyone how he's pulled the world's biggest economy back from the brink of disaster. All he needs to do is stop giving away free money, shut down a few of his so-called lending facilities, and stop manipulating interest rates by purchasing mortgage-backed securities (MBS) from Fannie and Freddie. How hard is that?

The S&P 500 has skyrocketed 48 percent since March 9. What's Bernanke waiting for; a 75 percent increase; a 100 percent increase??? How high do stocks have to go to convince Bernanke that the economy can stand on its own two feet without the torrent of cheap liquidity issuing from the Fed?

Bernanke can prove to his critics that the US economy doesn't need the Fed's monetization programs and price fixing; that it doesn't need the liquidity injections and the buying up of junk mortgages. ($80 billion last month alone) After all, as Bernanke opines, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong!"

Right. Now prove it.

All Bernanke has to do is boost rates by a point or two and demonstrate that he's willing to mop up some of the $13 trillion he's pumped into the financial markets. With just one announcement, the Fed chair could show our biggest creditor--China--that he's serious about defending the dollar and the trillion dollars of US Treasuries China purchased believing that the US was a responsible trading partner who would never write checks on an account that was overdrawn by $12 trillion. (The National Debt)

So, go ahead, Ben. Raise rates, shut down the printing presses, roll up the corporate welfare programs. Be a He-man. Make your critics eat their words.

This is from Bloomberg News 8-12-09:

"The Fed’s policy-setting Open Market Committee will today keep the target rate at zero to 0.25 percent and retain plans to buy as much as $1.45 trillion of housing debt by year-end to help secure a recovery, analysts said. The FOMC’s statement is expected at about 2:15 p.m. in Washington."

Hmmmmmm. So all the "green shoots" happy talk is pure gibberish, right? There is no recovery. Bernanke plans to continue flooding the financial system with cheap liquidity. It's all a fraud. Things aren't better; they're worse. Look at the facts.

There were 1.9 million foreclosures in 2009 in the first six months, and there will be another 1.5 before the end of the year. Is that better?

According to Bloomberg: "A glut of unsold homes is also pushing down prices. The 3.8 million homes for sale in June would take 9.4 months to sell at the current pace of transactions, according to the National Association of Realtors. The inventory turnover rate averaged 4.5 months in the six years from 2000 to 2005.....More than 18.7 million homes, including foreclosures, residences for sale and vacation homes, stood vacant in the U.S. during the second quarter. That compared with 18.6 million a year earlier, the U.S. Census Bureau said July 24

Total home sales fell 23.7 percent in June versus a year earlier." Bloomberg)

Massive supply, falling prices, record foreclosures, flagging demand--and according to Deutsche Bank--48 percent of all mortgages will be underwater by 2011. It's all bad.

Here's another clip from Bloomberg today 8-12-09:

"Home price declines in the U.S. ACCELERATED in the second quarter, dropping by a record 15.6 percent from a year earlier, as foreclosures weighed on values.
The median price of an existing single-family home dropped to $174,100, THE MOST IN RECORDS dating to 1979, the National Association of Realtors said today.

“I don’t think we’re at a bottom yet in home prices,” said Scott Anderson, a senior economist at Wells Fargo & Co. in Minneapolis. “There’s also a pretty big shadow supply of houses. People are kind of waiting for the bottom but there’s a pent up supply out there.”...Home prices are tumbling even as mortgage rates remain near all-time lows. The average U.S. rate for a 30-year fixed home loan was to 5.22 percent last week, down from 5.25 percent the prior week." (Bloomberg)

The decline in housing prices is ACCELERATING, not slowing down. The historic collapse in real estate is ongoing and it is wiping out trillions in homeowner equity making it increasingly difficult for consumers to borrow on the diminishing value of their collateral. This is why foreclosures, defaults and personal bankruptcies are soaring. (According to the American Bankruptcy Institute: consumer bankruptcy filings reached 126,434 in July, a 34.3% increase year over year, and a 8.7% increase sequentially (116,365 in June). July's number is the highest monthly total since the October 2005 bankruptcy reform aka the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act.)

This is why households and consumers can no longer spend as much as they had before the crisis. Credit lines are being pared back; personal savings are rising, and GDP (excluding fiscal stimulus) is shrinking.

Full article HERE