Correspondent Blog

In a recent article (Here), we discussed how lenders might help borrowers decide if and when to refinance debt and why lenders, as trusted advisors, should have a borrower’s best interests as their primary objective.  We also addressed how lenders should compare a borrower’s refinancing costs now versus waiting, and we shared an Excel model…

Examining Bond Portfolio Trends: Third Quarter 2021 Beginning in May 2012 we started tracking  portfolio trends of our bond accounting customers here at the Correspondent Division of SouthState Bank.  At present, we account for over 130 client portfolios with a combined book value of $17.2 billion, or $132 million on average per portfolio.  Twelve months…

If you are reading this, you are likely a high-performing banker. Like us, you are likely passionate about banking, looking to improve, and you are more quantitative than the average non-reader. While we suspect that supposition to be true, we really have no idea. Regardless of how you perform, the fact that we labeled you…

September CPI, Retail Sales and Plenty of Fed Speak A couple first-tier economic releases will likely garner attention from traders this week with a good dose of Fed news to keep the headlines flowing.  First, the September CPI numbers will be released tomorrow and it’s expected to be mostly a placeholder month with little movement…

September Jobs Report Last Before November FOMC Meeting The September employment report will be released at 8:30 am ET this morning and it will be the last jobs report before the November FOMC meeting and the expected quantitative easing tapering announcement. That being said, we don’t think the tapering decision hangs in the balance on…

September Jobs Report Last Before November FOMC Meeting It’s perhaps a quirk of the calendar that this Friday’s September Employment Report will be the only one before the Fed’s next FOMC meeting on November 3. So the question becomes how consequential can it be? We think the risks are asymmetric in that it would take…

A good bank strategy is a multi-layered cube. In this article, we present the four horizontal layers and then follow this article up with the vertical layers to round out the construction of the basic framework that can be used to set any bank’s strategic planning. The reality is that many banks fail to plan…

The most common question we hear from borrowers is, “Should I refinance my debt?”  This can be a difficult question for lenders to answer, but as a trusted advisor, every lender should understand the strategy, and the process to answer that question for every client.  We will address the knowledge that commercial lenders must have…

Democrats Continue to Wrestle with Reconciliation, Infrastructure Bills and Each Other Congress passed a funding bill last week that provides money through December 3 and avoids a temporary shutdown, but that was the easy part. The bigger lift is Biden’s reconciliation and infrastructure bills, along with the debt ceiling drama. Honesty compels us to say…

The Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, was clear last week that the central bank is highly likely to start reducing asset purchases in November and complete the process by mid-2022.  As shown in the dots plot, the FOMC members also expressed an inclination to raise interest rates next year (see graph below) – a shift…

As we have discussed before, your bank is a manufacture of credit, liabilities, and fee services. Whether you know it or not, you have a certain production capacity for each.  In today’s current environment, some banks are running at full and even overcapacity while some banks are operating at a 50% utilization level. The question…

Why are Yields Suddenly Moving Higher Following the FOMC meeting last week there was a brief pause in yields but on Thursday they bolted higher and haven’t really looked back since. Why is that? Well, in the sections below we discuss our rationale for why but suffice it to say that the combination of a…