Juggling Dynamite

Living one hour north of Toronto, the COVID-19 home-buying frenzy is readily apparent.  Prices have appreciated more than 20% year over year, and “Coming Soon” signs turn into “Sold” within days.  Many properties don’t even make it to an MLS listing.

A realty lawyer friend told me yesterday that she is having the busiest transaction year of her 20-year practice.  I asked if she saw many all-cash deals, and she laughed, “no, all highly financed.”

As government bond yields have plunged with the economy year to date, mortgage rates (which are priced off the 30-year bond yield in the US and the 5-year in Canada) have fallen with them.  Central banks have been buying up mortgages to prop up prices (further suppress rates) and keep the game going.

Meanwhile, some 11 percent of mortgage borrowers from large Canadian banks — representing around $175 billion of mortgage debt — are not making payments. Up to 20% of mortgages under deferral are considered a higher risk of default. See Don’t be alarmed, but as much as 20% of Canadian mortgages are at a ‘higher risk of defaulting’:

We are most concerned about borrowers on a deferral program who are unemployed (and were receiving the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, or CERB) and borrowers on a deferral program who are employed but are earning less than what they earned pre-COVID,” wrote RBC analyst Darko Mihelic and senior associate Sanly Li in a report earlier this week.

“We are also concerned about borrowers not on a deferral program but are facing some form of financial hardship. If 20 per cent of mortgages under deferral eventually become delinquent in Canada, this equates to a mortgage delinquency rate of 2.3 per cent which is almost 4 times higher than the peak Canadian mortgage delinquency rate over the past 30 years…”

Simultaneously, appraisers are running ragged with increased pressure to rubber-stamp prices so that ‘deals’ and refinancings can close.  This is all classic debt and price bubble indicia.

Similar patterns are playing out south of the border where the U.S. Mortgage Bankers Association’s refinancing index soared in March to its highest level since 2012 and remains more than 40% above its year-ago level despite some 13 million Americans being out of work and relying on weekly jobless benefits from the government.

As Danielle DiMartino-Booth explains in Mortgage-Refinancing Boom is too automated, all this activity is further aided by automated appraisal waivers, which replace human appraisers with a computer-generated model that draws values from the latest comparables where the mortgage is being refinanced.

As in the 2005-06 US housing bubble, automated lending assessments in a highly levered and quickly rising price environment are ripe for disaster.  Danielle discussed these issues in the podcast below, with many cross-over points to conditions in Canada today.

Phil welcomes Danielle DiMartino Booth to the show! Danielle breaks down the economic dangers of “Appraisal Waivers” at FHA and the GSE. Here is a direct video link.

America has become the gold standard for abuse of trust but the model is evident all over the world.

It’s one of the biggest conflicts of interest and we act like it doesn’t exist. Why do we allow people to go from Wall Street, to Washington, back to Wall Street again? Here is a direct video link.

The Solutions Project at Stanford University has been pointing out for years now that improving energy efficiency and powering the grid with electricity from wind, water, and the sun dramatically reduces overall energy use.   In their blueprint for Canada, the reduction in demand is an estimated 63% below current levels.

Already, wind and solar power are the cheapest forms of new electricity in most of the world today, and analysis by BloombergNEF predicts that within five years, it will be more expensive to operate existing coal or natural gas power plants than to build new solar or wind farms.

Last week, the International Energy Agency acknowledged that solar is starting to take over from coal as the cheapest form of electricity.

This is logical because, in power generation, coal is also one of the most inefficient ways to make electricity, with 65% of energy lost in burning the fuel.  The energy lost in generating electricity from wind is almost zero.

So, as the world moves to renewables, less and less energy is needed to generate the same amount of electricity, reshaping many industries. One case in point:  a third of the cargo miles hauled by shippers comes from moving fossil fuels worldwide, and 70% of that portion is oil, BNEF estimates.

As renewables take market share from oil, gas and coal, the shipping companies that deliver those fuels and keep it fed with machinery and pipelines will lose business.

On Monday, The United Arab Emirates–The world’s seventh-largest oil producer–announced that cheap solar is causing them to revise their energy strategy to produce solar and green hydrogen–made without carbon emissions. 

All of this is massively impactful, particularly since a large part of the illness and medical costs today are directly related to air pollution from burning fossil fuels.  See One in three strokes caused by air pollution for just one example.

As Canada and the world look for productive investments that will stimulate the economy and jobs while permantently reducing costs and improving life quality, renewable energy, retrofitting buildings, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and recycling metals are obvious and shovel ready:

Driving an electric vehicle uses as much as three times less energy than a conventional combustion engine, BNEF said. Switching to heat pumps instead of traditional gas boilers would make warming buildings far more efficient by several multiples, according to the BNEF findings.

It estimates that melting down old steel and reforming it is five times more energy efficient than making the material from scratch.