News
10/01/2016
UK house prices ‘to crash’ as global asset prices unravel
House prices have broken free from reality and defied gravity for far too long, but they are an asset like anything else, and there are six clear reasons a nasty correction looms in the coming year .
The next asset to fall was share prices. There was a delay of about 12 months because even though shares are also traded daily, their value depends on the profits of the company, and the impact of the commodity collapse took about a year to feed through.
Ticking time-bomb
There is a delayed effect on property prices because the market is so inefficient.
Transactions can take up to three months to complete and the property itself may have to languish on the market for even longer. The prices are also dictated by estate agents, who have an interest in inflating them to raise fees. The number of transactions is also still about 40pc below that of 2006 and 2007, which allows prices to stray from the fundamentals for a longer period.
It is true that Britain is suffering from a housing shortage, which drove UK house prices to a record high of an average of £208,286 in December, but like all asset prices they are on borrowed time. The fundamentals of demand and supply in UK housing will undergo a huge shift in the year ahead.
Death of buy-to-let
A large portion of the demand for UK housing will fall away as the benefits of buy-to-let have effectively been killed off in recent budgets.
George Osborne slapped a huge tax increase on buy-to-let in the summer Budget, which will take effect from 2017 onwards. The removal of mortgage interest relief was the first stage and was followed by hiking stamp duty four months later in the November review.
This could prove a double whammy on the housing market, turning potential buyers into sellers, and flooding the market with additional supply. A survey of landlords suggested 200,000 plan to exit the sector. The rapid growth of buy-to-let during the past decade looks set to be slammed into reverse.
The UK property market has been a highly attractive place for wealthy individuals across the world to protect their savings. However, many of the biggest buyers have been forced out of the market.
Chinese buyers have been locked out by state controls which mean each person is restricted from taking more than $50,000 (£34,000) a year out of the country. The stock market collapse will also destroy wealth.
The Russians have also had their wings clipped as the country’s economy goes into freefall. The Russian ruble has collapsed in value by 50pc against the pound during the 18 months.
The oligarchs have also seen their wealth evaporate as their holdings in mining and oil companies slump in value.
The petrodollars from Saudi Arabia have steadily flowed into UK property for more than a decade, but the Gulf nation’s investors are now pulling those funds out at a rapid rate to support the economy at home.
A fire-sale of assets is taking place to plug the largest recorded budget deficit in history. The shares will go first followed by the homes.
Interest rates have been held at emergency lows in the UK and US for around six years. The US has moved first, with rates rising to around 0.5pc last month. UK rate rises are expected to follow shortly after.
The impact on the cost of mortgages will be dramatic. An entire generation of homebuyers don’t know what an interest rate is. In the US following the December rate rise the cost of mortgages has soared by 50pc. The current market expectation is for the interest rate to rise four more time to about 1.5pc by the end of the year, or some 300pc higher than its current level.
Drowning in debt
UK households are simply drowning in about £40bn of debt according to the latest figures from the Office of Budget Responsibiliity. When budgeting is this finely balanced , it doesn’t take much to tip it over the edge.
The UK economy is weighted towards financial services and a collapse in markets could cause a painful correction.
Britain’s housing market has defied gravity and logic for far too long. Government intervention by way of cheap help-to-buy loans allowed it one last hurrah, but the limits of state intervention are being brutally exposed in China, the UK is no different.
Global asset price crash
Asset prices around the world soared as central bankers embarked on the greatest money printing experiment in history. While much of that money flowed into the stock market, a great deal also found its way into house prices. What we are now witnessing on trading screens around the world is the unwinding of the era of monetary excess, and house prices will not escape the fallout.
The end of easy money began when the US stopped its third quantitative easing programme in October 2014. That date marks the point the US balance sheet, or amount of money in the system, stopped rising, having soared from $800bn in 2008 to more than $4 trillion.
Without an ever-increasing supply of money the world economy is now slowing sharply.
The first assets to be impacted by the downturn were commodities. The price of things such as oil are set daily in one of the largest and most highly traded markets across the world and as a result it is highly sensitive to any changes in demand and supply. Admittedly there are also supply-side factors impacting the oil price, but the weak demand from a slump is still a major factor.
10/01/2016
RBS cries ‘sell everything’ as deflationary crisis nears
Clients told to seek safety of Bunds and Treasuries. ‘This is about return of capital, not return on capital. In a crowded hall, exit doors are small’
RBS has advised clients to brace for a “cataclysmic year” and a global deflationary crisis, warning that major stock markets could fall by a fifth and oil may plummet to $16 a barrel.
The bank’s credit team said markets are flashing stress alerts akin to the turbulent months before the Lehman crisis in 2008. “Sell everything except high quality bonds. This is about return of capital, not return on capital. In a crowded hall, exit doors are small,” it said in a client note.
Andrew Roberts, the bank’s research chief for European economics and rates, said that global trade and loans are contracting, a nasty cocktail for corporate balance sheets and equity earnings. This is particularly ominous given that global debt ratios have reached record highs.
“China has set off a major correction and it is going to snowball. Equities and credit have become very dangerous, and we have hardly even begun to retrace the ‘Goldlocks love-in’ of the last two years,” he said.
Mr Roberts expects Wall Street and European stocks to fall by 10pc to 20pc, with even an deeper slide for the FTSE 100 given its high weighting of energy and commodities companies. “London is vulnerable to a negative shock. All these people who are ‘long’ oil and mining companies thinking that the dividends are safe are going to discover that they’re not at all safe,” he said.
Brent oil prices will continue to slide after breaking through a key technical level at $34.40, RBS claimed, with a “bear flag” and “Fibonacci” signals pointing to a floor of $16, a level last seen after the East Asia crisis in 1999. The bank said a paralysed OPEC seems incapable of responding to a deepening slowdown in Asia, now the swing region for global oil demand.
Morgan Stanley has also slashed its oil forecast, warning that Brent could fall to $20 if the US dollar keeps rising. It argued that oil is intensely leveraged to any move in the dollar and is now playing second fiddle to currency effects
RBS forecast that yields on 10-year German Bunds would fall time to an all-time low of 0.16pc in a flight to safety, and may break zero as deflationary forces tighten their grip. The European Central Bank’s policy rate will fall to -0.7pc.
US Treasuries will fall to rock-bottom levels in sympathy, hammering hedge funds that have shorted US bonds in a very crowded “reflation trade”.
RBS first issued its grim warnings for the global economy in November but events have moved even faster than feared. It estimates that the US economy slowed to a growth rate of 0.5pc in the fourth quarter, and accuses the US Federal Reserve of “playing with fire” by raising rates into the teeth of the storm. “There has already been severe monetary tightening in the US from the rising dollar,” it said.
It is unusual for the Fed to tighten when the ISM manufacturing index is below the boom-bust line of 50. It is even more surprising to do so after nominal GDP growth has fallen to 3pc and has been trending down since early 2014.
RBS said the epicentre of global stress is China, where debt-driven expansion has reached saturation. The country now faces a surge in capital flight and needs a “dramatically lower” currency. In their view, this next leg of the rolling global drama is likely to play out fast and furiously.
“We are deeply sceptical of the consensus that the authorities can ‘buy time’ by their heavy intervention in cutting reserve ratio requirements (RRR), rate cuts and easing in fiscal policy,” it said.
Mr Roberts said the tightening cycle by the Anglo-Saxon central banks is already over. There will be no rate rises by the Bank of England before the downturn hits, and the next action by the Fed may be a humiliating volte-face and a rate cut.
RBS is not alone in fearing trouble. UBS issued what it called a “significant change” to its house view late last week, saying policy chaos in China had unsettled markets. It cut exposure to equities from overweight to neutral on a “six-month tactical horizon”. It went underweight emerging markets.
UBS said it is a precautionary move, insisting that the current global credit cycle has not yet peaked. Low oil prices should ultimately feed through to higher consumer spending and boost growth.
Larry Summers, the former US Treasury Secretary, said it would be a mistake to dismiss the current financial squall as froth. Markets often sense a gathering storm when policy-makers are still asleep at the wheel. He has long argued that the world economy is so far out of kilter that it takes permanent financial bubbles to keep growth going, an inherently unstable structure.
Yet there is something strange about the latest events. Austerity is finally over in Europe and fiscal policy in the US this year will be expansionary.
China’s slowdown hit its bottom in June and a fitful recovery has been building, driven by extra budget spending and credit growth. While the composite PMI indicator for manufacturing and services slipped back last month, it is still higher in the summer.
David Owen, from Jefferies, said there is a “weird disconnect” between the economic fundamentals and the market malaise.
“There is no evidence of anything rolling over in the US. Europe is clearly recovering and the M3 money supply in Germany is growing at almost 10pc, which normally means stronger activity,” he said.
Bank of America said panic selling had triggered its “contrarian buy signal”, since 88pc of global equity indexes are now trading below their 200-day and 50-day moving averages. The “Bull & Bear” index is at an ultra-negative level of 1.3.
It said a “big tradable multi-week rally awaits” but requires catalysts, above all a stabilisation of the Chinese yuan and oil, better PMI data and a halt to the rising dollar.
The risk is that this market storm drags on long enough to hit investment, regardless of what the economic data should imply. At the end of the day, market psychology can itself become an economic “fundamental”.
Pessimists warn that unless there is a batch of irrefutably good data from China over the next two or three months, the sell-off could become self-fulfilling and quickly metamorphose into the next global crisis.