BlackMask Breaking News

(Reuters) – The average interest rate on the most popular U.S. home loan climbed to a 12 year high last week and fewer homebuyers sought properties in a sign that the Federal Reserve’s aim of cooling the housing market may be beginning to have an impact, data from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) showed on Wednesday. The average contract rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage increased to 5.20% in the week ended April 15 from 5.13% a week earlier, the MBA survey showed. It has risen 2 percentage points from one year ago. The bulk of the run up, however, has occurred since the start of the year, causing the fastest climb in home-financing costs in decades as the Fed abandoned a cautious approach to raising its benchmark overnight lending rate in favor of swifter and more decisive action to bring down persistently high inflation. The central bank is also set to decide at its next meeting on May 3-4 to begin reducing its portfolio of $8.5 trillion of U.S. Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, a stash of assets that had helped keep consumer borrowing costs – for mortgages in particular – low throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. NN: this is just the start…… Rated will double from here in the next year. Remember US buyers are payment buyers not price of the real estate. Which means the monthly payment will tripple…… Rent and then buy at bargain basement prices like we did the last time…..

https://youtu.be/KhC7WVdVyko

Washington: Financial stability risks have risen along many dimensions, although no global systemic event affecting financial institutions or markets has materialized so far, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said. “Global financial conditions have tightened notably” and downside risks to the economic outlook have increased as a result of the Russian-Ukraine war, according to the newly released Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR). The tightening has been “particularly pronounced” in eastern Europe and Middle East countries with close ties to Russia, reflecting lower equity valuations and higher funding costs, the IMF report was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency. Emerging and frontier markets are facing tighter financial conditions and “a higher probability of portfolio outflows,” with a forecast of 30 per cent now, up from 20 per cent in the October 2021 GFSR. The latest report warned that a sudden repricing of risk resulting from an intensification of the war and associated escalation of sanctions may expose, and interact with, some of the vulnerabilities built up during the pandemic, leading to a sharp decline in asset prices. The sharp rise in commodity prices, “which has exacerbated preexisting inflation pressure, poses challenging trade-offs for central banks,” between fighting record-high inflation and safeguarding the post-pandemic recovery, the report said. The report urged policymakers to “take decisive actions” to rein in rising inflation and address financial vulnerabilities while “avoiding a disorderly tightening of financial conditions” that would jeopardize the post-pandemic economic recovery. “It is extremely important to tighten monetary policy at this point, in order to prevent an unmooring of inflation expectations,” Tobias Adrian, director of the IMF`s Monetary and Capital Markets Department, said at a virtual press conference during the 2022 spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. “At the moment, medium-term inflation expectations are well anchored, but of course, there`s a risk of de-anchoring, so there`s a risk that expectations would move beyond the target level in a markable manner,” Adrian said in response to a question from Xinhua. The IMF official noted that the intended consequence of monetary tightening is to get to a tightening of financial conditions that slows down aggregate demand, slows down economic activity, which in turn brings down inflation. “So some tightening of financial conditions is intended,” Adrian said. “But of course, you don`t want a disorderly tightening of financial conditions. So disorderly is the kind of sell-off and dash for cash that we saw in March 2020 at the onset of the Covid pandemic.” To avoid unnecessary volatility in financial markets, it is crucial that central banks in advanced economies, including the US Federal Reserve, provide clear guidance about the normalisation process while remaining data-dependent, the IMF report added. In the coming years, the report said, policymakers will need to confront a number of structural issues brought to the fore by the war in Ukraine and the associated sanctions against Russia, including the trade-off between energy security and climate transition, market fragmentation risks, and the role of the US dollar in asset allocation. NN: The wheels will fly off the cart. Thats what they mean by “market fragmentation risks”. The system is about to blow apart. Putin is no fool. In fact he is a evil genius. He engineered this over a decade, HE CONTROLS 50% OF Europe’s coal, OIL AND GAS. Controls 25% of the worlds Uranium, fertilizer, nickel, palladium and wheat. And its not by accidents. He can deliver natural gas to ALL of Europe. In fact he has built the worlds longest pipeline and can deliver his gas to China, Japan and S,Korea….. Pretty incredible feats. At the same time these great things were accomplished the US has shut down pipelines, cancelled drilling permits, pipeline projects, loading ports ,refineries. They killed production from know reserves like Alaska and gulf of mexico, In other words they systematically shut down the country with the greatest proven natural gas reserves. They cojiled banks, and funds from investing in natural resources, The US has halted all new mining permits for Uranium, Lithium.  Shut coal mines and steel miles…. In other words the exact opposite of what the commodity power house Russia has done. Wait watch and see when the millennials go hungry they will discover they cannot eat their Nintendo.  To show you how ridiculous things have become: with the world facing food shortages and mass inflation to make up for gasoline shortages they caused  they are increasing the Ethanol content of gasoline. Corn has gone for $2.70 a bushel to $8.00. And people in marginal countries will starve to death….

https://youtu.be/UU6mZoKPck8

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed this weekend their countries’ cooperation in the OPEC+ oil production pact in their second telephone call since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia is a key partner to OPEC’s largest producer and de facto leader, Saudi Arabia, in the OPEC+ alliance, which has been working for years to manage oil supply to the market. And it looks like Russia will continue to be such, despite Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, OPEC and the OPEC+ group have not publicly commented on the invasion, limiting themselves to saying that the market is currently run by “geopolitical events” or “the geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe,” not by fundamentals. The Saudi and Russian leaders “gave a positive assessment” of Saudi Arabia and Russia’s cooperation in the OPEC+ group during the phone call on Saturday, according to a statement from the Kremlin. The Saudi Press Agency (SPA), for its part, said that the Saudi Crown Prince had received a call from Putin in which “bilateral relations between the two countries and ways of enhancing them in all fields in a way that achieves the interests of the two countries and their friendly peoples were discussed.” “For his part, HRH the Crown Prince asserted the support of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for efforts that would lead to a political solution to the crisis in Ukraine and achieve security and stability,” the Saudi agency reported. Despite the turmoil in the global oil and energy markets following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, OPEC+ publicly presents a unified stance on reiterating that it’s not fundamentals that are currently driving the oil prices higher. And despite calls from many oil-consuming nations to boost production more than planned, the alliance continues to stick to its monthly increases of 400,000 barrels per day (bpd), as agreed upon in the summer of last year. OPEC+ has defied some expectations that since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the meetings within the group would be difficult. On the contrary, the alliance has held two of its shortest meetings ever since the end of February and hasn’t mentioned Ukraine in any public statement. OPEC, and by extension OPEC+, has steered clear of political statements and references as a matter of policy. OPEC did not break up even when its founding members, Iraq and Iran, for example, were in a state of war in the 1980s. The next meeting of the OPEC+ group is scheduled to take place on May 5 to decide production levels for June. While there is concern about an immediate demand slump with the Chinese lockdowns, OPEC+ has not pumped to its quota for many months. OPEC only raised its oil production by just 57,000 bpd in March from February, as African members’ struggles to pump more crude partially offset increases at the core OPEC members of the Middle East. Production in the key non-OPEC member of the pact, Russia, has started to show signs of distress as storage capacity fills up, infrastructure and shipping logistics prevent Russia from exporting all the oil unwanted in the West to China and India, and refineries cut run rates as product storage is overflowing. As a result, companies are scaling back crude production. OPEC+ struggles to deliver on its production targets, with estimates pointing to the group pumping 1 million bpd below its overall quota. But OPEC now expects lower demand growth this year after it slashed last week its oil demand growth estimate for 2022 by nearly 500,000 bpd on the back of lower expected global economic growth with the Russian war in Ukraine and the return of COVID lockdowns in China. The reduced demand growth forecast could give reason to OPEC+ to continue sticking to its nominal monthly production increases—even if it never achieves them—and to continue ignoring calls for more production at oil above $100 per barrel. NN: Its going to be a wild ride…. the way we like it… The market is fucked up in the head about two things…. The world is in a no shit oil and food shortage  crises… And throw in run away inflation for good measure. leadership (ha ha ha ha) I use the term rather loosely is in denial. Wishing upon a star just doesn’t work… I tried it when i was 15 years old and going through my stupid stage

PARIS (Reuters) – French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Tuesday that an embargo on Russian oil at a European Union level was in the works, adding that France’s President Emmanuel Macron wants such a move. “I hope that in the weeks to come we will convince our European partners to stop importing Russian oil,” Le Maire told Europe 1 radio. NN: about the dumbest think anyone can do. I do not think they realize what would happen to society, modern society that runs on energy….. Society would be thrown into the dark ages. Reality is the majority of people on earth in poorer countries will be devastated by skyrocketing energy and food prices…. More people will be thrown into poverty and starvation since World War II…. After all this is the start of World War III.

As Europe continues to consider a ban on Russian energy exports, German business and unions are joining forces in opposition, warning that an immediate Russian natural gas ban would have a severe negative impact on industry and jobs.
Germany boasts the largest economy in the 27-nation European Union and resisted a ban on Russian energy imports, opting instead for a strategy that would seek to gradually phase out Russian oil by year-end 2022 and Russian gas imports within two years.

“A rapid gas embargo would lead to loss of production, shutdowns, a further de-industrialization and the long-term loss of work positions in Germany,” AP quoted the chairmen of the BDA employer’s group and the DGB trade union confederation as saying Monday. 

Some 40% of the European Union’s natural gas and some 25% of its oil now comes from Russia, mostly through pipelines.

Germany alone depends on Russia for approximately one-third of its total energy consumption.  Last week, the German government approved its biggest pension hike in decades at a time when inflation is expected to skyrocket, already hitting a 40-year high. Beginning on July 1st, pensions for former West German states will increase by 5.35%.  While Germany’s employers and unions are on edge over the potential for an “immediate” ban on Russian oil and natural gas, the bloc is still starkly divided on the issue.  EU ministers are now in discussions about a sixth round of potential new sanctions against Russia, noting that the bloc has jointly paid 35 billion euros for Russian energy since Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine. Germany, Italy, Austria and Hungary are the most dependent on Russian gas and fearful of an immediate ban.  A ban on Russian coal imports has already been agreed but will not be implemented until August and will have only a limited effect on money going into Russian coffers compared to oil and gas. NN: See how they run! They just don’t get it. No matter how they wiggle waggle reality is they are trapped. Did you ever catch a rat in a cage trap. It is amazing how much fight they have in them. But no matter how they try they are doomed. Europe is caught in the Putin trap. No matter  how many press spin meetings, hi level summits. Reality is Putin has got them and their is nothing they can do.

Fed needs to act to rein in inflation that’s ‘far too high for comfort’

One of the Federal Reserve’s earliest advocates for aggressive rate increases won’t rule out a truly supersize rise, though he doesn’t expect one is needed. When it comes to the size of a rate increase, one greater than 50 basis points “is not my base case,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said during a virtual appearance Monday. But he noted the Fed has increased rates by more, and when it comes to a potential 75 basis point increase, “I wouldn’t rule it out.” Bullard said he remains on board with an almost certain series of half percentage point rate rises as the central bank presses forward with plans to help bring inflation, now at 40-year highs, under control by lifting the federal-funds rate target to around 3.5% by year-end. Bullard is a voting member of the rate setting Federal Open Market Committee, which last month raised its overnight target rate range by a quarter percentage point to between 0.25% and 0.5%. The FOMC also penciled in more rate increases for this year. In his appearance Monday, Bullard said inflation is “far too high for comfort, and so we have to move to get inflation under control,” adding “not all hope is lost here. I think we’re in a position where we can maintain credibility and get inflation lower.” Bullard is a voting member of the rate setting Federal Open Market Committee, which last month raised its overnight target rate range by a quarter percentage point to between 0.25% and 0.5%. The FOMC also penciled in more rate increases for this year. NN: The FED really blew it. They will have to get rates to 7 or 8% to get things under control. The published inflation rate is 8%. BUT if we use the same system of calculating inflation from the 80’s inflation is the highest ever over 14%. For the record we are about to see the biggest stock market real estate crash ever….. It will be devastating! The fucks deserve it.