Beyond the Blues Recognize that a depressive disorder is more than the blues. Without treatment, depression can last for weeks, months, even years. The first step is to see your primary care physician. Diagnosis Is Key A big reason to head to the doc: Some medications and medical conditions can cause symptoms that seem like depression. Your doctor will work to rule out these possibilities. How to Find Support If you don't have a primary care doctor, talk with a nurse, social worker, or religious counselor. Ask him or her for a recommendation on where to get help. Or look under "mental health," "social services," and "hotlines." A community mental health center also can be a great resource. Or call the free, 24-hour National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255). Talk It Out People with mild depression may do well with only psychotherapy. Most people with moderate to severe do best with a combination of psychotherapy and medication. The medication quickly relieves symptoms, while therapy helps you cope with life's problems.
A Stunning 60% Of All Home Purchases Are "Cash Only" - A 200% Jump In Five Years Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/15/2013 17:29 -0400 10 Year Bond Bond Housing Bubble Housing Market Real estate recovery Remember when housing was the primary aspirational asset for a still existent US middle class, to be purchased with some equity down by your average 30 year-old hoping to start a family in his or her brand new home, and, as the name implies, aspire to reach the American dream? Those days are long gone. Back in those days the interest rate on the 10 Year bond mattered as it determined the prevailing marginal affordability of leveraged real estate. That is no longer the case, at least not for about 90% of Americans, because as Goldman shows, while before the great crisis only 20% of home purchases were "all cash", since then the number has soared threefold, and currently the estimated percentage of cash transactions (by count and amount) has hit a record 60%. In other words, less than half of all home purchases are debt-funded, and thus less than half of all home purchases are actually representative of what middle-class America is doing. Goldman's take: Exhibit 4 shows the estimated cash transactions as percent of total home sales both by transaction count and by transaction dollar amount. Relative to the pre-crisis years, percent cash transactions has risen by about 30 percentage points. This change is broadly in line with the increases suggested by DataQuick data. The 30 percentage point increase in percent cash transactions explains almost the entire decline in the “mortgage per dollar transaction” series (with the remainder explained by small changes in average LTV ratios per mortgage). We do not have data to assess who these all-cash homebuyers are, but presumably investors who have been purchasing distressed properties and turning them into rental units have played an important role. The WSJ has a few thoughts to add: The surprisingly large cash-share of purchases helps to explain why home sales have jumped over the past two years despite more muted increases in broad measures of new mortgage activity, such as the MBA’s mortgage application index. There’s no exact way to know who is responsible for all of these cash purchases, though they are likely to include some combination of investors, foreign buyers, and wealthy homeowners that don’t want to go through the hassle of getting a mortgage before closing on a sale. Mortgage lending standards have sharply tightened up since the housing bubble, with banks scrutinizing borrowers’ tax returns and bank statements to verify their incomes and the source of their down payment. Our personal thoughts: just like the stock market has been levitating on zero volume and virtually no broad distribution, so the entire housing market appears to have morphed into a "flip that house" investment vehicle used by the usual suspects (wealthy foreign oligarchs abusing the NAR's anti-money laundering exemption to park their stolen funds in the US, government sponsored firms such as BlackStone using near zero cost REO-to-Rent subsidies, and other 0.01%-ers) who piggyback on cash flows deriving from alternative cheap credit-funded investments and translate their profits into real-estate investments. It also means that if nobody used leverage (i.e., mortgages) to buy houses before, they certainly won't do it now, all the more so with interest rates soaring and purchase affordability imploding in front of everybody's eyes. Finally, due to the very thin marginal source of bidside interest (flipper flipping to flipper and so on), it means that most of America has not participated in this mirage "recovery", and all it will take to send the buoyant housing market crashing is for the one marginal buyer to become a seller. What they will next find, is that when dealing with a bidside orderbook that has zero depth, one indeed takes the escalator down from where the lofty heights achieved courtesy of Fed-funded stairs. Average: 4.882355 Your rating: None Average: 4.9 ( 17 votes)
Can The Fed Ever Exit? Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/06/2012 17:38 -0400 We have extensively discussed the size ( here - must read! ) and growth ( here ) of the Fed's largesse in soaking up massive amounts of the primary and second Treasury (and now MBS) markets with the ongoing theme of 'what about the exit strategy?' among other things. The onset of QEternity likely means the Fed's balance sheet will grow to over $4 trillion within the next year and, as UBS notes, although the Fed has suggested that it will not begin an exit strategy until 2015, the magnitude of the excess balance sheet argues for considering whether the Fed has the ability to unwind their balance sheet . We, like UBS, believe that the Fed will find it far more difficult to exit than they have found it to enter given the limitations of the exit tools frequently cited . There are three main tools for reducing the Fed’s balance sheet: asset sales/maturation (bad signaling), reverse repurchase agreements (size constraints), and interest on reserves (inflationary). Via UBS: Asset sales/maturation. The portfolio shift to a longer average maturity means that the Fed is unable to reduce its balance sheet only by letting securities mature . There would be no material reduction until at least 2016 and even then the reduction would likely be under $250bn. Outright sales face a different problem – expectations. Unlike purchases where announcing a certain amount of purchases reinforces the Fed’s goal of lowering rates via expectations, any sales would likely result in the market pricing in a fully normalized balance sheet . As such, an initial sale program of just $200bn would not be credible as the expectation would be that the sale announcement signals a desire to return to normality requiring an addition $2.5tn in sales at some point. Reverse repurchase agreements. This tool is swamped by the magnitude of the drain required . At present money fund assets are roughly $2.5 trillion, $200 billion less than the excess balance sheet we anticipate by the end of 2013. However, this statistic does not tell the full story as reverse repurchase agreements only make up just over 20% of money fund assets, or just $500 billion . The other primary counterparty the Fed would rely on, the Primary Dealer community, are unlikely to be able to participate in anything close to that size. While these figures do not prevent the Fed from using this tool, they do suggest it can only be a part of the overall solution. Interest on reserves. Although interest on reserves theoretically creates a floor on rates in the interbank market, it does not prevent banks from using funds to make loans. Loans eventually end up as deposits somewhere and, as such, the overall level of deposits at the Fed provide little guidance as to whether the funds are circulating in the economy. The only way to prevent lending would be for the Fed to raise this rate sufficiently to make banks prefer depositing the money at the Fed to lending to their client base . QE3 and QE4, if enacted and continued until the end of 2013, will leave the Fed with excess balance sheet of roughly $2.7 trillion. Fed Treasury holdings by coupon maturity date (2013-2042) expected at the end of Operation Twist at the end of 2012. Money fund assets have been falling and the total amount of repos done by money funds does not appear sufficient to allow the Fed to rely solely on reverse repos from this financial segment to drain liquidity. Average: 4.5 Your rating: None Average: 4.5 ( 6 votes) Tweet Login or register to post comments 6281 reads Printer-friendly version Send to friend Similar Articles You Might Enjoy: Guest Post: The War Between Credit And Resources Fed Balance Sheet Composition Update For Italy, It Is Game Theory Over Evidence QE3 is Working, and Other Lies Guest Post: The Economics Of Breaking Bad
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