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Scratch one more bullish thesis for the housing recovery, and the economic recovery in general.

Over the past several years, optimists had often cited household formation as a key component of pent up demand for home purchases. Recall that last August, the WSJ noted that in a report on the status of families, “the Census Bureau said 13.6% of Americans ages 25 to 34 were living with their parents in 2012, up slightly from 13.4% in 2011. Though the trend began before the recession, it accelerated sharply during the downturn. In the early 2000s, about 10% of people in this age group lived at home.” It concluded, quite logically, that “the share of young adults living with their parents edged up last year despite improvements in the economy—a sign that the effects of the recession are lingering.”

Of course, the “improvements in the economy” were once again confused with the ongoing Fed- and corporate buyback-driven surge in the stock market, which has since been refuted to have any relationship to underlying economic conditions, and instead is merely the key factor leading to record class disparity – a very heated topic among both politicians and economists in recent months.

But going back to the topic of Americans living with their parents, today Gallup reported that 14% percent of adults between the ages of 24 and 34 – those in the post-college years when most young adults are trying to establish independence — report living at home with their parents. By contrast, roughly half of 18- to 23-year-olds, many of whom are still finishing their education, are currently living at home.

While this is an approximation of the Census Bureau’s own results which should be released in a few months, a 14% print in the critical 24-34 age group means that the percentage of college grads (or those otherwise falling into this age group even if uneducated) living in their parents basement has hit a fresh all time high.

As a reminder, this was the most recent visual update from the WSJ as of last year:

 

Here is what Gallup had to say about this distrubing result:

An important milestone in adulthood is establishing independence from one’s parents, including finding a job, a place to live and, for most, a spouse or partner, and starting one’s own family. However, there are potential roadblocks on the path to independence that may force young adults to live with their parents longer, including a weak job market, the high cost of living, significant college debt, and helping care for an elderly or disabled parent.

 

A statistical model that takes into account a variety of demographic characteristics indicates that three situational factors are most likely to distinguish the group of 24- to 34-year-olds living at home from their peers:

•     They are much less likely to be married.
•     They are less likely to be working full time and more likely to be unemployed or underemployed.
•     They are less likely to have graduated from college.

Being married may better explain why young adults move out of their parents’ home than why single adults live at home. For those living at home, their situation may have more to do with their job or income status than their marital status. Being single, however, may make living with parents a more feasible option for young adults than it would be if they were married.

 

Employment status ranks as the second-most-important predictor of young adults’ living situation once they are beyond college age. Specifically, 67% of those living on their own are employed full time, compared with 50% of those living with their parents.

 

 

The unemployment rate, as calculated by Gallup, among those in the workforce is twice as high for post-college-aged adults living with their parents as it is for their counterparts who are not living with their parents, 14.6% vs. 7.1%.

 

The underemployment rate, which combines the percentage unemployed with the percentage working part time but wanting full-time work, is 32.8% among those living at home and 15.4% among those living on their own. In other words, among young adults who live with their parents and are working or actively looking for work, nearly one in three are in a substandard employment situation.

The employment observations are not surprising: after all, one would never voluntarily live with their parents into their thirties, unless one was pathologically lazy and unwilling to branch out on their own of course, if the labor situtation in the economy permitted getting a job which allowed one to at least afford rent.

Neither is it surprising that college grads, saddled with a record amounts of student debt, now well over $1 trillion, or more than the total US credit card debt outstanding, is also crushing college graduate confidence about being able to be cash flow positive once they seek to start lives on their own with the associated cash needs.

However, the marriage observation is more disturbing, and goes to the argument of incremental household formation: namely there is none. In other words, that missing link that at least superficially would provide for some semblance of justification for the rise in house prices that had nothing to do with investor demand and offshore illicit cash laundry using US real estate, is gone.

And while this conforms with Gallup’s own implications of these data, there is more bad news:

A 2012 report from Ohio State University sociologists showed that it is increasingly common for young adults to live at home with their parents. The high costs of housing and a relatively weak job market are key factors that may force, or encourage, young adults to stay at home.… The biggest impetus for leaving home seems to be marriage, easily the strongest predictor of one’s living arrangement among those between the ages of 24 and 34. This indicates that if the marriage rate increases in the future, the percentage living with their parents may decline. Earlier Gallup research suggests that most unmarried Americans do have a goal of getting married someday.

 

Also, those who have secured full-time employment or have earned college degrees are more likely to have gotten a place of their own to live. An improving job market and economy should lead to a decrease in the percentage of young adults living with their parents.

To sum it up: a record number of college grads are optin not to start a household and instead live with their parents, and just as relevant:

“An improving job market and economy should lead to a decrease in the percentage of young adults living with their parents.“

Considering that the percentage of young adults living with their parents is now an all time high, what does that say about the true state of the job market?

He knows the answer.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1mh1xiO Tyler Durden

Scratch one more bullish thesis for the housing recovery, and the economic recovery in general.

Over the past several years, optimists had often cited household formation as a key component of pent up demand for home purchases. Recall that last August, the WSJ noted that in a report on the status of families, “the Census Bureau said 13.6% of Americans ages 25 to 34 were living with their parents in 2012, up slightly from 13.4% in 2011. Though the trend began before the recession, it accelerated sharply during the downturn. In the early 2000s, about 10% of people in this age group lived at home.” It concluded, quite logically, that “the share of young adults living with their parents edged up last year despite improvements in the economy—a sign that the effects of the recession are lingering.”

Of course, the “improvements in the economy” were once again confused with the ongoing Fed- and corporate buyback-driven surge in the stock market, which has since been refuted to have any relationship to underlying economic conditions, and instead is merely the key factor leading to record class disparity – a very heated topic among both politicians and economists in recent months.

But going back to the topic of Americans living with their parents, today Gallup reported that 14% percent of adults between the ages of 24 and 34 – those in the post-college years when most young adults are trying to establish independence — report living at home with their parents. By contrast, roughly half of 18- to 23-year-olds, many of whom are still finishing their education, are currently living at home.

While this is an approximation of the Census Bureau’s own results which should be released in a few months, a 14% print in the critical 24-34 age group means that the percentage of college grads (or those otherwise falling into this age group even if uneducated) living in their parents basement has hit a fresh all time high.

As a reminder, this was the most recent visual update from the WSJ as of last year:

 

Here is what Gallup had to say about this distrubing result:

An important milestone in adulthood is establishing independence from one’s parents, including finding a job, a place to live and, for most, a spouse or partner, and starting one’s own family. However, there are potential roadblocks on the path to independence that may force young adults to live with their parents longer, including a weak job market, the high cost of living, significant college debt, and helping care for an elderly or disabled parent.

 

A statistical model that takes into account a variety of demographic characteristics indicates that three situational factors are most likely to distinguish the group of 24- to 34-year-olds living at home from their peers:

•     They are much less likely to be married.
•     They are less likely to be working full time and more likely to be unemployed or underemployed.
•     They are less likely to have graduated from college.

Being married may better explain why young adults move out of their parents’ home than why single adults live at home. For those living at home, their situation may have more to do with their job or income status than their marital status. Being single, however, may make living with parents a more feasible option for young adults than it would be if they were married.

 

Employment status ranks as the second-most-important predictor of young adults’ living situation once they are beyond college age. Specifically, 67% of those living on their own are employed full time, compared with 50% of those living with their parents.

 

 

The unemployment rate, as calculated by Gallup, among those in the workforce is twice as high for post-college-aged adults living with their parents as it is for their counterparts who are not living with their parents, 14.6% vs. 7.1%.

 

The underemployment rate, which combines the percentage unemployed with the percentage working part time but wanting full-time work, is 32.8% among those living at home and 15.4% among those living on their own. In other words, among young adults who live with their parents and are working or actively looking for work, nearly one in three are in a substandard employment situation.

The employment observations are not surprising: after all, one would never voluntarily live with their parents into their thirties, unless one was pathologically lazy and unwilling to branch out on their own of course, if the labor situtation in the economy permitted getting a job which allowed one to at least afford rent.

Neither is it surprising that college grads, saddled with a record amounts of student debt, now well over $1 trillion, or more than the total US credit card debt outstanding, is also crushing college graduate confidence about being able to be cash flow positive once they seek to start lives on their own with the associated cash needs.

However, the marriage observation is more disturbing, and goes to the argument of incremental household formation: namely there is none. In other words, that missing link that at least superficially would provide for some semblance of justification for the rise in house prices that had nothing to do with investor demand and offshore illicit cash laundry using US real estate, is gone.

And while this conforms with Gallup’s own implications of these data, there is more bad news:

A 2012 report from Ohio State University sociologists showed that it is increasingly common for young adults to live at home with their parents. The high costs of housing and a relatively weak job market are key factors that may force, or encourage, young adults to stay at home.… The biggest impetus for leaving home seems to be marriage, easily the strongest predictor of one’s living arrangement among those between the ages of 24 and 34. This indicates that if the marriage rate increases in the future, the percentage living with their parents may decline. Earlier Gallup research suggests that most unmarried Americans do have a goal of getting married someday.

 

Also, those who have secured full-time employment or have earned college degrees are more likely to have gotten a place of their own to live. An improving job market and economy should lead to a decrease in the percentage of young adults living with their parents.

To sum it up: a record number of college grads are optin not to start a household and instead live with their parents, and just as relevant:

“An improving job market and economy should lead to a decrease in the percentage of young adults living with their parents.“

Considering that the percentage of young adults living with their parents is now an all time high, what does that say about the true state of the job market?

He knows the answer.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1mh1xiO Tyler Durden

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

When it comes to complex systems and unintended consequences, the key phrase is "be careful what you wish for."

A lot of people are remarkably certain that their understanding of how systems will respond in the future is correct. Alan Greenspan was certain there was no housing bubble in 2007, for example (or he did a great job acting certain).

Some are certain the U.S. stock market is going to crash this year, while others are equally certain that stocks will continue lofting higher on central bank tailwinds.

Being wrong about the way systems responded in the past doesn't seem to deter people from being certain about the future. Those who were certain there was no bubble in 2007-8 were wrong, and those (myself included) who saw the can being kicked down the road were wrong in not anticipating that global stocks would not just recover their pre-crash heights but go on to new nominal highs, based on the excellence of the can-kicking skills of central states and banks.

Complex systems don't act in the linear way our minds tend to work. Humans are built to distill a chaotic array of sensory data into a narrative that simplifies decision-making and risk assessment (for example, "us good, them bad"). We prefer our chains of causality to have a few big links we can follow without difficulty. We find systems with multitudes of ambiguous inputs tiresome and so we invent ideologies ("us good, them bad") and very occasionally, elegant mathematical statements that reduce the chaos of data to predictable causal chains.

We are built to cling very stubbornly to certainty once we reach a conclusion, because ambiguity and having to constantly change our assessments of inputs and causality are big drains on our energy and mental capabilities. It's "cheaper" in terms of energy and anxiety to just stick with the story we grew up with or the one we chose after a bit of looking at what our mates think/believe/claim is true.

Certainty has another advantage: it's more persuasive than hedged hesitancy. Leadership tends to fall to those without hesitation, the bold ones with the powerful rhetoric of certainty, confidence and optimism. We don't want the narrative muddled with hedges–maybe "them" are not necessarily evil, dangerous enemies, etc.–and so we shout down, ridicule or ignore those who are circumspect about how systems will respond in the future.

Politicians have of course mastered the art of distilling narratives to the desired state of certainty, confidence and optimism, and in repeating the story often enough that mere repetition lends it credence.

The problem is simplistic, linear narratives don't map complex systems. All sorts of unexpected and unintended things happen in complex systems when you change the inputs and try to control the output.

We have a name for systems where the inputs are all tightly controlled to yield a simplistic desired output: they're called monocultures, and monocultures are exquisitely vulnerable to unintended consequences and "leaks" from the outside world. Though monocultures look robust, they are actually quite fragile, because the natural feedbacks and redundancies of natural systems have been eradicated to make the desired yield the primary output.

This is why politicians cannot deal with either complex systems or unintended consequences. As a result, they have to act as if complex systems and unintended consequences don't exist.

Thus Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen sticks to the simplistic narrative that the economy is flourishing and so the Fed can "taper" its money-creation/asset-buying operation, but she is careful not to mention the unintended consequences of the Fed's monoculture: to mention just one, that since the Federal deficits are shrinking rapidly, if the Fed didn't reduce its $1 trillion a year program, it would soon end up owning the entire Treasury market.

Since there could be unintended consequences of that, the Fed chair doesn't mention the topic.

The narrative that printing money destroys the currency being printed is appealing on many levels. It makes sense, and history is replete with examples of just this narrative.

But the system isn't quite as linear as we might wish. If $10 trillion in dollar-denominated value is wiped out in write-downs triggered by marking phantom assets to market, and $1 trillion is printed, the system still lost $9 trillion. As correspondent David C. observed:

Destruction of dollar *value* means that surviving dollars become more *valuable.*

 

If stocks, bond, real estate, Beanie Babies, etc. decline in VALUE, it means they are worth fewer dollars-per-unit. This means that dollars are, by definition, rising in value per unit, and this absolutely confounds those who believe the next big thing is inflation/hyperinflation.

 

They simply can't see that if people become poorer (as their stocks, bonds, homes, etc. fall in value), and especially if the banks begin to fail in a wave too large to bail and take deposits into monetary nothingness, the most likely outcome is that those who retain access to dollars will see their dollars rises dramatically in purchasing power, the exact opposite of the last 82 years of experience.

 

I've encountered few people who can accept this paradoxical analysis.

 

Our fully fiat-money system enabled the embrace of illusions so pervasive that people simply can't see how much "value" today rests on cross-linked IOU's. When those IOU-dollars begin to evaporate in earnest, desperation for the underlying "asset" (a dollar, as perverse as that seems given that the dollar is backed by nothing and preceded by no production of value) should skyrocket."

As for China launching a gold-backed currency that acts as the reserve currency–it isn't quite as simple and tidy as it appears. Triffin's Paradox is based on a peculiar characteristic of a reserve currency: it serves both a domestic market and a global market, and the two have different dynamics.

A reserve currency must be available in size in global markets, which means the issuing nation must export its currency in size so others have enough of it to fill their reserves and grease their trade exchanges. The issuing nation can simply helicopter drop the equivalent of several trillion dollars of currency into other nations (something that hasn't been tried), or it has to run trade deficits, i.e. it buys more goods and services from other nations than it exports to them, and so it exports its currency to other nations to use as a reserve currency.

This means nations that run enormous trade surpluses can't issue a reserve currency, because they're not exporting currency, they're importing other nations' currency and having to "sterilize" it into their own domestic economy or buy something denominated in the imported currency.

There's another paradox. Let's say China became a net importer on a grand enough scale to issue a reserve currency. The one example we have of a nation issuing gold-backed currency that was also the reserve currency based on that nation running large trade deficits is the U.S. in the late 1960s. What happens in this circumstance is those holding the gold-backed currency decide to trade the currency for gold, and the issuing nation soon runs out of gold.

This sets up a paradox: net exporting nations cannot issue a reserve currency, fiat or gold-backed, for the simple reason they are importing currency, not exporting it for others to use as a reserve currency.

Any nation that does run a trade deficit large enough to enable a reserve currency and backs that currency with gold will see its gold reserves vanish as holders of their currency trade its currency for gold.

I have addressed a few of the complexities of reserve currencies and trade before:

The Impossibility of China Issuing a Reserve Currency (October 14, 2013)

Why the Shrinking Trade Deficit Will Choke U.S. Corporate Profits (August 8, 2013)

Understanding the "Exorbitant Privilege" of the U.S. Dollar (November 19, 2012)

When it comes to complex systems and unintended consequences, the key phrase is "be careful what you wish for."

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1dtN79h Tyler Durden

CBOE’s short-term VIX product (which tracks the implied volatility in stock options for a 9-day maturity) dropped to its lowest since inception this morning at 10.16%. The spread to the more ‘usual’ maturity VIX index is over 3.3 vols which isthe most inverted on record and thus the most short-term complacent equity investors have been since the lows in 2009. The exuberance of the last few days is equally and oppositely matched by the sheer lack of enthusiasm in volumes. S&P futures volume is 33% below recent averages today and as the chart below shows, it is clear where the volume in this “market” remains.

 

Short-term VIX drops to its lowest on record – and complacency is at its highest since the lows in 2009

 

Volume for the entire ramp has been dramatically below average and today’s is 33% below average…

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1jFEf4a Tyler Durden

Chinese capital markets are quietly turmoiling as debt issues are delayed and demand for “Trust” products – the shadow-banking-system’s wealth management ‘investments’ – is tumbling. As Nikkei reports, since January, 9 companies have postponed or canceled issuance plans (around $1 billion) and is most pronounced in privately-owned companies (who lack an implicit government guarantee). This, of course, is exactly what the PBOC wanted (to instill some fear into these high-yield investors – demand – and thus slow the supply of credit to the riskiest over-capacity compenies) but as non-performing loans in China surge to post-crisis highs, fear remains prescient that they will be unable to “contain” the problem once real defaults begin (as opposed to ‘delays of payment’ that we have seen so far).

 

 

Via Bloomberg,

Chinese banks’ bad loans increased for the ninth straight quarter to the highest level since the 2008 financial crisis, highlighting pressures on asset quality and profit growth as the world’s second-largest economy slows.

 

Non-performing loans rose by 28.5 billion yuan ($4.7 billion) in the last quarter of 2013 to 592.1 billion yuan, the highest since September 2008, the China Banking Regulatory Commission said in a statement on its website yesterday.

 

…

 

Chinese banks are struggling to keep soured loans in check and extend earnings growth as the slowing economy and government efforts to curb shadow financing make it harder for borrowers to repay debt.

 

“China’s economic growth turned downward with the new leadership switching policy focus to reform and risk management from emphasizing stable expansion,” said Wang Yichuan, a Wuhan-based analyst at Changjiang Securities Co. “Naturally the bad loans will increase along with the change. We expect the deterioration to continue for two more years.”

 

…

 

Chinese banks added 89 trillion yuan of assets, mostly through loans, in the past five years, equivalent to the entire U.S. banking industry’s, CBRC data show. By comparison, U.S. commercial banks held $14.6 trillion of assets at the end of September, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

 

Investors are increasingly concerned that China’s investment through borrowing since 2008 may trigger a financial crisis

Via Nikkei,

Concerns over potential defaults on high-yield financial products are making Chinese companies put some debt issues on hold due to wary investors, as well as posing a potential new risk to the global economy.

 

Since January, nine companies have postponed or canceled issuance plans for a total of 5.75 billion yuan ($948.24 million) in bonds and commercial paper, equivalent to about 2% of the debt issued over the period.

 

This is most pronounced among privately operated companies, whose lack of government backing has meant less interest from potential investors than hoped.

 

Demand has been dulled by worries over defaults on so-called wealth management products, a feature of China’s shadow banking system.

 

Broader credit risks have driven interest rates up, and the gap between corporate debt and more-creditworthy government bonds is widening. Average yields on AA-rated seven-year corporate bonds reached 8.44% in mid-January.

 

So even if companies offer bonds, they will be unable to raise money if they cannot pay these higher rates.

 

…

“There’s a possibility that the Chinese government will step in to keep the negative impact from spreading,” says Hiromichi Tamura, chief strategist at Nomura Securities, “but if these types of repayment delays continue, they could trigger a global stock market downturn.”

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1c709Zp Tyler Durden