房市继续疲软到 2012 （8-23）

Housing Slide in U.S. Threatens to Drag Economy Into Recession

By John Gittelsohn and Bob Willis - Aug 23, 2010

Housing led the U.S. out of seven ofthe last eight recessions. This time, it may kill the recovery.

Home sales collapsed after a federal tax credit for buyersexpired in April. Since then, the manufacturing-led expansion,which began in the second half of 2009, has been waning, withjobless claims rising and factory orders falling.

“If foreclosures continue to mount and depress homeprices, that could send the economy back into a recession,”said Celia Chen, an economist who tracks the industry forMoody’s Analytics Inc. “The housing market and the broadereconomy are closely intertwined.”

Spending on home construction and items such as furnitureand stoves accounted for about 15 percent of gross domesticproduct in the second quarter, according to West Chester,Pennsylvania-based Moody’s Analytics. Real estate also caninfluence consumer spending indirectly. When values soared inthe mid-2000s, people used the boost in equity to pay for carsand vacations. After prices fell, homeowners lost that cushionand curbed spending.

A report tomorrow by the Chicago-based National Associationof Realtors will show July sales of existing homes plummeted12.9 percent from June, the biggest monthly loss of 2010,according to the median estimate of economists surveyed byBloomberg.

New-home sales, which account for less than a 10th ofhousing transactions, stayed at the second-lowest level onrecord last month, economists predict Commerce Department datawill show on Aug. 25.

Housing in ‘Doldrums’

“Housing continues to be stuck in the doldrums,” saidJeffrey Frankel, a member of the business-cycle dating committeeat the National Bureau of Economic Research, the arbiter of whenU.S. recessions begin and end, and a professor at HarvardUniversity in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

With 14.6 million Americans out of work, homeowners arestruggling to hold onto their properties. One in seven mortgageswere delinquent or in foreclosure during the first quarter, thehighest in records dating to 1979, according to the Washington-based Mortgage Bankers Association. Foreclosures probably willtop 1 million this year, said RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine,California-based data company.

Federal efforts to help have had little success. Of 1.31million loan modifications started under the Obamaadministration’s Home Affordable Modification Program, 48percent were canceled by the end of July, the TreasuryDepartment said Aug. 20. More than half of all modificationsdefaulted again within 12 months, the Office of the Comptrollerof the Currency said June 23.

Sidelined Buyers

Shadow inventory, or the number of homes repossessed or indefault that eventually will be offered for sale, stood at 7.3million in the first quarter, according to Laurie Goodman, ananalyst in New York at mortgage-bond broker Amherst SecuritiesGroup LP. As those properties hit the market, prices will comeunder pressure and buyers will wait for better deals.

Those sidelined house hunters include Marion and JimLasswell, who said they spend most weekends looking at homes forsale near Raleigh, North Carolina. His engineering job at iRobotCorp. is secure, the couple’s credit is good and they have savedenough for a 20 percent down payment, Marion Lasswell said. Theproblem: they don’t think the market has hit bottom.

“We’re still watching prices drop,” Lasswell, 38, aregistered nurse, said in a telephone interview. She said theywon’t buy “until there’s an awesome deal.”

GDP Weakens

Home prices tumbled 33 percent from their July 2006 peak tothe low in April 2009, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller 20-cityindex. They may drop another 20 percent by 2012 if the economyslips back into a recession, according to Chen, the Moody’sAnalytics economist.

Gross domestic product increased less than 1.5 percent inthe second quarter, the slowest rate since the recovery began,according to the median forecast by economists in a Bloombergsurvey. That’s down from the 2.4 percent rate initially reportedby the Commerce Department last month. Growth may ease to 1.3percent by the first quarter of next year, according to the NewYork-based Conference Board.

Consumer spending rose 1.6 percent in the second quarter,down from 1.9 percent in the previous three months. Purchases ofhome furnishings and appliances fell 1.7 percent to an annualpace of $256.5 billion in June from a 2010 high in April,according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

“There is an epidemic of thrift,” said Nariman Behravesh,chief economist at IHS Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts.“Households and businesses are super-cautious right now.Sometime in the next 6 to 12 months, we’ll start to see moremovement on home and car purchases and greater willingness onthe part of businesses to hire.”

Fed Steps In

Federal Reserve policy makers on Aug. 10 made their firstattempt to shore up the recovery by pledging to keep theirholdings of securities and prevent money from draining out ofthe banking system. They said the economic expansion probablywill be “more modest” than earlier anticipated. The Fed hasheld the target for its benchmark lending rate near zero sinceDecember 2008 and purchased $1.43 trillion worth of debt to keeprates low and bolster housing.

“Household spending is increasing gradually, but remainsconstrained by high unemployment, modest income growth, lowerhousing wealth and tight credit,” the Fed said in a statement.

Buying Plans

The average U.S. rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage droppedto 4.44 percent in the second week of August, the lowestrecorded by McLean, Virginia-based Freddie Mac, the second-largest mortgage buyer. A July survey by the Conference Boardfound 1.9 percent of the respondents planned to buy a home inthe next six months, near December’s 27-year low of 1.7 percent.

A sustained economic recovery depends on the job growthrequired to boost consumer spending, said Behravesh of IHS. Theunemployment rate may average 9.6 percent this year, based onthe median estimate of economists in a Bloomberg survey. Thatwould be the highest annual rate since 1983.

Home construction and property sales led the way out of theprevious seven recessions going back to 1960, according to PMIGroup Inc., a mortgage insurer in Walnut Creek, California. New-home sales improved an average of eight months before thebeginning of economic growth, and single-family housing startsimproved seven months before recovery.

That didn’t happen in the last recession. Sales of newhouses fell in five of the eight months before economicexpansion began in 2009’s second half. Housing starts fell intwo of seven months.

While the Lasswells in North Carolina said they’ll keepspending their weekends looking at homes, they aren’t in a hurryto buy. “I don’t see things getting better,” Marion Lasswellsaid. “I expect prices to be flat for a long time.”