Hi all,

I want to thank Greg and Teri and Brian and….everyone for the honor of being invited to hang out with such an esteemed bunch.  I’m really excited about it and looking forward to working, talking and “raising the bar.”

I’ll do up a post next week telling a little more about “my story,” but for now I wanted to put up the post that I write every week for my blog.  I call it “Mortgage Market Week in Review” and it’s my overview of what’s been happening in the market and how it impacts the real estate world.  I hope you enjoy it.

For this week’s “Mortgage Market Week in Review,” I’m going to translate the Fed’s announcement that came out on Wednesday at 2:15 PM. It will, I believe, help give us a better view of what’s happening in the financial markets. The actual statement by the Fed will be in italics, my comments will be in bold.
The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to keep its target for the federal funds rate at 2 percent.

That, in and off itself, says that the Fed sees things as having changed since the last time they met. The last time they met, they felt that the economic weakness issue was more important than the risk of inflation. Now they are saying that it’s pretty much a tie as to which risk is bigger.

Recent information indicates that overall economic activity continues to expand, Remember, they are looking at the big picture and are looking at things nationally. partly reflecting some firming in household spending Household spending has firmed some, but a closer look at the charts (which I won’t bore you with here) shows that consumer spending is either 1) Spent on essentials like food and gas or 2) drifting slowly downward. So, I don’t see the household spending holding up, especially as people have to cut back in spending in other areas because of the cost of food and gas for their cars.

However, labor markets have softened further As the labor markets soften (a nice way for Read more