Dear Fed, It's Not "Really Hard To Spot Bubbles"

Authored by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com, 

Here are some visual aids to help the Fed spot the housing bubble.

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari was the latest Fed official to claim in an essay – thus following in the time-honored footsteps of former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke – that “spotting bubbles is hard,” that the Fed cannot see them, and that if it could see them, it shouldn’t do anything to stop them because it had only “limited policy tools,” and because “the costs of making policy mistakes can be very high.”

But it’s OK to use these “limited policy tools” to inflate the greatest bubbles the world has ever seen and then preside over the damage they cause to the real economy before they even implode.

Neither Kashkari nor anyone else working at the Treasury Department in 2006 – when they were tasked by Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson to look for signs of trouble because they were “due for some form of crisis,” as he writes – could see any bubbles, not even the housing bubble although it was already beginning to deflate.

“It is really hard to spot bubbles with any confidence before they burst,” Kashkari writes, specifically naming stock prices and house prices. “Everyone can recognize a bubble after it bursts, and then many people convince themselves that they saw it on the way up.”

So here are some visual aids I put together for Kashkari and other Fed governors. It will help them “spot” the beautiful housing bubbles in the US – because bubbles really aren’t hard to recognize before they burst, if you want to recognize them.

What’s hard to predict accurately is when they’ll burst.

The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index for March was released today. It jumped 7.7% year-over-year, far outpacing growth in household incomes. This has been the case for years. In fact, real household incomes are almost back where they were in 2006 (/sarc). So what could go wrong?

At 198.26, the index surpassed the peak of Housing Bubble 1 in May 2006 by 11% (data via FRED, St. Louis Fed):

Since everyone called it a housing bubble after it had imploded, even Kashkari, today’s phase in the wondrous market is Housing Bubble 2, no?

The other day, Zillow reported that the national median home value in April rose 7.3% year-over-year to $198,000. It too beat the peak of Housing Bubble 1 ($196,600) set in April 2007. “It only took a decade,” Zillow said.

The National Association of Realtors reported that the median price in April hit $246,100, which is 6.8% above the peak of Housing Bubble 1 ($230,400 in June 2006).

The Case-Shiller Index appears to have more stature at the Fed than Zillow or the NAR. So we’ll use it here in our visual aids for the Fed.

It is based on a rolling-three month average; hence, today’s release was for January, February, and March data. So it’s always behind. Instead of median prices, it uses “home price sales pairs,” for example, a house sold in 2011 and then again in 2017. Its algorithms adjust this price movement over the years and numerous other factors into a data point that becomes part of the index. The index was set at 100 for January 2000. So an index of 200 means prices have doubled in the past 17 years.

Housing is local. Therefore housing bubbles are local. But if enough of them come together at the same time, the housing bubble takes on national proportions. This is the phase, as the above chart shows, that the US has now reached: In some metros, prices are still below the peak; in other metros, prices are setting new records. Overall, prices have surpassed those of Housing Bubble 1.

So dear Fed Governors, please have a look at some of the beautiful housing bubbles around the country. As you’ll see, they’re really not “hard to spot.”

This is the Boston metro, where the current home price index is now 9% above the peak of Housing Bubble 1 (Nov 2005):

Prices in the Seattle metro have surged even more, pushing the index 13% above the peak of Housing Bubble 1 (Jul 2007):

And here’s Denver’s house price bubble, where prices have soared a breath-taking 38% since the prior peak (Aug 2006):

I know that folks in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro felt left out during Housing Bubble 1. I heard many complaints about that at the time. They also missed out on much of the house price crash.

But they sure know how to make up for things. Home prices have now surged by 37% since the last peak in June 2007:

The Atlanta metro isn’t quite back to the peak of Housing Bubble 1, but it’s near-perfect V-shaped bubble recovery will soon hit it:

For the Portland house price bubble, the index is now 14% above the prior peak:

The Case-Shiller Index for San Francisco, which covers the five-county Bay Area, is now 7.7% higher than at the peak of Housing Bubble 1. However, in the city (and county) of San Francisco, the median home price has soared 47% above the prior peak (Nov. 2007). This is the chart for the five-county Bay Area house price bubble-crash-bubble:

The city of San Francisco is also the first city in this lineup where the median home price is now heading south on a year-over-year basis. During Housing Bust 1, the City was late to react. This time, it seems to be ahead of the pack.

And the Case-Shiller index for the condo price bubble in New York City has soared 17% above the prior peak (Feb. 2006), with prices nearly tripling since 2000:

The local housing bubbles across the US blew up with spectacular consequences, all in their own time frames. Plenty of local home price bubbles are now coming together to form a national home price bubble. So it’s really not hard to spot them, Mr. Kashkari.

Sure, there has been some inflation – 17% since 2006, based on the Fed’s favorite core PCE measure. Home prices in some of the cities have already reached a new peak even after inflation. And besides, it’s not a housing bubble until it reaches the inflation-adjusted point where the prior one took down the financial system? Is that the point when Housing Bubble 2 begins, instead of ends? If so, what would Housing Bust 2 look like? A vision too ugly to behold.

What’s hard to predict is the moment when housing bubbles begin to deflate. With monetary policies still in easing mode, with the federal government subsidizing the housing market in numerous ways, and with homes having become a securitized asset class for global speculators, house price bubbles can inflate – as we have seen – far more than a rational human mind might think possible. But we do know that they will deflate.

In San Francisco, the signs and numbers are already lining up. Read…  Will these 2 Forces Crush San Francisco’s Housing Bubble?

These Are The Best And Worst U.S. Cities To Own A House

In its latest, January, update of US home prices, Case-Shiller reported that the unadjusted 20 city composite index, rose at a 5.9% annual rate, up from 5.7% last month and setting a 31-month high. Perhaps even more notable is that in 17 of 20 metro areas, the pace of home appreciation over the past year was 5% or higher, or more than double the pace of core inflation. And with rents continuing to soar across the country, in many cases at a double digit clip, not to mention exploding healthcare costs, one wonders just what the BLS "measures" with its monthly CPI update.

In any case, for those lucky Americans who can afford to own a house instead of being stuck renting the New Normal American dream where they are prohibited from peddling fiction as their annual rent increases by 10% or more each year, here is the breakdown of the best and worst cities for home price appreciation in the U.S.

At the top, with annual price increases of 10% or more, we find the usual west coast (and thus closest to China) suspects: Seattle and Portland, followed close behind by Denver and Dallas, which appears to be enjoying the recent revival in shale. What is more surprising is that on the other end we find Cleveland, Washington and - of all places - New York, which was dead last with only 3.2% annual price appreciation.

Here are some more observations from Case Shiller on the top 3 cities:  Seattle, Portland, and Denver reported the highest year-over-year gains among the 20 cities over each of the last 12 months. In January, Seattle led the way with an 11.3% year-over-year price increase, followed by Portland with 9.7%, and Denver with a 9.2% increase. Twelve cities reported greater price increases in the year ending January 2017 versus the year ending December 2016. 

The below charts compare year-over-year returns for Seattle and Portland with different ranges of housing prices (tiers). Tier level analysis from 2011 to present for both Seattle and Portland’s year-over-year returns show housing prices in the high tier to be the most stable, while housing prices in the low tier are the most volatile