After dominating the news cycle for weeks, the debt ceiling issue is suddenly resolved and the bond market doesn't seem to care. The jobs report proved to be far more relevant, but with half of it indicating a much stronger labor market and the other half saying the opposite, who's telling the […]

What Debt Ceiling? Yields Follow NFP Higher After being utterly bombarded for weeks, newswire feeds at trading terminals are suddenly devoid of debt ceiling headlines.  To be fair, there have been a few mentions of final approval set for this weekend, but […]

Nonfarm payrolls were up 339k, well above the 190k forecast.  At the same time, unemployment rose from 3.4% to 3.7%, well above the 3.5% forecast.  How can these two numbers coexist and how does the market decide which one to believe? The first thing to understand about "the jobs report" is […]

While lenders are grappling with steadily increasing Agency repurchase requests, it’s National Donut Day! Someone had better offer those folks at State Farm Insurance a donut… maybe they’ll change their mind about cutting off insuring properties in California. Three thousand miles away, I […]

Data-Driven Rally, But There's Bigger Data Ahead Yesterday's economic data made for a bit of back and forth in the bond market with Fed speakers ultimately riding to the rescue by forwarding the notion of "skipping" a rate hike at the upcoming meeting.  […]

Bonds had been hoping for econ data to reinforce a ceiling after a recent run to the highest yields in months and the past few days have delivered.  The resilience has drawn both on the data and on several Fed speakers forwarding the notion of "skipping" the rate hike on June 14th.  All this […]

The United States has about 336 million people. Did you know that 1/3 of them live within a 500-mile radius of Nashville? This is a cool site for anyone putting together a sales presentation for a real estate agent or a borrower. Speaking of geography, Wyoming has 23 counties, not 58 as the […]

After hitting the highest levels in several months last Friday, mortgage rates have fallen fairly quickly in the new week.  As bond markets improved this afternoon, many lenders were able to make mid-day adjustments.  That brought the average top tier 30yr fixed rate down to the lowest levels […]

Domestic Events Mostly Overshadowed by European Influence While we can trace some of this morning's back and forth market movement to domestic economic data (Chicago PMI helped, JOLTS hurt), it was the European market hand-off that set the tone for today's […]

The big news so far this week is the absence of any concrete conclusion to the debt ceiling debate (delivered in box labelled "debt ceiling debate solution").  The solution would effectively be to punt on actual decisions until after the next presidential election, but that still requires some […]