Mortgage Industry News and Insights
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Catching Up
Commentary ~ January 8, 2016 The bells have rung, the ball has dropped, and our two weeks of pretty much ignoring the world have ended. It’s 2016 and we are happily back to the grind. It was actually fairly quiet during the hiatus. The usual data was released, the usual year-end predictions rolled…
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Saved From The Beach
Commentary ~ December 11, 2015 It was one of the slowest weeks for housing and economic data in a very long time. We might have shut off the lights and gone to the beach but for two monthly jobs reports. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation report showed November to be another…
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Anti-climatic
Commentary ~ December 18, 2015 They finally did it and no one was the least bit surprised. At their two day meeting that ended Wednesday afternoon, the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee (FMOC) took the step they have been teasing markets with for months and raised the fed funds rate by a quarter…
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Playing Catch-Up
Commentary ~ December 4, 2015 While most of us were more engaged by cooking, eating, visiting, and shopping than by what was happening on the housing front, the gears ground on without us. There is a lot to catch up on. Three major price indices–the Case-Shiller and the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s indices…
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Re-Funded
Commentary ~ November 20, 2015 The Annual Report to Congress from Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro centered around some big news this week. The Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund (MMIF), which backs up the FHA mortgage guarantee, has recovered to its legally required capital ratio, 2% of its outstanding mortgage balances, and did…
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Rate Watch Redux
Commentary ~ November 13, 2015 The guessing game is on again. The October Employment Situation report that came out last Friday has left economists grasping for superlatives. The numbers were way above what analysts were looking for–somewhere around 190,000 new jobs. Instead non-farm payrolls grew by 271,000, the largest increase since last December.…