A number of analysts, and even some of those in the real estate industry, are finally coming around to the depressing conclusion that there will never be a recovery in residential real estate. Long time readers of this letter know too well that I have been hugely negative on the sector since late 2005, when I unloaded all of my holdings. However, I believe that 'forever' may be on the extreme side. Personally, I believe there will be great opportunities in real estate starting in 2030.
Let's back up for a second and review where the great bull market of 1950-2007 came from. That's when a mere 50 million members of the 'greatest generation', those born from 1920 to 1945, were chased by 80 million baby boomers born from 1946-1962. There was a chronic shortage of housing, with the extra 30 million never hesitating to borrow more to pay higher prices. When my parents got married in 1949, they were only able to land a dingy apartment in a crummy Los Angeles neighborhood because he was an ex-Marine. This is where our suburbs came from.
Since 2005, the tables have turned. There are now 80 million baby boomers attempting to unload dwellings on 65 million generation Xer's who earn less than their parents, marking down prices as fast as they can. As a result, the Federal Reserve thinks that 35% of American homeowners either have negative equity, or less than 10% equity, which amounts to nearly zero after you take out sales commissions and closing costs. That comes to 42 million homes. Don't count on selling your house to your kids, especially if they are still living rent free in the basement.
The good news is that the next bull market in housing starts in 20 years. That's when 85 million Millennials, those born from 1988 to yesterday, start competing to buy homes from only 65 million gen Xer's. By then, house prices will be a lot cheaper than they are today in real terms. The next interest rate spike will probably knock another 25% off real estate prices. Think 1982 again.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be long gone, meaning that the 30 year conventional mortgage will cease to exist. All future home purchases will be financed with adjustable rate mortgages, forcing homebuyers to assume interest rate risk, as they already do in most of the developed world. With the US budget deficit problems persisting beyond the horizon, the home mortgage interest deduction is an endangered species, and its demise will chop another 10% off home values.
For you millennials just graduating from college now, this is a best case scenario. It gives you 15 years to save up the substantial down payment banks will require by then. You can then swoop in to cherry pick the best neighborhoods at the bottom of a 25 year bear market. People will no doubt tell you that you are crazy, that renting is the only safe thing to do, and that home ownership is for suckers. That's what people told me when I bought my first New York coop in 1982 at one tenth its current market price.
Just remember to sell by 2060, because that's when the next intergenerational residential real estate collapse is expected to ensue. That will leave the next, yet to be named generation, holding the bag, as your grandparents are now.
According to my old friend, Rick Sopher, chairman of LCH Investments in London, the top ten hedge funds have earned $153 billion for their investors since inception.
Rick, who runs his business from an elegant flat on posh Eaton Square, compiled the list after a comprehensive survey of the still operating 7,000 hedge funds worldwide. It is dominated by marquee names like Steve Cohen's SAC Capital, Bruce Kovner's Caxton, and Louise Bacon's Moore Capital. Of the 100 largest funds, 95% have returned much of their investors' original capital, and are using the remaining profits to trade on.
Of course, the numbers show a huge survivor bias. They don't include the hundreds of billions of dollars lost by now shuttered 'wanabee' managers during the financial crash, largely with highly leveraged fixed income, spread oriented, 'low risk' strategies. Many of these are still in liquidation, peddling illiquid assets for pennies on the dollar through online auctions and elsewhere.
The numbers highlight the increasing barbell nature of the hedge fund industry. The biggest funds continue to attract the big bucks, and a steady wave of defections from Wall Street, are funding hundreds of new startups. But many mid-tier firms are getting nothing and are struggling to stay in business.
I spent the evening speaking to Gao Jie, a Beijing civil judge who left the bench to join China's growing environmental movement when her kids came home from school one day coughing and wheezing. You only have to inhale in the capitol city these days to understand that they have a huge problem there.
One of the dirty little secrets of international trade for the last three decades has been the offshoring of high polluting industries from the US and Europe to China, which then vociferously complain about the emerging country's toxic environment. Much of the Middle Kingdom's record carbon emissions these days have been imported from the West. 'Cancer villages' are now proliferating throughout the landscape.
China gets 80% of its power from coal, compared to only 50% in the US. As a result, scientists figure that China became the world's largest emitter of CO2 in 2006. The central government is now asking the provinces to achieve both GDP and energy conservation goals at the same time, a difficult task at best. Government policy dictates that air conditioners only kick in at 79 degrees. If you think that went down well, try spending a summer in Beijing sometime.
It is also pushing headlong into alternative energy, is already the technological leader in key areas like wind, and has an eye to exporting low cost platforms to the US. It is no accident that two of the most competitive solar companies in the world, Suntech (STP) and Yingli Green Energy Holding (YGE), are Chinese. China is also having Phoenix based First Solar (FSLR) build the world's largest thin film solar power plant in Western China, which, it turns out, looks a lot like Arizona. The mammoth, 25 square mile facility will supply power to three million homes.
China's problems give one an inkling of how we might have ended up if we hadn't passed the Environmental Protection Act. I first visited China during the Cultural Revolution, when they doused piles of bodies of those who died in the famine with kerosene and burned them, and anyone educated had to endure being paraded down a street in a dunce cap. I had to pinch myself after seeing a sophisticated and well-educated woman like Gao Jie openly pursue her liberal goals, unfettered by a totalitarian regime.
As a potentially profitable opportunity presents itself, John will send you an alert with specific trade information as to what should be bought, when to buy it, and at what price. Read more
As a potentially profitable opportunity presents itself, John will send you an alert with specific trade information as to what should be bought, when to buy it, and at what price. Read more
I just contracted to buy all the gasoline I want at 14 cents a gallon. No, I have not struck oil in my backyard, or come into an inheritance from a long lost Kuwaiti relative. That is the de facto price that PG&E is billing me for a full charge on my all-electric Nissan Leaf.
That works out to $1.20 to recharge a vehicle that will transport me 80 miles, at the price of five cents a kilowatt hour. This is a tiny fraction of? the 40 cents/hour I pay to run the rest of my appliances, and a pittance compared to the 50 cent/hour peak rate I pay to run the air conditioner in the summer.
PG&E has exactly one engineer to talk to its 10 million customers about this ground breaking new technology, and after much effort, I managed to get him on the phone. I asked who was paying the subsidy? Were those profligate spendthrifts in Washington involved? He answered that there was no subsidy, that power sold at night was cheap because there was no other market.
So I inquired as to who was paying for all of the equipment upgrades, like the new transformers and power lines that were needed? Do I sense the heavy hand of Sacramento? He replied that there was no capital cost because the same infrastructure that delivered power to me during the day would be used to power my car at night. Only a couple of bucks would be spent on the installation of a new 'time of use smart meter'.
The car cars with a $7,500 clean energy tax credit. I know we're supposed to be cutting the deficit by eliminating handouts like this. But you'll only take my subsidies away by prying my cold dead hands away off of them. Take someone else's subsidies, not mine! It is the American thing to do these days.
He did mention that one unanticipated problem had arisen. My ears perked up. Many wealthy Tesla Roadster owners in Los Altos Hills were impressing so many girlfriends with rides that they were requiring multiple daytime recharges, even though they promised to recharge only at night. Not only did this send their electricity bills through the roof, it was causing problems with the grid as well. I guess it?s all part of the teething process, a cost of making the great leap forward to the next generation. Who knew that Match.com would be involved?
I never thought I'd get something for nothing, but it looks like this time I will. That is, as long as the car works, and my kids don't run the battery down playing rap music all night.
I am in Orlando, Florida today to appear as the Keynote speaker at the 2012 Money Show. A search for a nearby bank took me to the surreal suburb of Celebration, a city developed by the Disney people during the mid-1990's. Created to evoke small town USA circa 1940, the berg tastefully replicates an America from the bucolic past, with wide parks, period street lights, white picket fences, fluttering American flags, and some of the strictest design review and zoning restrictions in the country.
Today, Celebration suffers from a foreclosure rate that is double that found in the rest of Florida. Disney was able to realize fantasy prices for its pixie dust sprinkled homes, about 30% more than equivalent property in the surrounding area. It wisely unloaded its ownership of the downtown commercial property to a California based investor group, which is no doubt regretting its move. The downward spiral began shortly after that. Prices are now thought to be 60% off their 2006 peak.
When the sheriff went to evict one unfortunate homeowner, they were held off at gunpoint for 14 hours before he took his own life. Another unfortunate resident was recently found bludgeoned to death. There is a sad irony that investors who drank the most Kool-Aid during the real estate bubble chose to live along the Southern edge of Disney World. Today, Mickey Mouse seems to be saying 'Rent, don't Buy.'
But That's Not What the Broker Told Me
After my weekly dump on residential real estate, I feel obliged to reveal one corner of this beleaguered market that might actually make sense.
By 2050 the population of California will soar from 37 million to 50 million, and that of the US from 300 million to 400 million, according to data released by the US Census Bureau and the CIA fact Book (check out the population pyramid below).
That means enormous demand for the low end of the housing market, apartments in multi-family dwellings. Many of our new citizens will be cash short immigrants. They will be joined by generational demand for limited rental housing by 65 million Gen Xer's and 85 million Millennials enduring a lower standard of living than their parents and grandparents. These people aren't going to be living in cardboard boxes under freeway overpasses.
The trend towards apartments also fits neatly with the downsizing needs of 80 million retiring Baby Boomers. As they age, boomers are moving from an average home size of 2,500 sq. ft. down to 1,000 sq ft condos and eventually 100 sq. ft. rooms in assisted living facilities. The cumulative shrinkage in demand for housing amounts to about 4 billion sq. ft. a year, the equivalent of a city the size of San Francisco.
In the aftermath of the economic collapse, rents are now rising and vacancies rates are shrinking. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac financing is still abundantly available at the lowest interest rates on record. Institutions combing the landscape for low volatility cash flows and limited risk are starting to pour money in.
Legendary Fortune Magazine editor, Winslow Jones, created the first hedge fund out of a shabby office on Broadway Avenue in New York City in 1948, and generated monster returns over the next 20 years. He got the idea of a 20% performance bonus, now an industry standard, from ancient Phoenician sea captains who kept a fifth of the profits from successful voyages. Jones must have had an historical bent.
Then came the second generation titans, George Soros, Julian Robertson, and Michael Steinhardt, who made their debut in the sixties. I count myself among the third generation along with Paul Tudor Jones and Louis Bacon, who launched funds in the late eighties, when there were still fewer than 200 funds and $25 million was still considered a lot of money. The really big money showed up in the nineties when the pension funds found them.
After that, we suffered through the many ordeals that followed, including the collapse of Long Term Capital in 1995, the Amaranth blow up in natural gas in 2006, the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008, and John Paulson?s 50% draw down in 2011. Today there are over 7,000 hedge funds, thought to manage some $2.2 trillion which dominate all financial markets.
Hedge Funds Do Have Their Advantages
Due to the overwhelming surge in new subscriptions last night, my website crashed, preventing many subscribers from renewing at the old $1,997 annual rate BEFORE THE February 7 deadline. I am therefore extending my special offer for just 24 more hours. After that, at midnight EST, Wednesday February 8, prices for both of my products are rising by 50%.
It is an old adage in the investment business that you get what you pay for. Followers of my Macro Millionaire?? trade mentoring got quite a lot last year, with my 56 recommendations bringing in a return of 40.17%.
Since this is the land of the free, the home of the brave, and the last bastion of capitalism, I am going to use this strength to raise prices for the first time in 18 months. The return of inflation starts here.? I am also going to plow my profits into substantially upgrading my products.
My Trade Alert Service will change names to the Global Trade Dispatch. The new services will include a beefed up research team covering a broader array of asset classes, more strategy lunches and seminars around the world, instantaneous distribution of trade alerts through text messaging, and a relaunch of Hedge Fund Radio. It will also include an enhanced live customer support. The new prices are:
$3,000?- One year subscription to Global Trade Dispatch, including the daily newsletter, trade alerts, and webinars
$500?-?Three month subscription to the daily newsletter only
Since I value loyalty, I am honoring the old price of $1,997 until February 8 only. So if your subscription is about to run out, or if you have been sitting on the fence with a view to subscribing, now is the time to act.
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