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
Jordan Peele met his famous comedy partner Keegan-Michael Key around 2002 at Second City in Chicago, and eventually performed this classic routine that every air traveler should see. This morning I head to Chicago, and from there to the MMLA event in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. Given my time with originators last week, the email traffic over the weekend, lenders are very concerned about overcapacity and therefore overhead. On a micro level, staff that may have been held onto “just in case” volume picked up are being reviewed. On a bigger scale, owners of lenders and vendors have seen their values decline and mergers and acquisitions are definitely a topic. The latest example of this is Denver’s Proprietary Capital announcing plans to buy 100 percent of New Jersey’s American Financial Resources (AFR); employees and counterparties were told Friday. And on a macro level, this week the economic calendar features fresh updates on inflation, with both the July Consume