I flew into San Diego yesterday for the MCT Exchange, and it is hard not to notice the number of boats in the harbor. For some quick “fun with numbers” on recreational boating: The U.S. state of Florida has the highest number of registered recreational boating vessels in 2020, with almost 959 thousand, closely followed by California. Hawai’i has half as many as Wyoming. In contrast, the District of Columbia had the smallest number of registered boating vessels, with just over two thousand in 2020. Keeping with the “numbers” theme, I receive my share of questions regarding mortgage-backed security statistics. Anyone doing research on them should check out FINRA’s Reporting of Mortgage and Asset Backed Securities (Securitized Products), a little dry but packed with information. I mention this because, as we know, soon the Fed is scheduled to stop buying MBS every week, and for those of you who like graphs, here is the link to the Federal Reserve&
Overheard in the hallway: “My email got hacked again. That’s now the third time I’ve had to rename the cat.” But there’s a lot of other conversation and session topics here in the hallways at the IMB in Nashville. Discussion about the rapidity of the Federal Reserve’s moves in attempting to combat inflation, and how might those moves actually eventually push rates back down if they dampen the economy. How volume and margin projections for 2022 are changing the minds of lenders, potentially turning them into sellers. The impact of Experian Go: a free, first-of-its-kind program designed to help credit invisibles begin building credit on their own terms. The continuing shift by employees, and the mangers managing them, in hybrid work-from-home arrangements. Trends in signing and retention bonuses. (The STRATMOR Group has a compensation survey, as does the MBA’s Compensation Survey.) Conventional servicing multiples up to 5x1! Conventional f