De Beursvloer #89: Buy in May

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Op maandag 11 mei 2009 12:05 schreef SeLang het volgende:

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Mwah...

[ afbeelding ]

Maar ook op basis van die geprojecteerde winst van $57 die is genoemd in dat artikel staan we boven die 15,5.

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Op maandag 11 mei 2009 15:57 schreef SeLang het volgende:

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Goed, laat hem dan nu maar daad bij het woord voegen en beginnen de rente te verhogen

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Mortgages Over 5% Mean Fed Purchases as Bonds Slump (Update2)

By Daniel Kruger

May 11 (Bloomberg) -- The world’s biggest investors are increasing bets that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke will boost purchases of Treasuries as the steepest losses on government debt since 1994 send mortgage rates above 5 percent.

The slump in Treasuries the past seven weeks pushed yields on longer-maturity bonds up by more than half a percentage point and sent average rates on 30-year mortgages to the highest since the start of April, according to North Palm Beach, Florida-based Bankrate.com. Policy makers said March 18 they were committing “greater support to mortgage lending and housing markets” when they pledged to buy as much as $300 billion of Treasuries and stepped up purchases of bonds backed by home loans.

BlackRock Inc., American Century Investments, Federated Investors and Pioneer Investment Management say it’s time to buy Treasuries because the Fed will need to expand its purchases to keep consumer borrowing costs from rising further. While higher bond yields, the 37 percent increase in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index since March 9 and U.S. reports on housing and inventories show the economy may be stabilizing, Bernanke said May 5 that “mortgage credit is still relatively tight.”

“The Fed needs to consider increasing its purchases of Treasuries,” said Stuart Spodek, co-head of U.S. bonds in New York at BlackRock, which manages $483 billion in debt. Spodek said he resumed buying Treasuries. “We are still in a recession. It’s quite bad. They need to stabilize long-term rates.”

Fed Precedent

Reviving the housing market is critical to ending the longest recession since the 1930s. The National Association of Home Builders says the industry accounted for 13.6 percent of U.S. gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2009, down from 16.7 percent in 2005. GDP contracted at a 6.1 percent rate last quarter after shrinking at a 6.3 percent pace in the final three months of 2008.

There is precedent for the central bank to expand purchases. The Fed increased its commitment to buy mortgage bonds to $1.25 trillion in March from $500 billion when it said it would begin buying government debt in a policy known as quantitative easing.

“We think there’s a point very close to here where the Fed would act,” said James Platz, a fund manager at Mountain View, California-based American Century, which invests about $24 billion in bonds and resumed buying Treasuries. “We would expect at some point an announcement of additional buybacks.”

The Fed purchased $92.2 billion of Treasuries since the March 18 announcement, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Losing Streak

At the same time, 10-year note yields, a benchmark for consumer and mortgage rates, reached 3.38 percent last week, the highest since November and up from 2.46 percent on March 19, according to BGCantor Market data. Thirty-year mortgage rates are up from 4.85 percent on April 28.

Yields rose for seven weeks, the longest streak in five years. The benchmark 3.125 percent note due in May 2019, which was auctioned by the Treasury on May 6, ended last week at 98 20/32 to yield 3.29 percent. The yield declined to 3.21 percent today at 9:32 a.m. in New York.

Treasuries lost 3.93 percent this year, according to Merrill Lynch & Co.’s U.S. Treasury Master index, after gaining 14 percent in 2008 as investors sought a refuge from tumbling prices of securities tied to subprime mortgages. Losses and writedowns at the world’s largest financial institutions total $1.41 trillion since the start of 2007, Bloomberg data show.

‘Tight’ Credit

The declines are the most since Treasuries tumbled 4.94 percent at the same point in 1994, according to Merrill Lynch indexes. That year, the Fed raised its target rate for overnight loans between banks to 5.5 percent from 3 percent in an effort to contain inflation. Treasuries ended up losing 3.35 percent for all of 1994, before returning 18.5 percent in 1995 and 2.61 percent in 1996, including reinvested interest.

Thirty-year mortgage rates as measured by Freddie Mac rose to 9.25 percent on November 1994, from 6.74 percent in 1993, before falling to 6.94 percent in February 1996.

Home prices have declined for 31 straight months and are down 31 percent from their peak, according to S&P/Case Shiller indexes. Mortgage applications to purchase a home remain below the high reached in September when rates averaged 5.94 percent, Mortgage Bankers Association and Bankrate.com data show.

“The supply of mortgage credit is still relatively tight, and mortgage activity remains heavily dependent on the support of government programs or the government-sponsored enterprises,” Bernanke told the Joint Economic Committee of Congress on May 5.

Thawing the Freeze

Bernanke succeeded in narrowing the difference in yields between mortgage securities, which also influence home loan rates, and Treasuries.

The gap between the 30-year current coupon Fannie Mae bond and the benchmark 10-year Treasury shrank to a 15-year low of 0.77 percentage point on May 6. It averaged 1.23 percentage points in the five years prior to the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September. Thirty-year mortgage rates are down from 6.46 percent in October.

Other lending rates also show Fed efforts to thaw frozen credit markets are working, which may reduce pressure on policy makers to step up purchases of Treasuries.

The London interbank offered rate, or Libor, for three- month dollar loans fell to a record 0.92 percent. The difference between Libor and what the Treasury pays to borrow for three months, the so-called TED spread, was 0.72 percentage point, the narrowest in almost a year and down from 4.64 percentage points on Oct. 10.

Bond Switch

Investors anticipating an expansion of the Fed’s Treasury purchases were disappointed after the Federal Open Market Committee’s April 29 meeting, when policy makers left the size of planned buybacks unchanged and said the economy is showing signs of stability. Yields on 10-year notes rose 16 basis points, or 0.16 percentage point, to 3.16 percent that week, the biggest increase since the period ended Feb. 27.

Treasuries are falling in part because investors are switching to higher-yielding assets on signs the worst of the recession is over.

Unemployment in the U.S. grew by the smallest amount since October last month. Payrolls fell by 539,000, after a 699,000 loss in March, while the unemployment rate rose to 8.9 percent, the highest level since 1983, the Labor Department said May 8. The Commerce Department said the same day wholesalers reduced supplies of unsold goods for a seventh month in March.

Corporate Debt Sales

“People are feeling a little bit more comfortable that the economy is not getting as bad as it was,” said Richard Schlanger, who helps invest $13 billion in fixed-income securities as vice president at Pioneer Investment in Boston. “There has been a slight migration out of the safe-haven mentality.”

Besides the gain in stocks and the drop in the rate banks charge to lend to each other, U.S. companies including New York- based Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Corp. in Charlotte, North Carolina, have sold more than $500 billion of bonds, according to Bloomberg data.

There is still plenty of incentive for Bernanke to contain borrowing costs as job losses threaten to restrain consumer spending after a first-quarter rebound, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News last month.

The government is likely to sell a record $3.25 trillion of debt this fiscal year ending Sept. 30, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., to finance bank bailouts, economic stimulus plans and fund a growing budget deficit.

Consumer credit in the U.S. contracted by a record $11.1 billion, the most since records began in 1943, to $2.55 trillion in March, according to a Fed report released May 7.

“If all of a sudden this rise in the 10-year yield feeds into higher all-in mortgage rates, that’s when we think the Fed will come in with a vengeance” to increase its Treasury purchases, said Joseph Balestrino, a money manager at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh, which oversees $21 billion in bonds. “We are a buyer.”