I mentioned yesterday that 4 out of 3 people have trouble with math, but it doesn’t take a genius to do subtraction. 6 - .2 = 5.8, right? Wouldn’t you like to earn 5.8 percent on your money? The Federal Reserve reports that U.S. households are holding $17.9 trillion in cash and cash equivalents. If your credit union or bank is paying you (and other depositors) .2 percent on your bank account, but owns a portfolio of new Freddie or Fannie loans where borrowers are paying 6 percent, well, that is a darned nice spread. I know that I am simplifying that somewhat, but what bank wouldn’t want that? Along those lines, underwriters are keenly aware that the average monthly payment on a new car loan hit a record high of $686 in June. Household balance sheets are still in good shape after bolstering savings during the height of the pandemic, but we can expect those to ebb with inflation. (Today’s podcast is available here and is sponsored by SimpleNexus, an nCino comp
“Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels… Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields.” Yes, at the end of today we’re halfway through with 2022 (already). Time passes, hair styles, relationships, people, pandemics, and companies come and go. (Today’s joke has to do with the passing of time.) History is made and remembered. Woody Williams, the last surviving WWII Medal of Honor recipient (Iwo Jima), died yesterday at 98, as did Hells Angel founder Sonny Barger. When was the last time COVID made the headlines? Yesterday the Commentary noted, “Remember names like AmeriLoan, Countrywide, PNC, WaMu, Home Savings of America, Fleet, Great Western, World Savings, Associates, Nat City?” My apologies to PNC, and the many who wrote in, saying that it is alive and well. Business cycles are alive and well: With rates escalating higher and the home price appreciation that has taken place, buyer interest has rapidly deteriorat
There are strange things going on out there. Revlon filing for bankruptcy. Atlanta’s mayor calling for limits on investors buying homes. Delta Airlines limiting the amount of time you can spend in its lounge eating cubes of cheese and lukewarm chili. Many high earners are living paycheck to paycheck. What isn’t strange, unfortunately, is lenders’ net worth plummeting, and a good indicator of that is the price of publicly held stocks. loanDepot, which had a high of about $22 per share, hit $1.75 yesterday. Guild Holdings was over $17 per share, now near $10. Rocket over $23 per share now in the mid-$6 range. UWM over $13 per share at one point now in the low $3 range. It is the same story for Homepoint, Mr. Cooper, PennyMac, Finance of America… If you had saved up $1 million dollars in your retirement account and bought loanDepot at the high, it would now be worth $79,500. But remember that these stock prices reflect what is happening in the entire industry,
While we await FEMA to declare the Yellowstone area a disaster (page down and spend 40 seconds watching the video) is “niches to riches” the new informal slogan of loan officers? LOs are certainly watching how higher interest rates have already impacted American homeownership as rising mortgage rates and house prices reduce buyer affordability. At the other ends of the loan process, making the rounds, which capital markets staff say is causing confusion, via ZeroHedge is a blog post from Louis Barnes at Cherry Creek Mortgage declaring MBS going “no-bid”. While many of us can agree liquidity isn’t what it once was, there are still massive volumes of MBS being transacted upon daily. Bid/ask spreads are certainly not as tight as they once were but we are a far cry from the early days of COVID 19 where some dealers outright refused to trade TBA. In other words, liquidity isn’t what it is in a normal market, and bid/ask spreads are wider, but no one
Yesterday in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, at the Indiana Mortgage Bankers Association’s annual conference, one of the non-mortgage conversations that I had was about TV. (Sometimes people talk about shows they’re “streaming.”) I don’t know what’s what: Hulu, Paramount, Paramount+, Dish, Amazon Prime, Disney, Disney Plus, Charter, Verizon, Comcast, You Tube TV, Peacock… can’t we just go back to cable? Maybe not: The number of Americans opting out of cable accelerated in the first quarter of 2022. In 2019 and 2020, a net of 1.1 million subscribers cancelled their cable or over-the-top streaming television, a figure that rose to 1.4 million in the first quarter of 2021 and has now hit 2.5 million cable cancellers in Q1 of this year. Comparing subscriptions in 2022 versus 2018, the only winners are Hulu + Live TV, up 3.1 million subscribers, and FuboTV, up 925,000 subscribers. The rest of the cable landscape? It’s bad: Comcast