Goodbye, 2009. Typing “2009″ is so much easier than typing “2010″, but such is life. And folks who are better at using words than I am (“than me”?) say 2010 is pronounced “twenty-ten”, not “two-thousand ten”. Speaking of “2’s” and “1’s”, The U.S. Treasury had a record year of debt sales last year, selling more [...]

Economic/Market News Roundup The big mid-day news yesterday was the Fed’s announcement. They are leaving overnight rates unchanged, as expected, but the markets were more interested in the verbiage of the statement. “Economic activity has continued to pick up and that the deterioration in the labor market is abating. The housing sector has shown some [...]

Repeat after me: Fed Funds are set by the Federal Open Market Committee, don’t vary daily, and have no direct bearing on 30-yr mortgage rates. 30-yr mortgage rates are set by supply and demand through the bond markets, vary every day, and prices are adjusted by what investors & servicers want to see flowing into [...]

An uncle once told me, “I’ve had bad luck with both my wives. The first one left me. And the second one didn’t.” In a story from Reuters, both Deutsche Bank and France’s BNP Paribas SA separately sued Bank of America last Wednesday, “claiming that the largest U.S. bank breached its obligations on a total [...]