This week in Haiku:
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Today is Monday
Little Happened on Friday
This Week Could Startle
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This Week in Links

Housing Double-Dip Speculation – Analyst Meredith Whitney thinks Housing is heading for a double-dip; what do you think?

Are there Four-Leaf Clovers in your Business Plan? Great article from AgentGenius on the role that superstitions and luck play in performance.

Barry Ritholtz (The Big Picture) suggests that it is Not A Good Time To Be A Homebuilder. He also suggests that China’s currency announcement over the weekend has more bark than bite in his article entitled China Yuan Depeg: Much Ado About Nothing. I love the Emerson quote he included – “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”

Calculated Risk, another great economic/market blog gives us some chart love and talks about Fannie and Freddie ‘s Collective REO Inventory and points some fingers on the home loan mess that many are in.

And lastly, an extremely readable (but long!) article on the state of the housing market from Jeremy Jones at The Draconian. My favorite part? This Chart which shows about how long we can get away with spending more than we can afford (about 5 years.)

This Week in Our Opinion

We ended last week on a mellow note; we had received good, bad and expected news during the week, and Friday’s lull in actionable data was met with a sigh of relief, as the markets more or less stayed stable throughout the day.

Over the weekend, however, China announced that they were allowing one of their largest banks to trade publicly, allowing their currency to be influenced by the free market. I tend to agree with Barry Ritholtz (link above) about this; this is a pretty textbook move that is only causing waves of speculation because its “China”.

We have some more housing data to look at this week, one big looming number actually comes next week – the June unemployment report. The market expectation is that the headline number will be very negative due to the loss of census jobs; the non-census number will likely begin to show the underlying trend for the summer; many experts are leaning towards a bad second half of the year for our economy. It will be interesting to see if the market can continue to surprise even the most gloomy of economists, or if (heaven forbid) we actually see some good news soon.

Rates are currently down as of this morning, but at this point is that the pressure downwards from economic forces is being matched by the pressure upwards from investors and diminishing returns. Expect that at some point in the near future, we will get a few timely pieces of good news and that that will begin to drive rates up more consistently.

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Geoff Boyd – PrimeLending – Clackamas, OR