Page 31 - Broker Software News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Let’s have a non-mortgage opening paragraph. Today is “Remember Pearl Harbor Day.” (If you like history, you gotta click on that link and see what is on there. Do a search.) The richest person in the world in the 1940s was Henry Ford, and when he died in 1947 his worth was about $200 billion in current dollars. (John D. Rockefeller became the first billionaire in 1916.) I mention these snapshots because one New Jersey industry vet wrote to me saying, “There are about 720 billionaires living in the USA, almost 1/4 of worldwide billionaires. The Administration is hiri...

“Hey Chet, since you’re the new guy here with the park U.S. Geological Survey in Hawai’i, you’re going to be the one placing the live cam on the volcano for our YouTube feed. Splendid! We’ll be behind you all the way.” (Apply to mortgage banking however you see fit.) Scooting back to lending, I am occasionally asked about high balance conforming conventional loans, and why so much of the country doesn’t care about them (to be somewhat blunt). The MBA put out a fine map showing “high-cost areas” defined by the FHFA as “areas ...

Robert K. writes, “My Mom always said, ‘Work until your bank account looks like a phone number. Well, I did it! ‘Available balance: $911.’” Speaking of numbers, thank you to those who wrote to me correcting the GDP of Mexico here as being $1.4 trillion and not $1.4 billion. Numbers certainly tell the story with vendors and lenders. Owners of vendors and third-party providers are looking at middle layers of management, cutting back, certainly cutting salaries, or ridding themselves of unproductive salespeople. Lenders continue to cut staff (Wells Fargo being t...

Our industry continues to be battered. Starwood Capital-backed Reverse Mortgage Funding and its parent company Reverse Mortgage Investment Trust have filed for bankruptcy. Inlanta Mortgage told the state of Wisconsin it plans to wind down its business. Switching gears, to celebrate the first day of December, spend 5 minutes taking one of my favorite quizzes, focused on figuring out where you’re from based on the words you use for certain common things. (What do you call the little bug that rolls up into a ball when you touch it? Sneakers versus tennis shoes? Y’all versus you guys...

Everyone is watching the value of their 401(k) plan go down. You should be watching it go down from “across the pond,” sitting at a sidewalk café in Paris. Anyone traveling in Europe is rejoicing at the exchange rate: Things are more affordable for American tourists this summer, with the exchange rate between the euro and the dollar now about equal. It's the first time since 2002 (in the early years of the euro's existence) that the ratio came close to 1:1, but could come at a cost of global economic stability. The Fed is on track to continue hiking inter...