Friday, September 7, 2012

Market Update 9-7-12

Good Morning All-

We had some major economic news come out in the past 2 days. A lot of job information was released and as you know jobs is the number one thing that everyone is talking about.

Yesterday, we had the ADP Private employment report. For those of you who do not know what ADP is, look as some of the paystubs your clients have. Odds are in the upper right hand corner it says "ADP." This is a corporation who handles payroll checks for thousands of companies. So a few years back, they came up with the ADP employment report and who better to report employment than the company that handles most of our checks.

Remember when numbers come out the market has an estimate, and based on were the actual number comes in, we get movement. Now ADP only measures private employment and they also do not account for all jobs out there. The market estimated that there were 143,000 jobs created. The actual ADP report came in at about 201,000 jobs. The markets loved this move. That is why we saw the DOW gain almost 250 points yesterday. Our mortgage bonds (what our rates are based off of) lost almost 50 basis points. In our world that is .375 price or maybe .125% in rate. Our rate sheets reflected about that.

Today is known as Jobs Friday. The first Friday of every month reports major economic jobs data. It's like the Superbowl for finance every month. Once a month we have the government jobs number come out which takes all jobs both public and private into it's readings except farm jobs. In the height of the crisis this number was negative. We were shedding about 700K a month for a few months. Over the year and a half, this number has begun to move positive.

Today we had the Jobs Number (also known as the Non Farm Payrolls) come out. The market estimated 130K new jobs were created and in actuality there was only 90K in new jobs created. Now in itself that does not seem awful, but we really need around 175K in new jobs being created to grow. Plus the previous month's number was revised down. Last month the government released info that stated that 163K new jobs were created and now they lowered that number by 23K. So that made the jobs outlook even poorer.

Next we had the Unemployment Rate come out. The market estimated 8.3% unemployed, and the actual number came in at 8.1%. So how did the rate go down, when the jobs number was terrible? Easy, people stopped looking for a job, thus fell out of the survey, or many of the seasonal jobs (our college kids) left their jobs and went back to school. They are technically not unemployed as school is considered employment.

So with this huge amount of info, stocks went from positive to negative and our mortgage bonds went from -30bps this morning to +70bps. That is a 100 basis point move. Our rates should open up about  .125% to a .250% in rate today.

It is never a good idea to gamble on a day like today but let's all use this much better pricing going into the weekend so we can procure more business. Putting all the hardships we endure on a daily basis aside, rates will improve on our rate sheets today.

Educate your clients, be aware of the market, and let's close some deals.

Josh

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