There's a growing fear among economists that housing will take a rougher fall than the soft landing intended by the Federal Reserve, but there's a lot to indicate that housing will pick itself up, dust off, and start running again.
While a raise in short term interest rates was widely built in to stock market prices, Wall Street tumbled nearly 100 points on the news that the Fed was doing what surprised no one, and left room for further rate hikes in May.
With new housing starts taking a tumble of over 10 percent in February, and existing housing rose five percent, all eyes are on housing as the spring selling season gets officially underway.
Pundits are already yelling that the sky is falling, with half of mortgages under three years of age and as many as 25 percent of those were interest only or some other exotic loan, which means that when those loans reset, their interest rates will go through the proverbial roof, putting homeowners at risk.
For example, adjustable rate loans -- not fixed-rate loans -- were over half the loans issued in 2004 and 2005, says CNNMoney.com writer Les Christie. But others, including chief economist Doug Duncan of the Mortgage Bankers Association says that 35 percent of all homeowners have no mortgages, 50 percent have fixed-rate mortgages, and that leaves only 15 percent of borrowers in riskier loan products.
While these indicators are important, there are others that suggest that housing has nothing to worry about, and that there's nowhere else to put your money yet that makes as much sense.
Consider the stock market's response to the Fed's statement that "some further policy firming may be needed." It tanked nearly 100 points.
Hadn't investors been watching gas prices? They've gone up 15 cents a gallon in the last week.
Adding insult to a stock market already rocking with injury, the Wall Street Journal ran a story that should bring on storms of protest from investors, but probably won't. The venerable Journal found that mutual funds, that mainstay of middle-class investing, are managed by fund managers that don't vote with their shareholders interests.
Where outlandish CEO pay is concerned, many fund managers vote for increases, rather than side with shareholders who would like to see CEO pay at 400 times average workers' earnings reined in.
The reason? Fund groups like Morgan Stanley (which was caught earlier in the decade giving rah-rah buy recommendations to stock stinkers) want the corporate managers to give them investment banking and retirement planning business. No one in their right minds could really believe that such executive compensation is justifiable.
The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees labor union and the Corporate Library research group found that Morgan Stanley backed the companies' agenda over the shareholders 95 percent of the time. But Morgan Stanley isn't alone. Most fund managers followed executive pay over the cliff over 75 percent of the time, and only voted to rein in executive pay 27.6 percent of the time.
One of the reasons that housing is doing as well as it has for the past five years is the volatility of the stock market. If fund managers and executives haven't learned what's a conflict of interest by now, there's little hope for the future.
Homes on the other hand -- can be bought, sold, improved, leveled, rebuilt and traded as an investment -- all without the greedy hand of a CEO who wants a golden salary and golden parachute, plus attorney's fees, when he fails to deliver.
