When you’re working from home, how interesting can next Thursday’s, April 28th, “Take Your Children to Work Day” be? WFH, or hybrid arrangements, is a continued concern for managers, and one of the informal topics in the hallways here in Memphis at The Great River Conference is how the next generation of leaders can’t learn how to run a company over Zoom. There are plenty of other things being discussed, such as the cost per loan, as measured by the MBA, increasing for six straight quarters in a row beginning in the 3rd quarter of 2020. On the good news category, it appears that developers are building houses again: Residential home construction unexpectedly rose in March to the highest level seen since 2006, hitting an annualized rate of 1.79 million new homes. That also seems poised to rise, as applications to build hit 1.87 million, which is a proxy for future construction. New house construction in single-family dwellings hit 1.2 million, well abo
It’s Thursday. What should we talk about today? Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter? How about the jump in adjustable-rate locks as evidenced by the MBA’s figures? (Are your LOs well-versed in them?) Their share of applications last week was at 7.4 percent, which was the highest share since June 2019. How about this unique measure of wage inflation? Last night in Manhattan I was chatting with a chef who, when COVID hit, had moved from a fancy restaurant to become a personal chef at three meals a day for a family in New York. The chef had changed jobs, and was now working for (coincidentally) the family of a national home builder who had homes in Miami and Aspen, but only cooking one meal a day at the same compensation for three meals a day a year ago. Or we could talk about the CFPB filing a lawsuit against TransUnion, two of its subsidiaries, and longtime executive John Danaher for violating a 2017 law enforcement order. “The order was issued to stop the company fr
Today is National Beer Day (beer humor below), which made last night Beer Day’s Eve. Here at the CMLA event the talk is not about all of the craft breweries in Denver, but instead a portion of the chatter in the hallways revolves around how lenders stack up on extensions and renegotiations. Compass/Black Knight has some stats for you. The talk also revolves around layoffs (including a new round from Better.com reported by the WSJ), and the stock prices of those companies that have “gone public” in the last few years. Whether it is Guild, UWM, Rocket, Finance of America, or loanDepot, some with distributed retail models, they are all near their all-time lows. Hopefully, no employees put all their retirement eggs in the one basket of their employer! The violent move higher in rates is a discussion topic, of course. Mortgage rates, usually based on a spread to Treasury securities, and with the talk of the Fed aggressively lightning its balance sheet (more in capital m
The Central Bank of Kenya has begun approving lenders’ applications to increase the cost of loans based on customer risks, setting the stage for expensive credit for small traders.