Correspondent Blog

One of the most underappreciated commercial real estate trends in banking is the remarkable stability of multifamily rents during this pandemic. As of last week, according to the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC), 77.4% of renters in an 11.4 million sample size of professionally managed apartment complexes were making their rent payment which compares to…

The continued rise in virus cases has knocked the momentum out of stocks this week, especially with limited economic releases to divert attention. And that seems to be the case this morning with futures pointing to a lower open for stocks while Treasury yields dip to levels last seen nearly three months ago. We do…

In a week with light data the market’s focus is even greater between the outlook on reopening versus the surge in virus cases and all that that could mean in slowing an expected economic rebound. On Monday, the mood was hopeful but it turned sour yesterday as once again spiking case counts, and increasing ICU…

Underappreciated in the banking industry is the growing role of identity and access in banking. As banks build their digital strategies, we need to stop and think about how we know our customers (identity) and how we know that the verified customer we believe is trying to access a banking channel is really the customer…

Perhaps there’s no better way to illustrate the tug-of-war between hopes for better economic results from reopenings and concern over increasing case counts than the reaction last Thursday to the June jobs report.  While almost every metric in that report beat expectations,  topped by a record 4.8 million new jobs, equities gave back much of…

Covid-19 and the responses to the pandemic are exerting various pressures on community banks.  How a community bank underwrites and books commercial credit through the end of 2020 will have a significant impact on the bank’s profits and credit quality through the entire next business cycle. In this article, we focus on four key steps…

Welcome to the third quarter of 2020, and good riddance to the second, although its historic spasms will live long in the charts that we’ll have to graph over the next year or two. While we were expecting to be heading down the road of reopening at this point, the recent surge in viral cases…

Recent survey data from borrowers that took a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan was surprising as more borrowers than we first expected will be using the EZ Form and fewer borrowers than expected will be using the 24-week covered period. In this article, we breakdown some of this data and then discuss how it might…

With Fourth of July falling on Saturday, financial markets will be closed Friday with an early close on Thursday (talk about bankers hours, they should rename it Wall Street hours), the holiday-shortened start to the third quarter will commence amid increasing viral case counts combined with top-tier fundamental data in the form of the June…

With a low and flat yield curve, generating profits through investments has become more challenging.  There are some very poignant lessons that CFOs are learning about investment strategies that apply directly to commercial lenders.  In this article, we look at several basic capital market precepts that the average investment officer lives with every day but…

While financial markets are focused on reopening developments and rising virus case counts, we did get May Personal Income and Spending  this morning and it offered a fairly as-expected read on the state of the consumers income and spending in May. Personal income for the month was down –4.2%, as the one-time stimulus checks from…

The up and down staccato of risk-on, risk-off is off this morning as a fresh tariff proposal of $3.1 billion against EU goods and rising virus case counts have global stocks lower and our stock futures pointing in the same direction.  Yesterday, the market was able to ignore the case counts as thoughts of a…