While we had news today of the British Prime Minister resigning, yesterday my doctor asked if anyone in my family suffers from mental illness. I replied, "No, we all seem to enjoy it." Suffering from a lack of liquidity is the death knell for lenders and certainly nothing to joke about. Want to know the quickest way to shut your business down? Don’t return your warehouse bank’s phone call. In the secondary markets, if no one is interested in buying the products we’re manufacturing, that isn’t good news. So headlines of stories in the Wall Street Journal like, “Recession Fears Hit Risky Mortgage Debt Amid Default Concerns” are a real problem. (Subscription needed.) Housing and lending, “upstream” and “downstream,” is our focus, and economist Elliot Eisenberg summed things up. “With 30-year mortgage rates steadily climbing and now at 7 percent, it is unsurprising the NAHB Housing Market Index f
The big news in the Chrisman household is my cat Myrtle being offered a big signing bonus by the family next door. Apparently, word of her mousing prowess has spread. Myrtle’s tight-lipped on the details, but I assume it involves line-caught halibut and wild salmon tidbits. When I brought it up, she glared at me as if to say, “Hey, it’s a free market.” At 10, Myrtle’s no spring chicken, and I told her that she’d better think long and hard about it since there seem to be fewer mice around to catch. (Stay tuned!) Lenders are seeing fewer loans to originate, and thus fewer loans for the secondary markets so every opportunity to pick up a few pennies or set up a new product is scrutinized. Besides spending their time setting pricing and margins, capital markets staff are usually looking for new investors (there are plenty on Mortgage Elements; just select the state and then the program) and there’s a new jumbo loan identifier for The Rule To
“Common sense is not a gift. It's a punishment because you have to deal with everyone who doesn't have it.” This is a tough market, and common sense usually isn’t enough to get through it. Lenders have expressed the need for advice on how to stop the bleeding by employing effective revenue tactics and optimizing efficiencies in their back-office operations. Identifying key areas in which to focus via informed benchmark data is a critical component to designing and deploying impactful tactics. STRATMOR can help. Contact CEO Lisa Springer to learn more. Did someone say revenue? Bicycles, which saw an unprecedented surge in demand over the course of the pandemic, are seeing sales come back down to earth. In the first six months of the year, revenue at bicycle shops in the U.S. was down 7 percent compared to the same six months of 2021. That’s a slight miss, but the business overall is still up substantially off the pre-pandemic levels. (Availabl
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
English grammar… what a hassle. Is it "lay" or "lie"? - Are you sure you're using them correctly? “Than” versus “then?” One should use “than” only with a comparative adjective, like taller than, faster than, as in, Apocalypse Now is better than The Deer Hunter. “Then” is used for time, like at that moment, or after. Or “I lost $100 at blackjack, and then lost another $100 in craps.” Speaking of gambling losses, ever heard of loss aversion, a theory which behavioral economists will tell you drives many of our financial decisions? People feel the pain of losses much more than they feel the pleasure of gains. Empirical studies suggest that losing is twice as painful as winning is enjoyable. So people will go to great lengths to avoid losses, and to recover what they’ve lost. Politicians often play on this (voters have lost the good old days and want them back, an