Correspondent Blog

You can slice and dice your credit portfolio all you want, but if you are not paying attention to cross-correlations, your efforts could be sub-optimal. For example, many banks separate their multifamily exposure away from their single-family exposure. In some markets, these two subsectors are almost 80% correlated. A drop in housing prices usually occurs…

All Eyes on Jackson Hole There had been speculation as late as a few weeks ago that the Jackson Hole Fed Policy Retreat could be the venue in which Fed Chair Jerome Powell put some meat on the bones of taper talk with dates of initiation and some outline of the speed of tapering asset…

The market is now pricing Fed Fund hikes beginning in 2022, and the proposed fiscal stimulus in the form of two separate infrastructure bills totaling $4.5T has created a new sense of optimism for FOMC members. However, the lingering concern that many bankers hold is can the country (US Department of the Treasury) afford to…

Delta Variant Continues to Weigh on Growth Outlook The market continues to take its lead from rising virus cases, both domestically and globally, and that continues to provide a bid in Treasuries as second-half 2021 growth prospects are revisited and marked lower. We take a look at what could be a catalyst for a further…

These days, if you want to make tough branch decisions, use a good college student instead of an experienced banker. We will come back to the college student but, in this post, we pitted experienced bankers against the latest branch models against the latest machine learning applications to see which method was more accurate at…

FOMC Minutes and July Retail Sales With Congress in recess the only headlines from DC will likely come when the minutes from the latest FOMC meeting are released Wednesday afternoon. Recall that meeting didn’t change policy and while tapering was discussed there were no details released in the statement or the post-meeting press conference. The…

When designing products, choosing vendors or trying to solve usage challenges, understanding the importance of alerts and notifications is critical to success. Alerts are important now and will be even more essential for the modern banker to understand in the future as banking morphs into a collection of mobile apps and wearables. While we have…

Will Delta Variant Slow Economy as Much as Treasuries Expect? Relying on anecdotal information can be dangerous, especially when trying to extrapolate the impact to an economy as vast and diverse as the US, but we can’t help ourselves. Much of the recent multi-month rally in Treasuries has been conditioned on the belief that the…

After months of being in a steady-state, the PPP world caught fire. You have the borrowers from Round 1 (2020 origination) that have not filed for forgiveness yet and are now facing principal and interest payments; you have Round 2 Forgiveness heating up, and then, as of last week, you have the new SBA Direct…

The market is preparing for the end of USD LIBOR as a benchmark index after 2021.  Most national and regional banks have created LIBOR working groups and have formulated a transition plan for LIBOR.  At SouthState Bank, we have been busy over the last year working on our transition from LIBOR to alternative indexes for…

Inflation and Infrastructure Now that the July employment numbers are in the books, the market will keep an eye on the infrastructure proposal being debated in the Senate along with the latest inflation data.  If a Senate bill passes it will head to the House for review and vote. The House is unlikely to exact…

The Fed Will Be Watching Some Lesser Known Job Stats The July employment report will be released at 8:30 am ET and the question isn’t so much what the results will be but how much will investors react to the findings? The median expectation is that 870 thousand jobs were created versus 850 thousand in…