Morning Report: Meh jobs report

Posted on January 10, 2020 by Brent Nyitray

Vital Statistics:

 

Last Change
S&P futures 3280 4.25
Oil (WTI) 59.52 0.04
10 year government bond yield 1.85%
30 year fixed rate mortgage 3.88%

 

Stocks are higher as it looks like hostilities are cooling between the US and Iran. Bonds and MBS are down.

 

Jobs report data dump:

  • Nonfarm payrolls + 145,000
  • Unemployment rate 3.5%
  • Labor force participation rate 63.2%
  • Average hourly earnings up 0.1% / 2.9%

Overall a meh report. Nothing special. Manufacturing payrolls fell by 12,000 which sort of meshes with the weak ISM report. Wage growth remains positive but below the sort of levels we were seeing a few months ago.

 

Initial Jobless Claims fell to 214,000 last week. No other economic data today, but we do have a lot of Fed-speak.

 

Want to give a compliance officer a heart attack? Go after a negative review on Yelp by trashing the borrower’s credit profile. Mount Diablo Lending was fined $120,000 for doing just that – “Your credit report shows 4 late payments from the Capital One account, 1 late from Comenity Bank which is Pier 1, another late from Credit First Bank, 3 late payments from an account named SanMateo. Not to mention the mortgage lates. All of these late payments are having an enormous negative impact on your credit score.” Note: credit profiles are confidential information, and your company should have procedures to protect it. Getting into a tiff with a declined borrower on Yelp is not a good way of going about that.

 

Remember when Quicken and United Wholesale got into a pricing war about this time last year? Well, it looks like Quicken just signed a 4 year contract with the NFL to be its exclusive mortgage sponsor. “Over the years we’ve been a brand and a company that likes to do big epic things,” Casey Hurbis, chief marketing officer for Quicken, said in an interview.

 

Corporate CEOs and consumers have differing views on the economy. CEOs think a recession in 2020 is the biggest risk, while almost all CFOs see the economy slowing next year. If you look at the chart below, CEO confidence is about where it was going into 2009, which quite simply makes no sense.

 

CEO confidence

 

 

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