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Once in a Century: Real Estate Financing and the Deal That Wasn't
"Once in a lifetime." That phrase usually applies to big happenings in a person's life, such as winning a Nobel Prize or the state lottery. Bob Prechter told a group of Georgia legislators that society has now witnessed something that happens once a century. It is the method of financing that mortgage companies and Wall Street cooked up to sell more and more real estate during the past decade. As he points out in this excerpt from his speech to the legislators, "it is very unlikely that we will be returning to this type of financing anytime soon." In the meantime, what does it mean that real estate, stocks and commodities are all moving together now?
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Excerpted from Bob Prechter's Elliott Wave Theorist, published December 19, 2008.
First presented as an address to the Joint Economic Committee of the House and Senate of the State of Georgia on December 10, 2008.
One of the ways that a lot of this real estate debt was financed is very unusual historically, and that is through asset-backed securities. They really came into their own in the decade of the 2000s up until 2007. A lot of people feel that such investment was normal, but it wasn’t. For years and years, housing was built essentially to provide a home for people; in other words, it was a consumption item. But in the 2000s it turned into an investment item for people other than bankers. Wall Street packaged mortgage loans and began selling them as investments to people who didn’t look very hard at what they were buying. And they didn’t feel that they had to because, again, they felt that they were covered, at least with Fannie and Freddie mortgages, by implied guarantees from the federal government.
What’s happened, though, is that the issuance of asset-backed securities has fallen nearly to zero, not far from where it started. This method of financing is abnormal and something that comes along maybe once a century, when financiers get together and figure out a way to dress up and distribute IOUs in a certain investment area. So it is very unlikely that we will be returning to this type of financing anytime soon.
If you are in the real estate business, you don’t have to feel alone. Here is a list [not shown] of celebrated money managers who in the past year have suffered tremendous losses in the stock market portfolios that they manage. As you can see, the S&P500—when this was compiled—was down 41%, and two-thirds of these managers actually underperformed the S&P, all the way down to minus 60%. So, there is not only a real estate decline but also a stock market decline, and, as we will see in a couple of slides, we’ve also had a drop in commodities. It is very important that these markets are moving together. The last time that happened on such a scale was in the 1930s.
I’d like to try to answer a question: “Are we near a low in the stock decline?” Because in these times when stocks and real estate are declining together, they tend to bottom roughly together as well. So I want to take a minute and look at a valuation chart for the stock market….
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Editor's note: To see the chart that Bob showed the Georgia legislators along with the rest of his insights about the future of real estate and stocks, illustrated with 14 charts and figures, sign up now to get your own copy of
The Elliott Wave Theorist.]