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 fell to 38 in October, the 10th straight monthly decline, and outside of Covid, its worst level since 8/12. First-time mortgage applications are down 38.3 percent Y-o-Y and refi is down 85.9 percent Y-o-Y. Lastly, single-family starts are off 18.5 percent Y-o-Y, but less costly multifamily starts are up 17.6 percent Y-o-Y as builders focus on rentals.” (Today’s podcast is available here and features an interview with TRUE’s Bob Noble on using AI to create accurate data that powers automation and optimizes every step of the lending lifecycle. This week’s is sponsored by EarnUp, reinventing payment and data flows in real estate ecosystems, origination, mortgage, and fintech.)