Increasing Number of Banks on Unofficial Problem Bank List

The graph that appears below shows the increase since August 2009 in the number of banks on an unofficial problem bank list provided courtesy of Bill McBride’s Calculated RISK blog.  McBride credits a blogger by the name of ”surferdude808″ for creating a proxy for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) which is only published quarterly.  

CAMELS is an acronym for the  FDIC rating system that is based on –Capital adequacy, Asset quality, Management, Earnings, Liquidity and Sensitivity to market risk.  According to McBride, surferdude808 creates his list of potential problem banks based on publicly announced formal enforcement actions, and also media reports and company announcements that suggest an enforcement action is likely

This unofficial list of potential problem banks has grown by forty percent between August 2009 and November 2009.  This unofficial count is close, but slightly lower than the official FDIC list.  McBride thinks the difference may have to do with data timing issues.  In any event, the trend line is moving in the wrong direction.  As of October 20, 2009, the FDIC insured deposits mat 8,195 financial institutions.

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Contra Costa Centre

While at the Urban Land Institute (ULI) conference held in San Francisco in November 2009, I had the opportunity to visit Contra Costa Centre along with fellow members of ULI’s Transit Oriented Development Council. Contra Costa Centre is a transit oriented development that is under construction adjacent to the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station in Pleasant Hill, California—about 25 miles east of downtown San Francisco.

This project has been in the works for decades. The station was constructed in 1970 and was the locus of the test tract for the BART system which opened for service in 1972. I remember driving by the site when the BART station was under construction and I was employed as a young planning assistant at Contra Costa County. ULI’s Transit Oriented Development Council was treated to an extensive briefing and site tour.

The briefers included: Steve Wilson, Senior Vice President of AvalonBay Communities, Inc.; Jeff White, Senior Development Director at AvalonBay Communities; John Rennels, Principal Property Development Officer for Bay Area Rapid Transit, and; Jim Kennedy, Redevelopment Director for the Contra Costa County Department of Conservation and Development.  Thanks to them for their hospitality and candid presentation.

Photos of the slide show and site tour are posted at:

 http://urbanexus.smugmug.com/Architecture/Contra-Costa-Centre/10441826_vB92F#724319292_MvzqT

Here are several PDF files containing background information and briefing materials.

Contra Costa Centre – 2008-06-21 – Building a Heart (P&P – James Kennedy)

Contra Costa Centre – 2008-07-15 – Press release

Contra Costa Centre – 2009-03-01 – Fact Sheet

Contra Costa Centre – 2009-11-04 – BART information

Contra Costa Centre – 2008-07-27 – Groundbreaking flyer

 

 

Employment

In the New York Times on October 4, 2009, there appeared a chart that illustrates the magnitude of the job declines of the current Great Recession in comparison to other recessions dating back to 1945.

Texas Metros Dominate Economic Performance Index

Texas metros, led by No. 1 Austin, claim four of the top five spots in the 2009 Milken Institute/Greenstreet Real Estate Partners Best-Performing Cities Index. In fact, the Lone Star State accounts for nine of the top 16 finishers.

The full report is available online, along with interactive data set, which allows you to look up specific metros, compare them side-by-side with other cities and see a timeline showing how economic factors have shaped the rankings since 1999.  Go to: http://bestcities.milkeninstitute.org/bestcities2009.taf?rankyear=2009&type=rank200

Bloggers Meet with U.S. Treasury Officials

On Monday, November 2, 2009, a group of eight bloggers met with  Treasury officials in Washington, DC.  The following link will take you to a report by  Steve Waldman (“Interfluidity”),  one of the bloggers who attended this session.  Go to  http://www.interfluidity.com/posts/1257407150.shtml .  At the end, there are links to reports from other bloggers.

Government Expenditures and Revenues

Once again, the Calafia Beach Pundit (Scortt Grannis) provides insight backed up with charts which show some distrurbing trends viz-a-viz revenues and expenditures of the United States Government. His post on this matter can be found at http://bit.ly/39qz0o .  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Money Creation

On October 9, 2009, The Calafia Beach Pundit (Scott Grannis) posted this chart and an explanation at his blog (http://scottgrannis.blogspot.com/). It illustrates the dramatic expansion of the monetary base in the USA during the year since the near collapse of the financial system. The Monetary Base (currency plus bank reserves), is now at an all-time high.

Grannis points out that all this money creation has yet to create inflation because most of it went into newly-created bank reserves that remain on the Federal Reserve balance sheet. Despite the increase in the money supply, there is little new lending. The big question is whether the Federal Reserve will be able to shrink the money supply as we move into recovery. If not, it seems like are in for some dramatic inflation.

A Global View of the Housing Bubble

It turns out that the housing price bubble of recent years was more pronounced in several nations other than the USA as illustrated by a chart that appeared in the McKinsey Quarterly Chart Focus Newsletter of October 2009 — http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/newsletters/chartfocus/2009_10.htm

The Astounding World of the Future

This spoof mocks a 20th century newsreel about what turned out to be largely accurate predictions of what life in the USA would be like in the year 2000.

This is the General Motors film about The Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City which was an attempt to simulate what life would be like in the USA by 1950.

Part II of the Genearal Motors fils about The Futurama exhibit.

And here is a look at the future from around 1956 from a film about Monsanto Corporation’s “House of the Future” in the (old) Tomorrowland at Disneyland in Anaheim, California.

There is a Part II to the “House of the Future”.

This one is a clip from the 1967 film 1999 A.D. which shows a family of the future shopping, paying bills and using electronic mail from home.

Unemployment Claims Down as Percent of the Workforce

 

The Calafia Beach Pundit (Scott Grannis) posted this chart at Seeking Alpha on October 2, 2009 (http://seekingalpha.com/article/164517-workforce-disruption-weekly-claims-update?source=email). It shows weekly unemployment claims as a percentage of the workforce.  At the end of the third quater of 2009, the figure was at its lowest level for the year.  

If you compare the severity of the recession that began in December 2007 to others based on this metric, the unemployment claims situation is better now than in the recessions of  mid 1970s and early 1980s.   Scott Grannis believes that as of October 2009, the United States of America is about three months into a recovery with a workforce disruption metric that has fallen to 0.42%. He says that ” .  .  .  It took almost one year of recovery for that same metric to drop to this level following the ‘81-’82 recession, and almost 18 months of recovery following the ‘74-’75 recession.”