Time flies (see joke at bottom), and here we are at Pearl Harbor Day already. “I'm a multitasker. I can listen, ignore, and forget all at the same time!” Occasionally someone will accuse me of having a sense of humor. If true, it can be traced back to my parents, but a portion of it came from watching Norman Lear’s shows like All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Maude, The Jeffersons, and movies like The Princess Bride (“as you wish”). Mr. Lear died yesterday, but his impact will be long felt. Audiences loved his shows. Does your customer love you, no matter the price? That’s the case with Coke. The average price of a 12-ounce can of Diet Coke in a package of 12 was 34 cents in 2018 but hit 56 cents per can in October 2023, a 65 percent increase. In general, Diet or regular, prices have shot up: The average price of a Diet Coke at a restaurant hopped up from $2.05 to $2.77. Inflation at many levels is impacting rates, including Treasury
You should know that caffeine increases the power of aspirin and other painkillers, which is why it is found in some medicines. You should also know the “50-50-90 rule”, which definitely applies to me: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90 percent probability you'll get it wrong. Cute sayings aside, one thing you don’t want to be wrong on is Fair Lending, and every lender, and their employees, should know the rules and regulations surrounding it, and know that its enforcement is a priority of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and is often mentioned in its Supervisory Highlights. In today’s “Mortgage Matters” presented by Lenders One (at 2PM ET, 11AM PT) attorney Brian Levy addresses Fair Lending, as well as the NAR verdict and other “hot” legal and compliance topics. Today’s podcast can be found here, and this week is sponsored by nCino makers of the nCino Mortgage Sui
National MI turned heads yesterday by announcing its temporary increase to AUS conforming loan amounts, despite the official FHFA word not coming until the end of November. (More below on the amounts.) Our biz is filled with “numbers people,” good or bad. According to Curinos, September 2023 funded mortgage volume decreased 30 percent YoY and 14 percent MoM. The average 30-year conforming retail funded rate in September was 7.01 percent, 18bps higher than August and 146bps higher than the same month last year. (Curinos sources a statistically significant data set directly from lenders to produce these benchmark figures.) Inventory and sales aren’t helping. Economist Dr. Elliot Eisenberg summed things up. “August data showed MoM housing starts down 11.3 percent to their lowest level since 6/20, the NAHB housing index down sharply M-o-M for the second month in a row, and new home sales weakening 8.7 percent MoM, the biggest decline since 9/22. Existing housing
McDonald’s taking 9 years to eliminate its self-serve soda pop machines. (Couldn’t they take 5 hours and just move the machines behind the counter?) In other non-mortgage news, arguably more interesting to talk about than the continued decline in mortgage applications and IMBs concerned about CRA requirements (STRATMOR’s current blog is titled, “Knowing CRA Developments is Critical”), remember when it was Ford, GM, and Chrysler? The third largest automaker in the world is VinFast, a Vietnamese electric vehicle manufacturer that was founded in 2017 and listed on the Nasdaq this month with a market cap of $191 billion! This is behind only Tesla ($760 billion) and Toyota ($270 billion), and well ahead of Chinese car maker BYD ($90 billion) and Volkswagen ($70 billion). VinFast, which entered the electric vehicle market last year, is planning to build a factory in North Carolina. Oh, and Ford is at $49 billion, GM $46 billion. Yes, rankings of all industr
Dang there’s a lot going on in Texas. One week it’s raining “hail the size of goat balls” (not my term; it was the phrase used by the woman mortgage banker who wrote me), the next week the state is experiencing a heat “dome” while malaria is in the headlines and a San Antonio airport ramp worker was sucked into a jet engine (ruled a suicide). Meanwhile, per the latest report from the Dallas Fed, “Texas home prices have headed steadily higher, a byproduct of rising housing demand and pandemic-related supply shortages.” For any originator interested in demographics like that, on a national scale, in doing some work for The STRATMOR Group I came across the article, “The Racial Segregation of American Cities Was Anything but Accidental.” And in the capital markets, mortgage rates have gone up faster than the 10-year. The spread between the 30-year fixed rate mortgage and the 10-year bond yield has surpassed the highs of