Kudos to Barron’s part II

After reading and blogging about one article in Barron’s this weekend I came to another outstading one.  Here is a link.  Nice work Barron’s.

Among the points that I found interesting:

* If Fannie Mae [ticker: FNM] and Freddie Mac [FRE] stopped all of their activity — for a moment, forget about shutting them down and being insolvent — in order to sell off mortgages as normal loans without this guarantee, the interest rate would have to be around 9% or 10%.

* Q: What other negatives do you see?

A: Inflation risk down the line. [The federal government is] going to probably overstimulate and over support in an attempt to stem these deflationary forces. We are looking at a longer-term inflationary force that is pretty substantial. This has been my view for a long time. Interest rates went into a very long decline from the late ’70s and early ’80s until earlier this decade, when first we saw rates bottom out. Then rates went up a couple of times.

Basically, we are getting back down toward those low levels again. The multiyear bottom in interest rates that started around 2002 will probably last into 2009. Then we are going to see the inflationary aftermath of these government policies, and you might be surprised at how high interest rates go.

* Q: How much more pain are we going to feel in the housing market before things start to stabilize?

A: I think we are about half way through. There is high momentum in terms of home-price declines, so it is pretty clear they are going lower. It always looks a lot like the hills on a roller coaster. It starts out with a flattish period. Then it starts to go down, and then it really starts to drop, and we are clearly in that period. That period is going to be with us for about another year before it flattens out and bumps along in 2010.

The S&P/Case-Shiller Index is down a little more than 15% from its peak in 2006, and I’ve believed for some time that the index will have dropped 30% from its peak. That means some markets are going to drop by 50%. That includes Miami, Las Vegas and Phoenix, all of which were fueled by subprime lending. The foreclosure overhang is so big in those areas.