Mon, Aug 24 2015, 5:35 PM
It'll be hard to miss today's news as it related to equities markets. Even the non-financial news will be talking about today's 588 point drop in the...
Mon, Aug 24 2015, 3:41 PM
Fannie
Mae's economic team said on Monday that the economic outlook for the second
half of 2015 is less upbeat than anticipated.
Second quarter ...
Fri, Aug 21 2015, 12:21 PM
The rest of the global marketplace is harshing the mellow of US bond markets. Treasuries and MBS are wondering what all the fuss is about , having h...
Fri, Aug 21 2015, 10:58 AM
The eyes of Texas are upon the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau - and not in a kindly way. Two
different actions out of Texas are challenging ...
Fri, Aug 21 2015, 10:47 AM
Black Knight Financial Services released its "First Look" at
its July loan level performance data which continues to show a decline in most
measures...
Fri, Aug 21 2015, 9:37 AM
What does the CFPB think of residential lenders? One indication might be the videos of borrower horror stories
posted on its website. I, for one, ...
Fri, Aug 21 2015, 7:33 AM
The "Death Cross" will be back in the news soon if stocks have many more days like yesterday (that's when the 50-day moving average falls below the ...
Fri, Aug 21 2015, 5:12 PM
Mortgage rates moved moderately lower yet again. This extends a winning streak that began on July 14th, making it the longest positive trend in 2...
Fri, Aug 21 2015, 5:12 PM
About 10 days into July's bond market rally, I posed the question: What if 2015 doesn't turn out to be the big bounce ? It started out with the fo...
Thu, Aug 20 2015, 11:00 AM
While first-time buyers fell back,
existing home sales scored their third consecutive monthly gain in July. The National Association of Realtors® (N...
Thu, Aug 20 2015, 9:03 AM
I
continue to hear about the overkill in paperwork as lenders attempt to
cover their collective "assets" against potential liabilities. But that
...
Thu, Aug 20 2015, 7:33 AM
As we discussed in yesterday's close , The general message received from the FOMC Minutes is that the Fed is far more dependent on incoming data ...
Thu, Aug 20 2015, 7:01 PM
Mortgage rates continued lower today, bringing most lenders to their best levels in more than 3 months. The average conventional 30yr fixed rate ...
Thu, Aug 20 2015, 7:01 PM
It was a classic risk-off trade today, albeit with a certain level of exhaustion on the part of US bond markets. "Risk-off" means what it says: inv...
Thu, Aug 20 2015, 1:21 PM
By the time yesterday's FOMC Minutes were out, European and Asian markets were already closed. As such, their overnight reaction was not too surprisi...
Wed, Aug 19 2015, 12:59 PM
There have been some pretty decent swings in prices/yields this morning if we're basing our notions of volatility on more recent ranges. For instance...
Wed, Aug 19 2015, 9:10 AM
Yesterday
the commentary noted how jumbo lending was alive and well, at least for
depository banks. Zillow recently analyzed what areas would be m...
Wed, Aug 19 2015, 8:46 AM
What little life there was in
mortgage volume last week came from refinancing. That wasn't saying much. The Mortgage Bankers Association's (MBA's) ...
Wed, Aug 19 2015, 7:58 PM
Ellie Mae said this
week that the closing rate for purchase mortgages reached 70.7 percent in July
up from 69.0 in June. This is the
highest r...
Wed, Aug 19 2015, 7:40 PM
Mortgage rates dropped today --largely in response to the release of the Minutes from the most recent Fed meeting. The Minutes don't convey any po...
Wed, Aug 19 2015, 7:37 PM
I'm not going to launch into a detailed assessment of every passage in today's FOMC Minutes. Instead, I'm going to talk about how the Fed has been ma...
Wed, Aug 19 2015, 7:33 AM
FOMC Minutes today! Time to find out if the Fed even matters or if markets have just been consolidating for their own reasons. Granted, the Fed al...
Tue, Aug 18 2015, 12:25 PM
Much like yesterday, today's economic data was far enough from consensus to move markets. Unlike yesterday, the movement was in an unfriendly direc...
Tue, Aug 18 2015, 10:53 AM
The level of cash sales remains high in
several states, mostly those also still experiencing a high level of
foreclosures . CoreLogic said on Tues...
Tue, Aug 18 2015, 10:48 AM
Permits for residential construction fell sharply in July,
down 16.3 percent from June while remaining 7.5 percent above the level of one year
earl...
Tue, Aug 18 2015, 10:34 AM
Under
the "fun with numbers" category, several readers wrote in yesterday
regarding the CFPB's semi-annual numbers: "The report noted that during ...
Tue, Aug 18 2015, 7:33 AM
It's a very interesting time for interest rates in the US. Once again, what had been broad consensus on the long-term direction of rates is turning o...
Tue, Aug 18 2015, 5:34 PM
Mortgage rates moved back up today, but continue holding well-inside last week's range. "Movement" is a relative term these days considering it's...
Tue, Aug 18 2015, 5:34 PM
The fun thing about FOMC Minutes releases is that we can never be sure if they're going to cause drama for rates until we see how markets react. Whet...
Mon, Aug 17 2015, 11:57 AM
Builder confidence remained stable this month. The National Association of Home Builders
(NAHB)/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) added a point...
Mon, Aug 17 2015, 9:58 AM
Thank you to Mark Baker with Cardinal Financial sent over a story about dear people who live in fancy tiny houses . An appraiser's nightmare or a Mil...
Mon, Aug 17 2015, 7:33 AM
"The Committee anticipates that it will be appropriate to raise the target range for the federal funds rate when it has seen some further improvement ...
Mon, Aug 17 2015, 5:58 PM
Mortgage rates improved just slightly today, but for most lenders, it was enough to erase the weakness seen last Friday. Behind the move was much...
Mon, Aug 17 2015, 5:58 PM
When we talk about "summertime volatility," we're NOT talking about the sorts of big day-to-day swings seen earlier this year. Instead, summertime ...
Mon, Aug 17 2015, 5:24 PM
While the Millennial generation is generating a lot of
attention, concern, and ink a Freddie Mac executive says it would be wise to
remember that th...
Mon, Aug 17 2015, 1:01 PM
Overnight and early morning trading was as calm as summertime Mondays tend to be. The day's first data--Empire State Manufacturing--doesn't typically...
Fri, Aug 14 2015, 12:52 PM
The affordability of homeownership dipped modestly in the
second quarter according to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells
Fargo Housing ...
Fri, Aug 14 2015, 12:21 PM
It's been an uncharacteristically volatile morning for bond markets considering the economic calendar and the day of the week. We've had PPI, Indus...
Fri, Aug 14 2015, 10:19 AM
The
fact that outstanding auto loans have passed the $1 trillion mark is
garnering headlines, as well as Ohio's vote on legalizing marijuana and...
Fri, Aug 14 2015, 7:32 AM
Surprisingly enough, this week's big, volatility-inducing event leaves US bond markets mostly where they were before the big volatility-inducing event...
Fri, Aug 14 2015, 4:42 PM
MBS prices are cutting a beautiful (or ugly, in terms of the implication) "Z" on the chart today. Prices were higher to start the morning and moved...
Fri, Aug 14 2015, 2:32 PM
Mortgage rates were just slightly higher on average for a third straight day. Much of this week was spent focusing on the effects of China's deci...
Thu, Aug 13 2015, 11:30 AM
So far, the trading day has gone as you would expect it to go if you agreed with the premise in the morning commentary . Namely, without Chinese c...
Thu, Aug 13 2015, 10:04 AM
Applications for the purchase of newly constructed homes fell
off slightly in July, a decline that the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA)
said was i...
Thu, Aug 13 2015, 10:01 AM
"Texas alone accounts for 15% of all new single family homes built in the United States." I find this factoid interesting on a number of levels, an...
Thu, Aug 13 2015, 7:33 AM
Chinese currency devaluation had quickly grabbed almost every available top news headline by yesterday evening. Yet while the rest of the world was...
Thu, Aug 13 2015, 6:51 PM
The Mortgage Bankers Associations National Delinquency
Survey provides another measure of the declining rate of distress in
residential mortgages. ...
Thu, Aug 13 2015, 6:47 PM
The headline is the recap. There's not much more to it than that. Ever since China stepped in to stem the tide of currency weakness yesterday aftern...
Thu, Aug 13 2015, 5:07 PM
Mortgage rates continued higher today as the recent volatility in global markets subsided. Treasury yields and mortgage rates both benefited from...
Wed, Aug 12 2015, 11:37 AM
”Rob,
I've heard that the fines that a company pays to the CFPB are tax
deductible. So therefore the money is just transferred from one
governme...
