“I won a million dollars and donated a quarter of it to charity! I now have $999999.75 left.” Money can be funny… or not. In the past, a “flight to quality” or “flight to safety” didn’t involve feckless investors searching for a place to park their money when there was turmoil in the world. It usually involved buying securities issued in the United States, like bonds or MBS. That has changed, hence gold hitting $3,400 dollars an ounce, prompting analysts to wonder if the United States’ (which in the past was the world’s strongest economy) dollar is still thought of as the world’s reserve currency. Despite U.S. stocks being down 10 percent this year, U.S. bond prices and interest rates have done little. Will we only care if it impacts our borrowers? Perhaps. The spring homebuilding season is slower than usual, with housing starts are down 11.4 percent in March month-over-month. Direct and indirect reverberations from tariffs are an element of this; while 7 percent of goods that go into residential construction are imported, economic concerns about the health of the economy are a fairly large factor in the decision whether or not to buy a new home. (Today’s podcast can be found here and this week is sponsored by nCino, makers of the nCino Mortgage Suite for the modern mortgage lender. nCino Mortgage Suite’s core products unite the people, systems, and stages of the mortgage process. Hear an interview with dataQollab’s Adam Quinones on how traders are making sense of unpredictability in markets recently.)
