I did an interview for the ABC, on the RBA Financial Stability Review. Here is the transcript, courtesy of the ABC. The link to the interview, and my longer interview can be found at the ABC site.
By way of context, a quick reminder of current house price trends from the Economist:
CHRIS UHLMANN: The Reserve Bank (RBA) has given its strongest warning yet that a dangerous property price bubble in Sydney and Melbourne could destabilise the economy.
It’s now ramping up talks with other regulators to introduce lending controls to head off the risk of a damaging correction in prices.
With more I’m joined by our business editor, Peter Ryan.
And Peter, these warning have been around for the past year. Is the Reserve Bank starting on the back foot?
PETER RYAN: Well, this was certainly very strong language from the RBA yesterday that investment in Australian property is now becoming “unbalanced” and that the speculation increases the potential for current stellar prices to fall.
Now the RBA is now worried about the broader impact of any correction or a hard landing and how that would hurt not just the speculators but average Australians whose biggest single investment is usually the family home.
The property analyst Martin North says unless the RBA intervenes with tighter controls, there could be a correction in the range of 20 to 25 per cent and that some borrowers could find themselves overwhelmed in debt – in other words facing negative equity.
MARTIN NORTH: Property prices have been high for a long period of time so this is not just a little bubble. This is a long term systemic issue.
So what’s been happening is it’s been sucking a lot of money from people’s pockets out to pay the mortgage, right? Secondly, people have been committing to buy at the top of the market and so if prices were to move down, a lot of people who’ve bought relatively recently would be out of the money and that’s very significant.
A lot of those are investors – and investors will change their tune quite quickly, you know, particularly if capital growth is no longer in the sector. So yeah, this is a very unstable situation.
Also, the banks have a huge exposure to property, probably one of the highest exposures in the world and that means that whatever happens to the property market is going to impact not only individuals but also the banks as well.
PETER RYAN: If there was a correction and those property speculators decided to sell while they could and the market was flooded with properties, what impact would that have on the general market?
MARTIN NORTH: We will probably see a downward swing and that downward swing would gain quite a lot of momentum. I wouldn’t be surprised to see prices slipping by 20 to 25 per cent. It will probably self-correct a little bit beyond that but it’s that, it’s that sort of slide down and then up which is the problem.
PETER RYAN: And that of course is a huge problem for borrowers who bought at the top of the market, borrowed too much and are now over their heads in debt.
MARTIN NORTH: The real issue there of course is all the people will find that they’re in negative equity at a point. In other words, they can’t then sell. So we could find the situation where people are trying to sell, are being forced to sell. That will tend to drive prices further down, probably languish for quite some time because we have to correct back to long term averages between income and property prices in my view.
So this is more like I think the early signs of some of the things that happened in the US prior to the GFC.
CHRIS UHLMANN: Property analyst Martin North.
So Peter, can we expect to see action on lending controls from the Reserve Bank?
PETER RYAN: Well, the RBA governor Glenn Stevens is speaking in Melbourne later today and as always his comments will be scrutinised on perhaps when and how the RBA might intervene to prevent any property bubble bursting.
CHRIS UHLMANN: Business editor Peter Ryan, thank you.
