For our Clients, Colleagues, and Friends,
A majority of our clients use Encompass as their loan origination system, a big majority of them seem satisfied with its functionality, but an even bigger majority have complained at one time or another about aspects of Encompass and its spiraling cost. Only a small minority, however, have ever seemed curious how the stock of its parent company, ICE, has done. Let’s take a look.
Not bad, but certainly not great.
We mentioned last week that we knew a firm which did deep-dive due diligence reports on the broker/dealers you use for your MBS TBA trades. We got too many calls asking about them, so please contact them directly. They’re called Forest Street Analytics (www.foreststreetanalytics.com). If you think the financial strength of your broker/dealers can’t affect you, think again. When MF Global collapsed in 2023 (and they were one of the biggest broker/dealers, headed by former New Jersey Governor and Goldman Sachs senior partner Jon Corzine) a whopping $1.6 billion of customers’ money was lost. Here’s an example of a typical Forest Street’s credit review: Forest Street Example of Broker/Dealer Credit Review.
Interestingly, Forest Street founder Andrew Salerno was running counterparty credit risk at ABN AMRO in 2008 and was among the first investment bankers to smell a rat at Taylor, Bean & Whitaker and to pull the plug on them, saving his bank hundreds of millions of dollars when they failed.
We love baseball, including its traditions, among them the barnstorming days in its past. Satchel Paige and other Negro Leagues players traveling with the Caribbean Kings, Grover Cleveland Alexander with The House of David, and even Hank Aaron for a short time with the Indianapolis Clowns. These teams never competed with Major League Baseball, they only complemented it for great entertainment traveling around small towns and cities throughout the U.S. where there weren't any MLB teams.
Enter today's new barnstormers, the Savannah Bananas and their traveling show of Banana Ball zaniness. Mike recently got to watch the Bananas play the Texas Tailgaters at one of two sold out games at Houston's MLB Daikin Park last week, and boy, if you haven't seen the Bananas in action, you're missing a treat. They play competitive, unscripted baseball with talented minor league and college players but under modified rules like no bunting, a two-hour time limit on games, batters who step out of the box get a strike, a designated fan to challenge calls on the field, points rather runs for scoring, and if a fan catches a foul ball, it's an out. And there's the pitcher on stilts, team dance and singing routines, trick plays, and much more. It was a cross between a baseball game and a circus, and it wasn't only families with kids loving it. There were nearly as many older people and especially young people: couples, groups of women, and bros who were wild, like at a college basketball game. The excitement, entertainment, and pure joy was something you won't see at an MLB game. Here's a short segment of Banana Ball to give you a flavor of it: Bananas in action.
A Savannah Bananas ticket is one of the hottest in sports with sellouts at 40 stadiums nationwide in 2025 leading to a lottery for tickets. Mike scored tickets because one of his very best friends from college, John Alexiades, has a son who stars for the Bananas. Reese "Super Man" Alexiades is a star right fielder for the team, playing in a cape, making trick catches, and belting homers, including in front of 81,000 at one game in Clemson's football stadium. Reese came to the Bananas a couple of years ago after starting at D-1 Pepperdine with a .312 average and then three years in the Pioneer League minor league where in 2023 he was the League MVP, Home Run Leader, and Walks Leader. So Reese can play ball, but loves what he does with the Bananas. Here's Reese in action at bat and on the field, and a nice photo of "Super Man" below. And if you love Banana Ball, let Joe know that it's OK to love baseball and Banana Ball.
If you wonder what the term “strongman” means or implies, a good definition came from Peru’s strongman/dictator Óscar R. Benavides in the 1930s: “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.” In other words: Ignore or bend the law to benefit loyal allies, but use the law to go after political opponents. Pardons for friends, prosecutions for enemies.
Apparently the people of Peru didn’t mind their president sporting a silly mustache and a sillier hat, looking like he was some character in in a Marx Brothers movie.
How do languages evolve over time? North and South Korea might be a good laboratory for linguists to study this question. The two countries have had almost no contact in the past 70 years, so it would be interesting if the language has changed even a little in one county but not the other. John McWhorter, where are you when we need you?
Many articles seem to emphasize how many jobs will be lost to artificial intelligence. What about some analysis on how many jobs will be created by AI? Here’s how many employees five specific companies have today, and not one of these companies even existed 50 years ago. It’s all about Schopenhauer, creative destruction and full-body contact, bare-knuckles capitalism.
Add them all up, and you get over 2.1 million new jobs that people couldn’t even dream about 50 years ago. Goodbye Sears, nice to meet you Amazon. And Amazon, watch out for the next predator that nobody sees today.
Jack Black can be a funny guy (School of Rock, Orange County), and he’s also surprisingly good in serious roles (King Kong), but unless he gets his weight under control he could pull an early death like Philip Seymour Hoffman. When Hoffman died, it really ticked me off that we wouldn’t be able to see him in any movies again, and I feel the same way about Jack Black.
One of the more fun things about America used to be regionalism, the way things were different in different regions of the nation. There has always been a Southern accent, a flattish Midwestern accent, a New England accent. When I was at Dartmouth, the locals in New Hampshire pronounced it Dat’muth rather than Dart-muth. But bit by bit, we’re losing those differences.
When I was a kid, the only place you could buy an It’s-It ice cream sandwich was in San Francisco. Now it’s in seven or eight western states. Moxie was a soft drink pretty much available only in Maine and Massachusetts. For 60 years, Dr. Pepper was only available in Texas and a few neighboring states. Today, it’s in all 50 states. And Coors beer was just a western states beer until 1991. It had such a cult status that people smuggled it illegally across state lines.
This house has three bedrooms and three bathrooms, with 2,700 square feet, in the college town of Hanover, New Hampshire. It’s on ten acres of manicured grounds surrounded by deeply wooded forests. Room to ride your horse or go down to the Connecticut River for fishng and boating. You could even get in a canoe and paddle 250 miles to the Atlantic Ocean. All for about $1.2 million.
There’s a school of thought that the American Revolution was not a grassroots movement but was led by the wealthy merchants of Massachusetts and the aristocratic cotton growers of the Deep South and started at the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775. Not true. The Revolution started in the fall of 1774, when Massachusetts farmers won a revolution months before the war “officially” broke out at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.
Before those famous two battles, the colonists of Massachusetts led a grass roots uprising that freed the colony from all British control outside of Boston.
Furious over the Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament passed the Coercive Acts to punish and isolate Massachusetts. The most devastating of these decreed that the people could no longer elect judges, sheriffs, and governor’s councilors, whatever those were. Instead, the royal governor would appoint them. The law also banned town meetings except for once a year. The patriots called it an attempt to impose “abject slavery” on the people of Massachusetts.
For the farmers, this was an existential threat. The courts of Common Pleas met four times a year, and they mostly adjudicated unpaid debts. They also had the power to seize property as a remedy for indebtedness. But now, a judge appointed in London, not answerable to the community, could seize on farmers’ small debts to foreclose on their land.
When the new law took effect on Aug. 1, 1774, the people armed themselves, and for the next two months, they took part in a series of uprisings. Tens of thousands of farmers and small tradesmen throughout the colony gathered at meeting houses, closed the courts, and forced the newly appointed judges and sheriffs to resign. They threatened to tar and feather them if they didn’t pack up and leave. And they held town meetings whenever they wanted to, not just once a year.
By the end of September, the British government’s authority throughout Massachusetts had ended, except for the city of Boston.
On September 6th, 1774, the Court of Common Pleas for Worcester County was due to convene at the meeting house (now City Hall). The king’s newly appointed judges arrived to find Main Street lined by nearly 5,000 militiamen. The protesters proclaimed that the courts should not open on any terms. They then humiliated the court officers, forcing them to walk back and forth 30 times, hats in hand, repeating that they resigned and would not open the courts.
The people of Worcester County then set up their own government. They freed all prisoners charged with debt, fired any public officials who wouldn’t resign, stopped sending tax revenue to British authorities in Boston, and established seven new militia regiments.
The rebellious colonists coordinated their response to the Massachusetts Government Act, and the grass roots revolution spread to every town and village in the colony. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Berkshire mountains in the far western part of Massachusetts.
In September 1774, several thousand protesters and armed militia marched to the Springfield meeting house, crowding it so much that the judges couldn’t sit down. They then forced the court officers to take off their hats and sign their resignations. In Great Barrington, 1,500 unarmed men filled the meeting house and the roads leading to it. They prevented the judges from entering the building and forced them to resign.
In Concord, so many people filled the meeting house that the newly appointed judges, barristers, and sheriff couldn’t get in. The court officials went over to a local tavern and offered a compromise: If they could enter the building, they wouldn’t conduct any business. Their answer came at sundown: No deal.
On September 27, 1774, the new justices tried to open the Court of Common Pleas in Plymouth. They had as much luck as the others. As many as 3,000 militiamen and protesters blocked the courthouse and forced the court officials to publicly resign.,
Royal Gov. Thomas Gage appointed 36 new councilors. But the patriots intimidated most of them into resigning or refusing to take office.
The House of Representatives, which remained intact under the law, formed their own shadow government: The Massachusetts Provincial Congress. The Provincial Congress essentially replaced British authority. It began collecting taxes, regulating trade, organizing militia units, and buying military supplies. For the first time, an American colony had created a fully operational, independent government that ignored royal authority.
Months later, the people of Westminster, Vermont, took over the county court after a bloody confrontation in the Cumberland County courthouse. Fearing the seizure of their farms by Loyalist courts, patriots had occupied the building to prevent a session, but British loyalists fired upon the protesters, who were armed only with sticks.
By the next morning, over 400 patriot militiamen had surrounded the courthouse, forcing the surrender of the officials inside and effectively ending the King’s authority in the region.
Five weeks later, on April 19, 1775, a contingent of 700 British soldiers marched on Lexington to capture and destroy colonial military supplies reportedly stored there. Patriot leaders received word weeks before the British expedition that their supplies might be at risk and had moved most of them to other locations. On the night before the battles, several riders, including Paul Revere and William Dawes, warned area militias of the British plans and approaching British Army expedition from Boston.
When the British Army of 700 arrived in Lexington as the sun was coming up, an officer announced to the 70 or 80 local colonists, “Lay down your arms, you dammed rebels.” Farmer and militia Captain John Parker told his men, outnumbered ten to one, “Stand your ground; don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here."
The first shots between Patriot militiamen and Regulars at Lexington were fired at sunrise on April 19. Eight militiamen were killed and ten wounded. Most people think this was when the Revolution started. In fact, it had started as a grass roots movement two years earlier.