Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Memetrics
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
| Last | Change | |
| S&P futures | 2875 | -15 |
| Oil (WTI) | 61.27 | -0.13 |
| 10 year government bond yield | 2.43% | |
| 30 year fixed rate mortgage | 4.17% |
Stocks are lower this morning on no real news. Bonds and MBS are up.
Trade fears have been the driver of negative sentiment in the markets this week after Trump tweeted that he is considering increasing tariffs on Chinese goods this week. It turns out that Beijing sent a marked-up agreement that basically reneged on most of their former commitments, which is what drove the response from the US.
There were 7.5 million job openings at the end of March, according to BLS. The quits rate was unchanged at 2.3%. Quits rose in real estate and fell in construction. Job openings are pretty much close to record levels and exceed the numbers we saw in 2000. This is the 13th straight month where the number of openings has exceeded the number of unemployed.
Mortgage applications rose 2.7% last week as purchases rose 4% and refis rose 1%. We saw a good week for the spring home buying season, as a 5 percent increase in purchase applications–both weekly and year-over-year–drove the results,” said MBA Associate Vice President of Economic and Industry Forecasting Joel Kan. “Average loan amounts also stayed elevated, with government purchase applications rising to the highest in the survey. Even with slower price appreciation in higher-priced markets, home prices are still rising enough to push average loan sizes higher.” The increase in government applications was driven by VA purchase activity. The typical 30 year fixed rate mortgage fell 4 basis points to 4.27%.
Speaking of VA loans, the government has sent subpoenas to at least 8 lenders seeking information regarding delinquencies and prepayments. VA prepay speeds have been an issue for both the government and investors. VA has recently put out a request for input from various stakeholders regarding VA loans and prepay speeds and is considering making some high LTV VA loan ineligible for GNMA multi-issuer pools, which would almost certainly negatively affect pricing.
Newco spelled backwards reported a first quarter loss, due to a negative mark on their MSR book. The mark was probably due more to interest rates than anything else, as both prepayments and delinquencies fell. Yet another instance where investors have loaded up the boat buying MSRs ahead of an expected increase in interest rates, only to see them head back down. This has pretty much been the story for the past several years.
Filed under: Economy, Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
If Trump wants to troll the media, he’ll confirm the NYT tax return story and use it to promote his book written at the same time, “The Art of the Comeback”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Trump’s uniquely dangerous and incompetent.
https://hotair.com/archives/2019/05/08/theresa-may-joe-biden-sinking-special-relationship/
LikeLike
Joe Biden is liberal Trump-lite. And don’t think the AOC crowd isn’t going to see him that way.
LikeLike
Vox lives in it’s own special world:
“Ranking celebrity chef cookbooks … by how many animals their recipes kill
A study counted how many animals you’d have to kill to cook all the recipes in these cookbooks.
By Dylan Matthews
May 8, 2019, 9:00am EDT”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/5/8/18535394/paula-deen-rachael-ray-cookbook-keto-vegetarian-meat-animals-killed
LikeLike
And the #1 cookbook is the one that kills the most animals, right? That’s the one to buy the meat-eater in your life.
Although I think they should rank them by actual pounds of meat consumed. Mmmm.
LikeLike
Guess what, it’s not really about climate change:
“A Green New Deal Needs to Fight US Militarism
By Phyllis Bennis
We can’t heal the climate if our war machine keeps raining destruction, absorbing resources, and gobbling up fossil fuels all around the world. Here’s how to stop it.”
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/05/green-new-deal-fight-militarism-imperialism
LikeLike
Climate change is nothing more than the latest in a long line of excuses the left will use to justify more government control and higher taxes.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Green New Deal is just New Deal War on Poverty Redux–an umbrella under which to advance us that much closer to a socialist utopia. It will cover everything a good, modern socialist fresh out of academia could want–or as much of it as they can cram in there–because everything the left wants is, by definition, good for the planet. IT JUST MAKES GOOD SENSE!
LikeLike
Climate Change is eugenics without the illustrative example of the holocaust to put off the intelligentsia. And, much like eugenics, is constructed around an absolute moral conviction, immovable by fact or logic and untainted by humility, that we know things we simply don’t, can do things we presently cannot, and have certainty about things we can have zero certainty on.
LikeLike
The comments echo that completely.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-end-of-the-everything-may-be-what-weve-been-needing/2019/05/07/902027ac-7101-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html?utm_term=.29fe870a1255
LikeLike
From the comments (and this is what it’s all about for them): “Don’t act like you care about the environment as long as you’re a republican. You’re just a hypocrite!”
It’s tribal religiosity. Cap-and-trade and the Paris Climate Accords did nothing and do nothing and would never have done anything but virtue signal, and if the planet is in peril, virtue signaling won’t do anything to help it. You know what would really help the climate? Criminal penalties for misgendering and a Universal Basic Income. Because Gaia demands it!
Do keep in mind that any environmental cause is a *lost cause* without very significant population growth limits, indeed population reduction. Right now, the global population is growing by around 250,000 people per day. Um…
And of course we also need free contraception, abortion, and perhaps mandatory reversible sterilization and government control over reproduction rights. For mother earth!
Which gets to my complaints about it all being religious posturing and virtue signaling. This complainer is complaining about something that has been getting better for 30 years: the rate of population increase has been going down.
And if you’re going to try and target the major reproducers for their threat to the planet, it’s going to be the poor and minorities hardest hit. Do those folks really want to unravel the thread about how Muslims need to stop having babies because they are threatening the earth?
Eh, I gotta get out of the comments. And I’m only three or four deep.
LikeLike
well, as we all know, we would run everything on solar and wind if we only banned the kochs and exxon from lobbying and shut down fox
LikeLike
As to the article: A new United Nations report projecting the extinction of one-eighth of all animal and plant species should rattle the cages of any remaining skeptics regarding climate change and the central role humans have played in Earth’s accelerating destruction.
Except not only do we not know that, we can’t possibly know that. It’s all guesswork. Because we literally don’t really know how many species have gone extinct, we’re not sure ever species we say is extinct actually is, we don’t know how many species there are in full, and we have no way of knowing what is going to drive certain species to extinction.
Which doesn’t even get to: how much does it matter? What are we talking about going extinct? Certainly not polar bears, whose populations have been growing.
Nothing in today’s headlines compares to the catastrophic potential posed by climate change and the decimating effects of careless consumerism around the globe
When you essentially get to make up your headlines without recourse to facts–then, yes. Any Baptist preacher sermonizing on the apocalypse would no doubt agree.
“the health of ecosystems on which we and all species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”
There is no evidence of this. At all.
Everything is speeding up, including the temperature and acidification of oceans, which contribute to the loss of coral reefs
Again, we don’t actually know this specifically, and don’t know that we’re actually identifying a unique problem with coral reefs. Lots of evidence reefs die and rebound, and there are disagreements as to weather any of the dire things being said about coral reefs dying are true at all.
Meanwhile, the world’s population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion by mid-century, according to the United Nations. Already, it has tripled since 1950.
The population growth rate has been going down since the 1970s. North America’s growth rate is negative. Europe and Central Asia is even more negative. High growth rate is all in the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Really, do they want to pull on that thread?
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_grow&hl=en&dl=en
Collectively, we humans have altered 75 percent of Earth’s land and more than half of the marine environment.
I can’t imagine a way in which either or those numbers are true–or knowable in any real sense. By what criteria can they be determining that? What have we really done to the great deserts? Are we including federal lands? All of Antartica, even though the majority of it remains untouched. If a road cuts through on part of a million acres of forest, is that whole forest counted as “altered 75% of the Earth’s land”. And more than half of the marine environment? That seems like a stretch.
But I guess when it’s the apocalypse, anything is possible.
LikeLike
I’m sorry, I thought this was America
https://www.latimes.com/food/la-fo-virgilio-martinez-central-piranhas-lax-peru-20190508-story.html
LikeLike
I’m with the KosKidz, impeach.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/9/1856464/-Yep-it-s-a-constitutional-crisis-Pelosi-and-other-Democrats-accept-the-obvious
I guess I’ll believe it’s a constitutional crisis when the people telling me it’s a constitutional crisis start behaving like it’s a constitutional crisis.
LikeLike
Perhaps this is explains the otherwise inexplicable fact that Mueller never bothered to investigate whether the Steele Dossier was Russian disinformation intended to influence the election.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/09/robert-mueller-tap-fusion-gps-christopher-steele-assist-anti-trump-investigation/
Expenditure statements show that the Special Counsel’s Office outsourced “investigative reports” and “information” to third-party contractors during Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian “collusion” during the 2016 presidential election. Over the past few months, Mueller’s office has rejected several formal requests from RealClearInvestigations for contract details, including who was hired and how much they were paid.
Washington-based Judicial Watch suspects Mueller’s office may have farmed out work to the private Washington research firm Fusion GPS or its subcontractor Steele, both of whom were paid by the Clinton camp during the 2016 presidential election. Several law enforcement and Hill sources who spoke with RCI also believe Steele and Fusion GPS were deputized in the investigation.
Which, if true, would be fucking outrageous.
LikeLike
So apparently the millenial generation is turning out emotionally needy, whiny, friendless men that even women (or should I say other women?) can’t stand, and Slate blames….wait for it….the patriarchy.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/05/mens-emotions-women-labor-patriarchy.html
Last week, Harper’s Bazaar published a piece by Melanie Hamlett that spread quickly between women on social networks. “Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden” read the headline, and those women sharing the article certainly agreed. “Willing to pay someone to take a physical copy of this story to every man I’ve ever dated and smack them over the head with it,” one tweeted. “I can’t even count the number of women I know who’ve gotten so tired of acting as therapist to the men they’re dating that they’ve given the ultimatum: Get a real therapist, or we’re done,” another added. “I feel this in my bones,” a third said. Clearly, many women found the scenario the piece described—a closed-off man, whose only confidante is his girlfriend or wife, in a relationship with a quietly frustrated woman who’s sick to death of the endless listening and processing—to be all too familiar.
The piece’s second half is extremely thoughtful about the therapeutic work some men are doing to step outside of this dynamic in their own lives—Hamlett clearly admires them. Yet the article’s social media framing, which references a classic tweet by writer Erin Rodgers (“I want the term ‘gold digger’ to include dudes who look for a woman who will do tons of emotional labor for them”), implies considerable male agency in the construction of this toxic dynamic. And the horror stories in the first half of the piece serve to stoke plenty of readers’ anger at the men involved: The women Hamlett interviewed included a 24-year-old who became the “default therapist” for her boyfriend and a 41-year-old whose “wonderful” husband breaks bedside tables (multiple tables!) because he doesn’t know how to talk about his feelings. The reception of this article—an outpouring of annoyance and frustration with male partners—shows how difficult it is to talk about patriarchy as a system that victimizes both women and men.
LikeLike
i’m so old i remember when women were complaining that men weren’t vulnerable enough..
LikeLike
Exactly! The men described in that article resemble quite literally no man I have ever met.
LikeLike
hey honey, i’m gonna ease your emotional burden.
i’ll be at the bar.
LikeLike
lol
LikeLike
Jeezus broads are so fucking needy. Plus, they want to talk non-fucking-stop. This is all about their perception that dudes don’t worry about as much stupid shit as broads do, plus broads don’t want dudes to have dude friends.
LikeLike
hey honey, i’m gonna ease your emotional burden.
i’ll be at the bar.
I drink so that you will be more interesting.
LikeLike
This is all about their perception that dudes don’t worry about as much stupid shit as broads do,
We do not. I can’t worry about as much stuff as women do.
plus broads don’t want dudes to have dude friends.
This–like so many things–is a case of they do want guys to have friends in the same way they want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want you to have robust relationships with your guy friends, so long as you never go anywhere with them, do anything with them, talk to them on the phone–ever, they get pissed if someone calls for half-a-second–or have them impinge on the time you’re supposed to be paying attention to her in any way whatsoever.
She wants you to have guy friends to talk to and do stuff with only when she’s randomly not in the mood to deal with you, which is never on any kind of schedule.
I don’t see why any man who reads this stuff up front would ever intentionally get into any kind of romantic relationship with a woman. But maybe that’s just me.
LikeLike
I think the key point is the reasons will change, but the complaining will remain the same.
A few years ago it was the “man child” that was being complained about. Too busy playing video games to get a job or connect.
https://nypost.com/2017/07/08/were-losing-a-whole-generation-of-young-men-to-video-games/
LikeLiked by 1 person
well, and the other thing is that what they claim they want is not what they are attracted to.
which the soy boy generation has yet to figure out and will learn the hard way.
LikeLike
Everybody likes the strong horse.
LikeLike