Well, here we are on the morning many people thought would never come. Many people said they never expected that GM would actually go under. Well, under they are with approximately $178 Billion in liabilities and only $82 Billion in assets (and I think the $82 Billion includes the money that you and I gave them.)
So what difference does that make for the mortgage market? A couple of things:
- It’s not a positive thing for the housing market because it “solidifies” what we all knew anyway. There are going to be additional job losses and as we all know, additional job losses equates to additional mortgage delinquencies and housing losses which is bad for the mortgage backed securities market.
- I don’t know the exact amount but there is a LOT of money out there in GM bonds. Those bonds are now essentially worthless (from what I understand, they were “exchanged” for stock – stock that’s currently trading at 75 cents per share). This is spooking the entire bond market and pushing rates higher.
- The government announced that as the “only one who would lend to GM right now” (not exactly what they said, but close) they are putting an additional $30,000,000,000 into GM. This makes the GM bailout the largest individual company bailout and increases the risk by the government going further in debt thereby pushing up on rates.
So, GM, the one company that was supposedly too big to fail, failed and failing isn’t a good thing for the mortgage rate market.
What else is happening?
- The ISM (Industrial Supply Management Index) showed that manufacturing is still contracting but once again it’s the “less bad” type of thing. It was slowing but not as rapidly in May as it did in April.
- Personal income rose and personal spending fell in May. That means that we all made a little bit more and guess what, we didn’t go out and spend it! For the long term health of the market, this is actually a good thing that we aren’t “over consuming” but short term, it’s quite painful because so much of our economy is based on consumers Read more