IMF: No Bottom in Sight for Housing

It’s been roughly one year since the mortgage and financial market turmoil first began in the subprime market — and on Monday, a report from the International Monetary Fund suggested that we’re nowhere near out of the woods yet. “Credit quality across many loan classes has begun to deteriorate with declining house prices and slowing economic growth,” said the IMF’s latest Global Financial Stability Report Market Update. “Although banks have succeeded in raising additional capital, balance sheets are under renewed stress and bank equity prices have fallen sharply.” The update was released 11 days after the IMF published its latest forecast for the world economy—now clouded by the impact of high energy prices and anxieties about rising inflation. The IMF said it expects global growth to slow significantly from 5 percent in 2007 to 4.1 percent in 2008 and 3.9 percent in 2009. Problems at home Here in the U.S., housing is the single largest threat to the real economy, according to the IMF; and on that front, things don’t exactly shape up positively. “At the moment, a bottom for the housing market is not visible,” the IMF report said. At a press briefing, Jaime Caruana, director of the IMF’s monetary and capital markets department said that extraordinary steps by central banks in mature markets had succeeded in capping systemic risk. “However, in the context of the deleveraging process and uncertainty about asset valuations, credit risks remain elevated, indicating that further raising of capital may be needed in a number of financial institutions,” he said. Raising capital, however, could prove to be problematic for more than a few U.S.-based financial institutions, whose shares have been pummeled in recent weeks. The Dow Jones industrials fell a whopping 240 points on Monday as investors continue to display anxiety over financials, led in part by the report. Not helping matters was the failure of two more banks last Friday, either. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index declined 23.39, or 1.86 percent, to close Monday at 1,234.37. Related links: full IMF Global Financial Stability Report