Things are a little rosier in the commercial and multi-family sector. The MBA reports that in the 3rd quarter loan originations came in 98% higher than during the same period last year and 10% higher than the second quarter. “Mortgage originations by life company portfolios hit another new record in the third quarter,” said MBA [...]

For those out there rooting for the non-agency (jumbo) market to come roaring back, there is a step in the right direction. Pricing engine Optimal Blue has released Redwood Trust’s Jumbo Fixed and ARM products. Redwood has seen a solid increase in their number of clients, percentage-wise, in the last year, and with good reason. [...]

Josh Brown at TheReformedBroker is fascinated by and scared of the Chinese growth story for good reason. On the truly scary side, he highlights the home market paragraph below from David Leonhardt’s NYT feature on China. Post-boom U.S. Realtors take heart: you’ve (probably!) never resorted to setting up shop on the sidewalk. This reminds me [...]

Markets Don’t Know What To Do If you’re a trader, running a position and inclined to make occasional knee-jerk buy/sell decisions based on economic news, what would you have done yesterday with these headlines: Producer Prices show inflation is less than expected, Industrial Production rose 0.5% in October, the most in three months, Capacity Utilization [...]

Don’t Fight The Fed At this point, expectations are that the overnight Fed Funds rate stays near 0% well into 2011, if not further. And traders know the old saying, “Don’t fight the Fed”. We’ve already seen this with low rates – and no one expects rates to trend higher in the near future. For [...]

Bond Bubble? WSJ has the latest bond bubble talk, saying bond markets are growing riskier as investors seeking steady returns bid up prices and ignore some early warning signs similar to those that flashed during the credit bubble. Last week, prices on high-yield, or junk, bonds hit their highest level since 2007, nearly double their [...]

No More MBS Buying From Fed Rates continue to trend lower, helped yesterday by the release of the FOMC meeting’s minutes which alluded to the possibility of the Fed reinvesting in MBS’s. (But heck, as one trader told me, low mortgage rates are helping agency-qualified borrowers, not others in the economy like renters who can’t [...]

Guns & Mortgages This story speaks for itself, here’s the link and the epic lead paragraph below: Prosecutors: Mortgage Worker Got Drunk, Shot Computer Server A Salt Lake City mortgage company employee allegedly got drunk, opened fired on his firm’s computer server with a .45-caliber automatic, and then told police someone had stolen his gun [...]

Which Bonds Are Mortgage Rates Tied To? Rates on mortgage loans up to $417k and up to $729k are tied to trading in “agency” mortgage-backed bonds—meaning bonds issued by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. So while many look to the 10yr Treasury Note for clues on mortgage rates, they should be looking at [...]

Treasury Auctions Weigh on Markets Yesterday’s $42 billion 5-yr auction did not go well. It goes back to the “What if we held an auction and nobody bid?” Indirect bids, which in the past indicated a level of interest from foreign entities but in the last year became a little convoluted, have been on a [...]