The twin crashes in US commercial real estate and the US bond market have collided with $9 trillion uninsured deposits in the American banking system. Such deposits can vanish in an afternoon in the cyber age.
Fallout from the Silicon Valley Bank collapse has directed attention to a $620 billion ticking time bomb in the banking system that has the potential to spell doom for the financial system.
Some tech industry founders got emails from their venture-capital investors on Thursday urging them to move their money out of Silicon Valley Bank, according to people familiar with the matter, adding pressure to the already troubled firm.
On Friday, residential real estate brokerage firm Redfin released new data on home prices, showing that prices fell 0.6 percent in February, year over year. According to Redfin’s numbers, this was the first time that home prices actually fell since 2012.
The Fed’s next crisis is already brewing. Unlike 2008, where “subprime mortgages” froze counter-party trading in the credit markets as Lehman Brothers failed, in 2022, it might just be the $27 Trillion Treasury market.
Investors globally are wondering – after CPI sent the ‘peak inflation’ narrative to the bottom of the ocean and Powell’s Jackson Hole speech (and this FOMC statement and press conference) crushed the ‘Fed Pivot’ narrative – what other potential indicators/signals (aside from a multi-month slowdown in inflation of course) could prompt Powell and his pals to back off their uber-hawkishness?
Well, that should have been a wake-up call. The 30-year mortgage rate soared by 24 basis points recently to 6.18%. So the latter now stands at well more than double the 2.65% rate which prevailed just 18 months ago in January 2021, and at the highest level since the tail end of the Great Financial Crisis in 2009.
All these curveballs will further fragment the housing market. Oh for the good old days of a nice, clean housing bubble and bust as in 2004-2011: subprime lending expanded the pool of buyers …
Signs of trouble continue to show up in the world’s largest, most liquid government-securities market as government bonds logged their worst week in years and the U.S. central bank’s interest rate hiking cycle gets under way.
The U.S. bond market reeled further on Tuesday, extending Monday’s declines after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s aggressive rate hike comments drove yields on short-dated Treasuries to one of their biggest daily jumps of the past decade.