The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles in Canada: Prices Drop Further as Sales Slow and New Listings Jump Further

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

The Canada Home Price Benchmark Index for single family houses in fell for the third month in a row, in September by 1.3% from August, after having dropped by 1.1% and by 0.5% in the prior two months, to $815,300 (all prices in Canadian dollars).

The three months in a row of declines came after a wild and woolly sucker rally in the spring, fueled by the spring buying season and fake hopes about rate cuts. But the Bank of Canada instead went on to hike rates further to 5.0%, and at the last meeting added a further tightening bias, while inflation has begun to resurge across the board, topped off with Canada’s worst rent inflation since 1983.

The breathtaking price plunge last year forms the base for this year’s year-over-year comparison; and after the wild and woolly sucker rally this spring, the benchmark price is up 1.6% year-over-year. Since the peak in March 2022, the benchmark price has now dropped by 14.2%, or by $135,300, according to data from the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) on Friday.

The Pullback in Stocks May Not Last Much Longer

By Matt Call

The benchmark S&P 500 Index sank to a fresh four-month low last week...

Concerns about the rapid rise in interest rates weighed on the index. It's now down about 4% from its July high.

The weakness has been tough on nearly every sector in the market. And now, broad investor fear is spiking as a result.

But believe it or not, this is actually a bullish sign for stocks in the long term...

You see, as I'll explain today, activity in the options market indicates the market pullback may not last for long.

Traders and investors alike have been loading up on put options...

That makes sense. Put options are a leveraged way to bet on falling stock prices. And falling prices are exactly what most investors expect today.

After Getting the Largest Bailout in U.S. History in 2008, 85.5 Percent of the $1.34 Trillion in Deposits at Citigroup’s Citibank Lack FDIC Insurance Today

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 5, 2023

As evidenced by the speech that the FDIC Chair, Martin Gruenberg, delivered at a conference yesterday, the FDIC is very much aware that both the level of uninsured deposits and the concentration of those uninsured deposits among a handful of mega banks is a serious problem for the U.S. banking system. Gruenberg didn’t name names, but we will do that in this article.

Gruenberg pointed out in his speech that year-end data for the three banks that failed this past spring indicated that anywhere from 90 percent to 70 percent of their deposits were uninsured. (During a banking panic, uninsured deposits are typically those that head for the exits at the fastest clip.)

But those three failed banks (Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank) were minnows compared to the asset-size of the banking whales which now account for the lion’s share of uninsured deposits in the U.S. banking system.