Portland Mortgage Broker

here’s some useful info from the RMLS database about Portland area housing trends. We are presently at an 8.6 month supply; 5.5 months is considered a balanced market. In other words, it’s a great time to be buying a home because there are more houses to choose from and sellers are being forced to offer [...]

Over the past week the Dow has lost about 500 points, but this week’s move lower is nothing like what happened exactly 20 years ago today…a date lovingly referenced as Black Monday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 22% – enough to reduce the outstanding value of all U.S. stocks by $500 billion. In spite [...]

The Consumer Price Indexes for Pacific cities came in slightly more tame than national CPI for US Cities. Particularly, the CPI for the Portland/Vancouver/Beaverton metropolitan area reflects only a .1% 1-month increase compared to a .3% increase nationally. The core Consumer Price Index is the most widely used measure of inflation, and is an indicator [...]

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.3 percent in September before seasonal adjustment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported yesterday. The CPI-U excluding food and energy advanced at a 2.5 percent SAAR in the third quarter, following increases at rates of 2.3 percent in each [...]

Citigroup reported today that its third quarter profit fell 57%, the biggest decline in over three years. Principally, Citigroup excused the significant loss by blaming it on the need to absorb losses in subprime loans. Revenue rose 6%, while net operating expenses rose 22%. Citigroup joins a long list of banks that have reported or [...]

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) released its meeting minutes from the September 18 meeting. The release pressured bond prices lower, because the Fed showed increasing concern on economic growth and was less vocal on inflation. Mortgage bonds are still holding on right at their 200-day moving average, despite the Fed comments and the dollar’s [...]

As of 9/30/2007, the S&P 500 stock market index was up 9.1% YTD (Year To Date). The S&P has produced a positive return in 20 of the last 25 months and 18 of the last 25 quarters. The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index of 500 widely-held U.S. Securities that is considered to be largely [...]

Standard & Poors, the agency allegedly responsible for incorrectly rating subprime mortgage backed securities, announced this morning that they do not expect the subprime crisis to peak until 2009. One has to wonder if this is a case of truthful reporting or if its just a case of S&P setting the world up for a [...]

So today the economy added 110k new jobs, according to the Labor Department. In addition, the 4,000 jobs it said were lost last month were revised upwards to 89,000 new jobs created. How you miscalculate by 93,000 jobs (89k + negative 4k, for those of you who need the help) is well beyond my understanding. [...]