The SBA and asperity

asperity


ah-SPER-i-tee

Harshness or roughness.

Via French from Latin asper (rough).
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TIP OF THE WEEK

Asperity in commercial real estate is easing, at least according to Moody’s.

The Moody’s/REAL Commercial Property Price Indices (CPPI) measure the change in actual transaction prices for commercial real estate assets based on the repeat sales of the same assets at different points in time. The National — All Property Type Aggregate Index (CPPI) recorded a 2.4% increase in August, bringing it to 15.3% above the post-peak low recorded in April 2011.

The share of distressed transactions included within this month’s CPPI was 21.7%, down 5.9% from last month and the lowest level since January 2010. Prices for distressed transactions were down by 3.5% from the last month and are 6.9% above their post peak low set in August 2010. The reduced share of distressed transactions helped drive this month’s overall price increase.

If you would like a copy of the Moody’s October 2011 report, let me know.

A SBA loan is well suited for commercial real estate purchase or refinance.

The refinance provisions with a 504 loan expire in less than a year.

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Indices:

PRIME RATE= 3.25%
SBA LIBOR Base Rate October 2011 = 3.24%
SBA Fixed Base Rate October 2011 = 4.848%
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504 Debenture Rate for October

The debenture rate is 2.76% but note rate is 2.807% and effective yield is only 4.609%.

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AHEAD OF THE YIELD CURVE

In case you missed it, the economy has now recovered from the great recession.

According to the Department of Commerce, the value of goods and services produced in the U.S. last quarter surpassed its pre-recession level after 15 quarters, taking three times longer than the average for 10 previous recoveries since World War II.

Gross domestic product expanded at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the period from July through September, the fastest pace in a year and up from 1.3 percent in the prior three-month period. After adjusting for inflation, GDP climbed to $13.35 trillion last quarter, topping the $13.33 trillion peak reached in the last three months of 2007.

Left behind however are the ones who lost their jobs.

The number of Americans with jobs last month, 131.3 million, was lower than the 138 million workers in December 2007, when the 18-month recession began.

Only 80,000 jobs were created in October. Through the first ten months of 2011, the economy has added 1.256 million total non-farm jobs or just 125 thousand per month. This is a better pace of payroll job creation than last year, but the economy still has 6 ½ million fewer payroll jobs than at the beginning of the 2007 recession. There are a total of 13.9 million Americans unemployed and 5.9 million have been unemployed for more than 6 months.

So what does the bond market think about all of this?

Keep your eyes on Thursday’s $16 billion auction of 30 year Treasury bonds.


Here is what the 30 year bond has been doing:

2001- 5.49
2002- 5.43
2003- ND
2004- ND
2005- ND
2006- 4.91
2007- 4.84
2008- 4.18
2009- 3.89
2010- 4.61


What a minute, why no numbers for 2003, 2004, and 2005?

One month after the 9/11 attacks, the Treasury 30 year bond is discontinued. When the Treasury mothballed the 30-year bond in 2001, experts speculated it was trying to drive down long-term interest rates, which had remained stubbornly high while the Federal Reserve was slashing short-term interest rates to revive the economy. When the Treasury discontinued the 30-year bond in 2001, its yield fell 35 basis points in one day. Why? A shrinking supply of the 30-year Treasury bond caused increased demand to drive rates down.

What does all this mean?

I don’t know.

Yields on 30 year bonds have fallen from this year’s high of 4.79 percent on February 9 down to about only 3.04 percent.

The slope of the yield curve—the difference between the yields on short- and long-term maturity bonds—has achieved some notoriety as a simple forecaster of economic growth. The rule of thumb is that an inverted yield curve (short rates above long rates) indicates a recession in about a year, and yield curve inversions have foreshadowed each of the last seven recessions. One of the recessions predicted by the yield curve was the most recent one. The yield curve inverted in August 2006, a bit more than a year before the current recession started in December 2007.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, projecting forward using past values of the yield curve spread and GDP growth suggests that real GDP will grow at about a 0.8 percent rate over the next year

Asperity continues and interest rates will remain low.



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OFF BASE

The sun came up nice and early this morning.

That’s because Daylight Saving Time just ended.

The official spelling is Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight SavingS Time.

Saving is used here as a verbal adjective (a participle). It modifies time and tells us more about its nature; namely, that it is characterized by the activity of saving daylight. It is a saving daylight kind of time. Because of this, it would be more accurate to refer to DST as daylight-saving time. Saving is used in the same way as saving a ball game, rather than as a savings account.

So NO S for Daylight Saving Time and NO apostrophe for Veterans Day which is this Friday.

The holiday is commonly printed as Veteran's Day or Veterans' Day in calendars and advertisements. While these spellings are grammatically acceptable, the United States government has declared that the attributive (no apostrophe) rather than the possessive case is the official spelling.

Because it is a federal holiday, many American people have the day off from school or work for Veterans Day. Non-essential federal government offices are closed. Banks are closed and no mail is delivered. The holiday is often celebrated by having a ravioli meal. This tradition dates back to the ending days of World War I when President Woodrow Wilson, aware that the returning soldiers would be longing for home cooked meals, invited 2,000 soldiers to the White House and helped his staff chefs cook them ravioli, which had just become a mainstay in mainstream American kitchens due to commercial canning. In his Armistice Day address to Congress, Wilson was sensitive to the psychological toll of the lean War years. "Hunger," he remarked, "breeds madness."