Anyone flying in or near El Paso, Texas, good luck: the FAA has shut down its airspace for 10 days! The government closing down travel… Conspiracy students, take note! Something else to take note of is… If you had something that earned you $3.5 billion in the last three months, would you get rid of it? Me neither. That’s what Fannie Mae earned in the fourth quarter of 2022. In 2025 Fannie earned over $14 billion. Remind me again… is the “system” so broken that the government

“You are allowed to send e-mails to people in prison, as long as you don't attach a file.” I receive my share of emails every day… Let’s open up the mailbox and see what’s going on. “Rob, thank you for publishing Mike Simmons’ primer on UAD 3.6 . Right now, credit is a hot topic, but I am sure appraisals will ‘have their day in the sun’.” You’re welcome, and in fact tomorrow’s L1 show at 11AM PT features Caleb Stuemky with Connexions, a valuation platform designed for AMCs a

Late last week my daughter Marie, her two children, and I toured the Ballerina Farms dairy near Park City in Utah. My tech takeaway, as it relates to lenders: there are 150 cows, and two $250,000 robots do the milking machine duties of guiding Bessie, cleaning the udder, using lasers to attach the cups to the teats, pump the milk, weigh it, monitor the butterfat and protein, and bring up the next cow, day after day. That’s automation! Lenders are always analyzing automation f

“If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.” Lenders can’t. They work with many loans that “try” but don’t work, and have historically unenviable position of passing along costs of loans that don’t fund onto those loans that do. The surest way to lower costs is to increase pull through, and increase fundings to spread out fixed costs. Efficiency! By informal chatter, 2026 is off to a decent start. Sure enough, according to  Curinos’  new proprietary a

“Going to bed early, not leaving my house, not going to a party… my childhood punishments have become my adult goals!” Is one of your goals to live to be 100 years old? Alan Greenspan, the 13th chairman of the Federal Reserve (1987 to 2006), turns 100 in a month. As we know, the Federal Reserve currently finds itself, and its independence from politics, in the crosshairs of legal and political maneuvering. The Trump Administration asked the Supreme Court to allow it to fire F

“I was wondering where the dish soap was. And then it Dawned on me.” Here in Utah, where the median age is 31 (versus Maine’s 45) with lots of younger families, Bed Bath & Beyond outlets were a big deal. But the chain declared bankruptcy three years ago, dissolved its physical presence, and now the name has come roaring back and is entering the mortgage biz. Yup, another competitor for lenders come July: Bed Bath & Beyond is acquiring Tokens.com “to develop a blockchain-base

“I used to brag about how late I stayed up at conferences. Now I brag about how early I went to bed.” Have you ever seen a group of mortgage lenders on the last morning of a 3-day conference? Well, here is the equivalent in the animal kingdom, and it’s not even iguanas plummeting from trees. Besides the end of the quick lived shutdown, and the continued M&A environment ( Own Up to be acquired by Experian being the latest example) one of the topics in the hallways at the IM

Our meat prices have gone up… Cattle herd numbers at a 75-year low. There ain’t nothing Jerome Powell or the Fed can do about drought and high grain prices. To deal with rising operating costs, many U.S. cattle farmers reduced the size of their herds, and some got out of the business altogether. As a result, the U.S. cattle inventory is the smallest it’s been since 1951. Regarding rate movement, the bond markets often do the Fed’s job for it, and so whatever the Fed’s Open Ma

Wasn’t it just New Years Eve? Time flies, this morning Punxsutawney Phil "saw" six more weeks of winter, and “the IMB” is already here. What is the chatter in the hallways at the MBA’s Independent Mortgage Banker’s conference in Florida? “Holy smokes it's cold in Florida (Jacksonville’s low is 26 F today; everyone is bundled up to even go to the hotel lobby). The Ritz is relatively small, so the room block sold out quickly. As a result, many people are staying at hotels in th