Danny Salas

Chico, CA Interest Rates Market Report – Economic Influences – Sept 23rd, 2008

Unprecedented Times

I feel as though I have been writing about “unprecedented times” for years now.  It was about a year ago that the markets started to get scared and loans over $417,000 became very difficult to place.  Last week I also mentioned how frightening the outlook for insurance giant AIG was, as they tried to raise capital to avoid bankruptcy.  Well, they got a two year $85 Billion loan from the Federal Reserve for a 79.9% ownership in the company’s stock.  This will enable them to have some time to sell off some of their $1 Trillion in assets to pay the loan off.  Unprecedented!

Unprecedented Printing

Initial Jobless Claims rose to 455,000, but again, in line with expectations.  Another Fed move this past week was the expansion of funds that the Federal Reserve swaps between other countries by $180 Billion.  Some of these moves have just not been tested.  If we start running out of funds, and we just have to print more money, we could see inflation skyrocket.  Let’s hope we’re not headed in that direction.  Not only is this unprecedented, but the later would be unprecedented, as well.

Put Your Money Into…Well, Real Estate

Here’s something else to think about.  With IndyMac closing their doors, AIG’s bailout, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, the Fannie-Freddie take over’s.  Washington Mutual running into trouble, etc.  Where’s a good place to put your money?  Under the mattress?  No tax benefits.  Real Estate keeps looking better and better.  With values so low and rates still nice, it’s truly a wonderful time to get out and look into buying.

Unprecedented Guaranties

So, we also had a virtual “run on the bank” this past week.  What happened was that the Net Asset Value (NAV) of some money market accounts dropped to below $1.  So…if you invested a dollar into the fund, you’d expect to get a dollar plus interest back.  Once we had an NAV below that, $180 Billion was taken out of the market by investors.  The Fed had to step in again, and rescue the industry indicating that they would guarantee some money market funds.  Unprecedented.  Some investors can be unbelievably greedy.  There’s a process known as “short selling.”  Basically, an investor can borrow a stock at a certain price, bet that that price will go down, and when it does, pocket the difference.  There’s an illegal process minus the initial borrowing the stock step.  It’s called “naked” short selling.  This hurts stock values exponentially, as you can imagine, and the SEC had to step in and put a holt to any short selling, to put a stop to this ridiculously hurtful criminal activity.

So, a lot of this unprecedented activity may have caused interest rates to move up this past week, however, at least we still have interest rates, the ability to buy real estate, and put our money into something that will eventually give us a nice gain…real estate.  More news this week was the fact that Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Bank (a Japanese Bank) is interested in purchasing up to a 20% ownership interest in Morgan Stanley.  With Oil now over $100 a barrel again we’ll have to watch and see how this all pans out.  Hopefully, we can keep a lid on inflation but with this volatile market, you’d better have a finger on the lock button.  Until next week…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Chico Home Loans, Home Buying, Interest Rates, Weekly Market Report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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