Housing Slump in U.S. Poised to Worsen, Derivatives Trades Show

Bloomberg writes some interpretations on the derivatives market pricing.

The slumping U.S. housing market is about to get a lot worse, according to traders of mortgage-backed securities and the so-called derivatives on which they are based.

The ABX index, which measures the risk of owning bonds backed by home-loans to people with poor credit, rose 30 percent since Aug. 9 to the highest since January. There are more than $500 billion of such notes outstanding.

Not sure how reliable or biased they may be, but Freddie Mac says:

Sales of new and existing homes probably will drop 9.4 percent to 6.76 million in 2006 from a record last year, McLean, Virginia-based mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Oct. 10.

This statistic is troubling:

About 18 percent of all mortgages issued in the first half of the year were to borrowers considered most likely to default, such as those with high credit-card balances, up from 2.4 percent in 1998, based on data from the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Finally,

Bill Gross, manager of the world's biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California, forecasts the housing slump will cause the economy to slow and force the Fed to lower interest rates to 4.5 percent next year. The central bank's target for overnight loans between banks is 5.25 percent. Pimco is a unit of Munich-based Allianz SE.

The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo said on Oct. 17 that its index of builder confidence this month rose to 31 from 30 in September, the first increase in a year.