Prepare for financial crisis
The biological crisis has stabilized, but the financial crisis is just beginning. True, the Fed has been injecting huge amounts of money into the financial system via repo and treasury and mortgage bond buying. In just a few weeks we're doing more QE than we did over 8 months back in 2008. That should help prevent outright bank failures, but there's still going to be a lot of pain as mortgages and corporate debt start to default.
The canary in the coal mine for a mortgage default crisis is unemployment, and this week we're likely to see initial jobless claims jump from 280,000 last week to some number in the millions. Reports indicate that New York's unemployment office is receiving 200,000-500,000 new claims per day, and California's jumped from 2,000 to 80,000 overnight. Both offices are overwhelmed and their employees are working huge amounts of overtime to keep up with all the new claims.
Bad mortgages aren't as big a risk to the economy as they were in 2008, but they're still a pretty big risk. The Trump administration has been lowering lending standards for several years, and the share of mortgages considered "high risk" has been rising rapidly. There's going to be pain in the banking sector. I will enter FAZ ahead of Thursday's ICSA report this week.
The canary in the coal mine for a mortgage default crisis is unemployment, and this week we're likely to see initial jobless claims jump from 280,000 last week to some number in the millions. Reports indicate that New York's unemployment office is receiving 200,000-500,000 new claims per day, and California's jumped from 2,000 to 80,000 overnight. Both offices are overwhelmed and their employees are working huge amounts of overtime to keep up with all the new claims.
Bad mortgages aren't as big a risk to the economy as they were in 2008, but they're still a pretty big risk. The Trump administration has been lowering lending standards for several years, and the share of mortgages considered "high risk" has been rising rapidly. There's going to be pain in the banking sector. I will enter FAZ ahead of Thursday's ICSA report this week.
Comment:
I just saw a report that the stimulus package under debate in Congress is going to be $2 trillion, or about twice as large as originally expected. If so, then we will start the week with a rally and you won't want to buy into FAZ until Wednesday ahead of the jobless claims number. The current Estimize consensus is about 1.1 million jobless claims this week, but I'm thinking the actual will be higher than that. I set my forecast at 2 million.