Correspondent Blog

Fed Speak and Home Sales Even though we just had an FOMC meeting last week we will be inundated with Fed speak again with almost every FOMC member opining on the economy and US policy. The headliner, however, will be Chair Powell paired with Treasury Secretary Mnuchin testifying before the House Financial Services Panel tomorrow…

It’s FOMC meeting day but before we learn what the Fed has in store for us (which we’ll talk more about below), we did get the August retail sales numbers and they reflect a note of caution that if fiscal stimulus continues to fade into the fall, does that risk a W-shaped bounce rather than…

It was only two years ago when we were in the golden age of banking. The ten-year treasury was above 3%, loan growth was strong, funding cost was low, and credit quality was near its high – if not at record highs for some banks. Fast forward today, and you have a 0.67% ten-year, a…

As any lean six sigma practitioner will tell you, banks need to continuously define problems, measure against benchmarks, analyze, improve, and control their PPP Forgiveness application process. With a couple of thousand applications processed over the past five weeks, we are improving our process daily. In this article, we focus on the back end of…

The economic consequences of Covid-19 have altered average credit quality and created a flat and shallow yield curve.  Community banks are working diligently to support their local communities and survive in these challenging times.  One tool that many community banks have utilized in this business environment is a loan-level hedging product. There are several benefits…

FOMC Meeting & August Retail Sales The FOMC rate decision on Wednesday will be the highlight of the week, but with most economic reports posting decent numbers of late, it’s not likely the Fed will announce any new initiatives on Wednesday like quantifiable targets to guide reward guidance or longer duration quantitative easing purchases. Still,…

In addition to the jobs report last week the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey provides some additional labor market details. The issue is it’s always a month behind its more famous labor report sibling. In any event, the July report due later this morning is expected to show job openings totaling 6.00 million versus…

Will the Stock Selling Continue? With a two-day stock correction ending last week it will be interesting to see if the selling continues into this holiday-shortened week. It’s also a quiet period for the Fed before the September FOMC meeting so little in the way of Fed speak will be in the offing should the…

The August Employment Report is out and it came amazingly close to expectations finding 1.37 million jobs versus the 1.35 million median estimate. Despite the positive beat, the scope of the damage still to be repaired is daunting.   10.5 million jobs have been created  in the last four months versus 22.2 million jobs lost in…

It’s jobs week and that means today we received the ADP Employment Change Report which disappointed finding only 428,000 new private sector jobs when 1.00 million were expected. That  compares to an even weaker but upwardly revised 212,000 jobs in July. Meanwhile, the Friday BLS Employment Report is expecting 1.39 million new jobs versus 1.76…

There is no surprise that you can only do so much when it comes to educating PPP borrowers. We have produced a comprehensive website, executed a detailed email campaign, conducted a series of webinars, produced videos, have a Getting Started Guide, and distributed a checklist – still, borrowers remain deficient in completing their application accurately….

It is around this time before a presidential election that bankers start to ponder how the results of the election will affect credit, interest rates, and the general business environment.  The stock and the acceptable answer is that presidents get too much credit when the economy does well and too much blame when it slumps. The complex…