Category: Uncategorized

Kind of an odd title for a mortgage related blog, don’t ya think? Why would I ramble on about a feline experiment when there is quite obviously bigger problems in real estate land. Well, the answer is quite simple: Canada’s housing market is just like Schrodinger’s Cat. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept,…

It seems like every single day we are bombarded with graphs, charts, averages and statistics. We live in a world of daily data dumps, and attention grabbing headlines. Let’s face it – our job is to help people navigate the financial world to the betterment of their situation, but it can be challenging with so…

What a start to the shortened holiday week in Canada. Data and news came out fast, furious, and decidedly negative overnight ,and into the wee hours of the morning. Lets unpackage it and see what it all means. While you were sleeping, we had: Chinese import/export numbers that fell well below consensus, Italy had a…

With the highly anticipated unemployment reporting coming out yesterday, many people are left wondering what it all means. Lets take a look below the surface of the headline numbers. Canada: While the headline numbers were less than stellar reporting a loss of 6,100 jobs in July, it only gets worse from there. Consensus for July…

Canadian employment report shows that Canada shed 6700 jobs in July with unemployment rising to 5.50% Expectations were for 21,100 new jobs and the unemployment rate holding steady at 5.40%.

Over the last 12 months, the mortgage industry has become the largest watcher of bond yields it seems. I am convinced that mortgage brokers spend more time tracking the daily bond market than most full time bond traders. It only makes sense given the steady march higher in rates, and the havoc it is playing…

Today we saw a fine handed down to a former BC mortgage agent. The fine was $50,000.00 for her admission of creating documents that she knew were misleading. Basically we have a broker making up paystubs and letters of employment. This happened on 5 separate files. While at least some punishment was doled out, the…

With the recent rise in bond yields, everyone seems to want to know if we are done yet, or can we march higher? While no one has a crystal ball, we can use past moves as a bit of an indicator as to the future moves. 4.00% is a big number on the Canadian 5…

On Tuesday we saw Fitch Ratings downgrade the US Government debt from AAA to AA+. They are the second ratings agency to do so, after Stand and Poor’s ( S and P ) did so in 2011. Yes, you read that correctly – 2011. So, for the last 12 years Standard and Poors has had…