Welcome to this week’s episode of Optimal Insights. In this episode, the Optimal Insights team discusses market updates, key factors that could influence interest rates, and several underappreciated economic indicators they monitor to add context beyond headline data. They share their expert opinions and insights into how these factors are shaping the industry and the broader economic landscape.

Key Points:

• A market update on mortgage rates and Treasury trends
• Discussion of potential risks to interest rates, including policy and geopolitical uncertainty
• Underappreciated economic indicators that may provide additional market context

Chapters:

• 00:00 – Market update and current backdrop
• 12:46 – Potential risks to interest rates
• 21:58 – Underappreciated economic indicators to watch

Optimal Insights Team:

• Jim Glennon, SVP, Hedging & Trading Operations
• Alex Hebner, Hedge Account Manager
• James Cahill, MSF/MSR Account Manager
• Kevin Foley, Director of Product Management

Production Team:

• Executive Producer: Sara Holtz
• Producer: Matt Gilhooly

Commentary included in the podcast shall not be construed as, nor is Optimal Blue providing, any legal, trading, hedging, or financial advice.

Mentioned in this episode:

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Welcome to Optimal Insights. I'm your host, Jim Glennon, Senior Vice President of Hedging and Trading Operations at Optimal Blue. Our clients and industry partners have long relied on Optimal Blue for trusted insights and commentary. And these podcasts are an evolution of our commitment to keeping the industry informed. Let's dive into today's episode.

Welcome everybody. Thanks for being here today. We've got a great show as always in the interest of making sure you know what to watch, whether you're an originator, capital markets person, or just someone interested in the mortgage industry and some great market commentary.

Here we are. We'll start out as always with a market update with the crew. We'll have Kevin with us today as well, but of course we'll have James and Alex. And then from there, we will move on to a quick discussion about some underappreciated economic numbers. We were kind of talking on the side about some numbers we were seeing recently that we thought were interesting indicators that don't get a lot of press. So we thought we'd share those with you. Before we get into any of that in the way of data, OBMMI, the 30 year

Conventional 30 year fixed is at 6.18. So seeing the spread between treasuries and mortgages continue to contract a little bit, which is a good thing to see the 10 year still around four and a quarter still a bit stubbornly high there, but not breaking out. Not breaking out to the higher side, which is a very good sign. I think there was some worry. Certainly we were worried about it and other market watchers were worried at the beginning of the war that we'd be potentially seeing.

know, prolonged six and a half rates with mortgages maybe higher, six, seven, five, seven percent. But there hasn't been a lot of ⁓ buying in bonds, but there also hasn't been a ton of selling. So keeping our fingers crossed there. All right. Let's go check in with the crew and see what's going on in the market.

All right, welcome. Welcome. We have a slightly oversized team here today to talk about what's going on in the war and the economy. We've got, as always, Alex and James. We've got Kevin with us as well. It's been a minute, Kevin. Welcome. Welcome, everybody.

to be here.

Morning.

Good morning. So where to start today? Obviously it's, we're kind of in Groundhog Day, at least I am with this war. Is the straight open? Is the straight closed? Is the war over? Is there a ceasefire or not? It depends on who you ask.

We need

like one website where we can just go and check this. Is the Strait of Hormuz open? Yes or no?

Who gets to populate it. It'll be like Wikipedia, right? Are people will keep going on there and changing the answer depending on whether it's, you know, someone in a bunker in Iran or that's the headlines that are really dominating what's going on in the market right now. Doesn't it? Doesn't it seem we were talking before I hit record just about how. I mean, I think we're somewhat lucky where we've been insulated from.

That's a challenge for sure.

a lot of the violence of this war, at least in our part of the world and in the West. military has been relatively safe, but there have been casualties. But it doesn't feel like the market. think what you were saying, Kevin, is there's been some articles written recently that the market isn't pricing in risk. the equity markets are a risk instrument. I mean, to clarify, think they're not building in risk that the war could boil over or there could be.

Yeah.

Hostages taken or there some risk of the war could go south on us worse than it has already So each day whether it kind of talks are good talks are bad Stock market is still good. It's continuing to hit records Which that seems counter intuitive when there's a when we're we've got ourselves entrenched in a war that seems to be stretching out

Yeah, you would think so. think a lot of folks might expect there to be more volatility or disruption to the downside than what we've seen over the last couple months. of that, think where folks are more worried about is what happens to all the missing oil that has not entered or gone through the straight of four moves over the last two months. Where does that end up showing up in the broader economy? And then

the uncertainty from here forward of, this something that will just wrap somehow in the next short period of time, whatever that is, or is this something that's going to drag on? Is it going to get worse before it gets better? A lot of those things we don't really know, a lot of market participants feel more confident or more optimistic about where those are going, particularly folks in the equity markets.

the bond market has not recovered to where it was when the war started with the 10-year treasury being below 4%. It's still been fairly consistently above you mentioned there was an interesting article that was published over the weekend by economist Kyle Scanlon, article, it's in the New York Times

the title of something like why the stock market doesn't make any sense. And one of the major underlying feces is that markets are just simply not pricing in level of risk that most analysts might find adequate because of the idea of, it's called the Trump put or maybe less charitably referred to as the Trump taco.

argument with when you have state responding in the way that it has to how the markets are doing, basically setting policy kind of within these set of within the market. You have your up and your down throttle. When the stock market goes up, that gives you more leverage to potentially make policy decisions that are

damaging to the economy. When the market goes down, opposite happens where you need to take more conservative ⁓ policy stances relative to their market impact. I think the challenge is, what happens with that is markets start to expect more from the state and a lot of the risk that would naturally be occurring within the markets gets offloaded to the state to manage.

then you find situations where the straight-up form loses close. There's 10 million plus barrels of oil every day. And you have the stock market at all time highs. some of those things might be counterintuitive. And some folks might just say, well, this is all, it's not a big deal. These are small affairs or they're all going to resolve themselves. And that's true. But

or that might be true, the reality is if these were easy things to solve, there's an argument to be made that this could have been over already as well. So the lingering risk that we have within the again, perceived to be not really a matter for market participants, but more a matter of the state to come in and resolve eventually. So that's kind why we were

Mm-hmm.

You know one perspective at least on why we're seeing a lot of the know Uniqueness in the market that we've been seeing over the past a couple of months So I thought it was a very interesting article. I would encourage folks to go check it out feel like it helped me make more sense of what's going on for sure

Yeah, I mean, we see it with a lot of things in the market now and it's, it's, it does feel like we're complacent, maybe too complacent right now. And a lot of times, because not only have the last kind of six weeks of this war, I think made people complacent because of the taco trade, right? Which means by the way, talk Trump always chickens out. There's this thought that Trump won't let the war get out of hand that the state won't let the war get out of hand. And if there are economic ramifications, those will be taken care of as well. And those,

That complacency goes all the way back at least till the great financial crisis, certainly during COVID, where things got scary bad for like a day and then the government jumps in and helps out. Right. I think, you know, to paraphrase part of what you're saying is we're not pricing in the possibility that things could get out of hand or Trump could allow ceasefire to lapse or could start bombing the infrastructure of Iran and really cause like a world war three. We're not letting that come into the trade.

So we're seeing record highs as if the war is not happening or the war will end and it will be better off for it financially.

Right. Yeah. And I think you bring up a good point. The article also makes this point, which is this idea of the Trump put or the taco is not really a new phenomenon, but it's something that has become a bigger presence within the market over the last several decades. We saw the same thing during COVID where the federal government came in that was a more extreme scenario where we really didn't know what was going to happen.

federal intervention in the markets, helping a floor on asset prices ultimately, now the market has come to more expect or rely upon. obviously there are times when there are limits to what the federal government can actually do. so how is that risk ⁓ being priced in? Is that risk being priced in?

I think those are things that we don't have a great handle on at the moment.

Right. Well, what can we do, but keep the blinders on and follow the money, I suppose. And then the money says that the straight is less open today than it was on Friday. I would say if you were to follow the money, follow the stock market, set risk aside. ⁓ what else did we see last week? Speaking of Alex, I think he wrote a couple of things down, like, meanwhile, like the world still turns economy, still moving. We had some numbers last week. We talked a little bit about inflation on the podcast last week. What did we get?

after the pod in the way of data.

Yeah, yeah. When we recorded last week, were waiting on PPI and it came in much the same as our CPI number showed hot as we were expecting. And again, I think this is something that, you know, to go back to what Kevin's saying, you know, the market was expecting this and it really, it shook it off immediately. PPI jumped for the non-core number, which is inclusive of energy prices, jumped half a percent month over month, which landed it for the year around 4%.

Mm-hmm.

You know, these numbers, PPI was jumping here and there above 3%, but to see it jump to 4 definitely indicative of the crisis we have going on the other side of the planet right again, PPI is generally a leading number. Keep in mind, you know, these are, these are these input prices before that, that producers are seeing before you see that product on the shelves. So it could be indicative of a steep increases in CPI for the April release. We'll, we'll have to see on that.

big.

That was the standout for me last week. was relatively quiet on the data front otherwise.

Yeah. Good call. like you said, numbers came in, expectedly hot and we kind of shrugged it off. we getting any decent, decent data this week?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, yeah, we'll get a PC to cap off all of our inflation metrics

and there will be an FOMC decision on, I believe next week.

Yeah, I think it's the 30th is fed meeting. expectations, regardless of what happens with PC this week, right? I would think flat rates don't move. Once again, the fed is going to wait and see what the real effects are of the war inflation, unemployment.

Correct, yeah, sorry, PC is next week along with FOMC meeting. This is a pretty quiet week.

Gotcha. All right. So I don't know. have a couple of things on my mind, probably on listeners minds as well. Maybe we start with James and go around the room. What's the biggest risk to interest rates right now, especially mortgages?

Outside of the war, I'll leave that to someone else. I think it's still on the discussion around Powell, right? So Powell is coming up his final official day is ⁓ during the month of May. And he said, Hey, I'm staying, right? I'm not stepping away anytime soon. Warsh has confirmed.

And Tom Tillis is still holding up the Senate Banking Committee and he is a lame duck. He's not running again. So he doesn't have to do anything that anyone wants him to. He can be as ineffective or effective as he wants. And he has until January. So he could hold this. The question is really, can the administration and Donald Trump just fire Powell, tell him to leave? traditionally this role people previously have.

Mm-hmm.

They haven't had a following. They haven't had someone confirmed. So whoever is the head of the Fed stays on. We've never had a situation where the president says, well, no, you don't. So it becomes kind of an awkward situation where there's no rule saying who's in charge. You'd think the administration is, but the Fed tends to be independent. It's going to be a discussion. It's going to be in the news. It's going to cause discomfort with Fed independence. And that is a threat to rates. So I think that's going to be the biggest thing moving forward.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

That's a big one. It's been the case for especially the last couple of years, the threat of the independence, but now you've got this unprecedented event of an expiring tenure along with Tillis dying on the Hill of, you know, I won't confirm anybody until criminal charges are dropped against Jerome Powell and others in the FOMC. I don't know. What do you think Alex, setting that one aside, the war? Well, I mean, you could use the war. James passed on that.

What's the biggest risk to interest rates right now?

I was going to jump as kind of a second order effect to the war and tying back into Kevin's conversation from earlier. I'm going to say biggest threat and maybe not as on the horizon as pal and what James was talking about here, but I'm going to say finding the limits state intervention. As we've said, it got us out of the great financial crisis, blunted the impacts there.

COVID, know, threw everything at the wall, massive programs, but these all came at a know, these conversations have been happening for decades. There's been, you know, going back to, you know, Rand Paul in the eighties has been talking about the federal deficit and the issues with it. But, know, debt GDP for the U.S. now is approaching 140%. You know, the interest payments are massive. And I do think at a certain point,

Mm-hmm.

there comes to be a limit to what we can do to blunt the effects of a crisis. I don't know what that crisis could be. fact, I don't probably think it'll be this war with Iran, I do just want to call out the limits to that federal intervention and then a crisis that can spiral from there because we're not able to blunt the impacts of it.

Right. Cause we're finally broke. Yeah. I, I, I share yours. I, I worry about the debt, our nation's debt, just the supply of debt that's out there and going to be out there between us and the rest of the world, including, especially NATO with, you that budget looking to double itself by the order of trillions of dollars over the next decade. And then whatever we're doing over here, which we have not yet turned the corner of reducing.

Yeah. Yeah. So broadly speaking, I'd say it's the inflationary effects of the federal backstop.

the deficit we just seem to keep increasing it.

Yeah. And what do we do if we actually have to step in again? How much ammo do we have? If any. How about you, Kevin? Biggest risk to interest rates. Toughest one is going last, I think.

Yeah, well,

Well, I was going to say you guys are giving me the easy one. I'll take I'll take the effects of the war because I have something that I've been thinking a lot about lately and mostly you know, when you have an energy shock like what we've seen and relatively speaking, think like oil prices have not been it hasn't been worst case scenario yet. You know, I think been flirting with

$150 barrel dated ⁓ oil, means like current spot price for buying oil in the physical market what we see if we go to CNBC or whatever is typically the futures, which can be different if you're actually trying to physically buy oil versus just trading the paper price. given how quickly that spiked and the impact in other areas, helium, petrochemicals,

of goods that the world economy highly relies on being higher than they were year to a fairly substantial degree. There's already been reports of fertilizer increased by about 40 % for this year's growing season, which makes its way into food prices later in the year during harvest. Helium is necessary and

related to chips, magnets, for medical devices. Yeah, medical devices. was what I was looking for there. Petrochemicals necessarily in plastics. So all of those things I think are items to watch for their inflationary pressures later this year, including food. There's some indications that the US relatively speaking could be somewhat more isolated from some of the worst effects compared to Asia where

Medical equipment, it's a...

They've had the steepest drop in actual physical oil, but I would definitely want to be keeping an eye on that. feel like that's just something that was not really going to be a factor this year. And now you're going to need to keep a close eye on it to see how that might factor ultimately downstream into inflation, supply chain bottlenecks, a lot of the same things that we saw post COVID, potentially not necessarily to that level.

Yeah, I'm going to be keeping a close eye on those things for sure the second half of the year.

All right. So they have the inflationary effects of the policy and of the war. The two do overlap, but there's also, there's a lot there. And, know, I'm not saying this is what's going on. It's certainly not the viewpoint of optimal blue. But some people think you fight wars over resources so that your country is less affected by these inflationary pressures that are building and probably going to build over the next decades, right? Wars make money. Again, follow the money.

one more anecdote on that. know, there's some research, you talk about, you know, food and inflation and, natural resources. know, anecdotally, when we had the, you know, the Arab Spring back in 2011, that was, you know, a situation where, you know, having across a variety of countries, there was sort of civil, social unrest.

of other crops that were severely impacted by this extreme heat and forest fires that are happening during that time. And there was some research that has actually connected those two activities where there were shortages or inflationary pressures in those areas where a lot of that wheat and other crops come from Russia. So you start to think about

first order, second order, third order effects of these sort of global macro events, it becomes very unpredictable downstream. that kind of ties into your point about resources and why to secure resources and using conflict as a means to do so, but just also kind of tying back to what I was saying, I think there's a lot of things to watch for sure, into the second half of the year and then ultimately to next year.

Mm-hmm.

know, downstream from the effects of this war.

Yeah, I think it will be very interesting that when, hopefully when this war concludes, see how that part of the world is put back together. Right? That's going to be very different, I think. And what we have access to, what other nations have access to in the free flow of resources or the actual capturing of resources, I think it'll be interesting to try to follow that from this side of the world.

All right, let's move on to the next segment.

pretty cautiously excited about this next kind of short segment we're throwing in here. We've got Kevin with us. So we were thinking about kind of, you know, some things that revolve around Kevin's world, not just at OB, but just some things he's interested in. So I thought we could ask him a couple of questions on something that just came up in conversation last week, which was there's so many economic indicators out there. There's

There's a handful that we all focus on very closely that the media covers, things like unemployment rate and lately inflation numbers over the past five, 10 years, GDP to a medium extent. And then there's hundreds of others, but are there any sleepers out there? there some underappreciated economic indicators that maybe one could...

add to the widget on their phone or that they should be paying closer attention to just to really know what's going on either with the economy or to be able to have some view into what maybe economists and analysts are looking at when they look at investing or interest rates.

Yeah, so I'm a huge market econ nerd and I love looking at charts. of the more underappreciated apps, in my opinion, is actually an app distributed by the Atlanta Fed, and it's called Economy Now. And it has a number of metrics, just recent metrics think all kind of tie back to the 10-year treasury yield.

You know, things like unemployment, has inflation metrics. one in particular that I tend to frequently look at there is business inflation expectations. And I relied on this pretty heavily last year as a metric to help me understand how tariffs and their effects be

seeping its way into actual inflation data into the markets. So business inflation expectations, it's a 12 month outlook. And survey around 600 or so business leaders each month and then publish those business leaders' expectations for inflation over the next 12 months. Now, inflation, we can calculate break even inflation rates over the same 12 month period. So market implied inflation.

Thank

But business inflation expectations might differ from that. both data points I think are helpful because you have, you know, market participants who are out there trading, looking at what market's expectation for inflation is going to be. But then you also have business leaders who are running their own business. They need to be thinking about things like payroll, the price of ⁓ goods, supply chains, things like that. And that's just a different perspective.

Business inflation expectations pretty much throughout all last year stayed very steady. So there was not much of an impact of tariffs showing up in those business inflation expectations, which as time went on kind of had me feeling more confident that we weren't ultimately going to see a sustained rate of increase in prices that the effects of tariffs might be more of kind of like a one time thing.

That's something that I've gone back to pretty frequently. Also, so far this year with the war happening, business inflation expectations still staying fairly low, right around 2%. So overall, I think that's good news, given where we are so far this point in the year. But that's definitely one of my top underappreciated market stats that I go and check frequently.

I like that, that one. I can't tell if it's just wishful thinking or if there's really this, this deeper understanding across the business world, the producer world that, that tariffs somehow weren't going to do it. They weren't going to cause rampant inflation, which they ended up not doing, even though classic economists would tell you otherwise. then now with the war, you know, should it, should a war cause inflation or is that more of a short-term tempered?

Expectations can be important, Consumer sentiment tends to lead us to some assumptions about consumer spending, even though they're not usually right, at least lately. So something like this makes a lot of sense that we would look to see what is sort of the mood within these businesses. If they're expecting inflation, obviously they're going to raise prices, right? That's going to be part of their strategy is to get ahead of that. So that's something I would want to know.

Yep.

Yeah, for sure. you know, inflation at the end of the day comes down to it's not something that's centralized. It's something that's decentralized comes down to a million different decisions all across our economy around, what is the price that we pay for for goods or services versus what is the price that we feel that we need to raise our, you know, our the price of our employees.

know, salaries, you things like that. you know, it's also one of those things that when it when there is sort of a self-awareness of inflation, that also changes the dynamic as know, when we think that we're in a or we're entering an inflationary environment that we also need to make different decisions as business leaders. So, yeah, it's super interesting stat overall.

Sure.

Sure. Yeah. All right. So that's a good one to start. Maybe one or two more. What else you got?

so another big one that a, have been checking pretty frequently. It's a newer one for me. it's something I've talked about here before and it's the, the churn, unemployment, the current it's like a, now cast of unemployment. and it's published by the Chicago fed so in the Chicago fed run by Austin Gulsby, you know, also

fairly, fairly active online. lots of commentary out there, but they created this real time unemployment cast that looks at, you know, ⁓ vectors of hiring and job attrition and all the way down to like scanning Google searches, scanning, know, employment postings.

and putting together kind of a real time composite metric for what the unemployment rate is. And it was released right as the government was shutting down right at the end of Q3, right at the end of September last year. And it was a great thing to have when we weren't getting that updated BLS data for unemployment. it's, know, while especially since there have been shutdowns and there have been disruptions, know, delays and getting data out,

It's been a great opportunity just to be able to have a real time view. And you can go and you can check in any time. It gets updated on a weekly basis and gives projections for where we think the next month's unemployment rate is gonna land. the good news there is the unemployment rate has been fairly stable. It was up to four, 4.5 and kind of back down to 4.3.

know, in between months, try to get a sense of where things might be trending for the next BLS report.

Good one. Yeah. You would think with, with AI now there'd be more opportunities to take different inputs and try to kind of back into your own number for a lot of these, these prints and not having to wait for things like surveys and things that could have a larger level of error in them. There's actually more tangible data that you could drive. I like, I've got one that I'll throw in there. I actually, I got this one from Logan Motoshami of housing wire, but it's a residential construction jobs. So you reminded me of that. talking unemployment.

It's, one of those, another one where within businesses, there's a lot of kind of innate knowledge about which way the wind's blowing. Right. and a lot of times construction, especially residential construction, maybe one of the first things that's going to see, it's going to take the pain if there's a slowdown in, in spending or rates go up or there's a slowdown in GDP. So that number, I've been following it for the last couple of years now. And it started, it took a bit of a beating last year in the summer.

Yep.

But then it's bounced back to almost as high as it's ever been. it's, you know, feels like a pretty good indicator of the health of the job market, even with a little bit of noise around some of the current administration's policies on immigration. I think that that caused definitely some noise in it last year. I think it's still a really good indicator of, of, of the jobs market.

Yeah. that's, I love that one too. residential construction actually peaked in 2006. So while, you know, we're still kind of, Well, while, you know, the stock market was, you know, continuing to go up, you know, that was like one of the first early signals for, you know, the housing market to ultimately turn.

Let's see, Alex, you have

So, yeah, definitely agree with you on that one.

I definitely like Kevin, that all of your, ⁓ all your data points are those with skin in the game, you know, you know, business leaders and, you know, looking at them for their inflation expectations rather than, you know, maybe calling the random consumer who maybe doesn't buy that, that basket of goods that we're looking at when it comes to inflation.

Same for residential construction. These are people with skin in the game. These are people making hiring decisions. I think that's always a good delimitator on what separates a good data point from a great data point. But with such a dearth of information out there, Kevin, is there any that you just throw straight in the trash?

⁓ But basically whatever the S &P is doing during the war, mean? No, just kidding. ⁓ No, there are some. So I actually have a theory related to one economic data point where I just, you know, every year it comes around and I throw it right out the window. And that's Q1 GDP. And so here's my sort of like semi conspiracy theory around Q1 GDP. So

Yeah

course, GDP is an insanely important data point. Don't get me wrong. This is one of the most crucial opportunities for us to get a sense of what's going on in the economy. There's so much data that gets published alongside of But in Q1, we see sometimes the most volatility. If you look back over the past 15 years or so, Q1 GDP consistently out or underperformed the rest of the months calendar quarter.

And the reason that I believe this happens is because when we're publishing Q1 GDP numbers, we do account for seasonality. But the big but is that we don't account for what the season was actually like or what the weather actually was during Q1. So Q1, obviously wintertime during North America.

Sometimes we have very severe winters. In the Northeast, we had a fairly severe winter this year. Out West, it was bright and sunny and warm and lots of places really unaffected by winter weather. But when we calculate our GDP numbers and we account for seasonality, we don't actually take into account what was the weather like.

Mm-hmm.

how might that have actually disrupted economic activity or not obstructed economic activity? And so since that's not actually an input, what we have is really just like a smooth curve that's sort of averaged over the past several years. But if you have a winter that wasn't like one of the past several years, well, this is why I think often we see an underperformance of our QNGDP number relative to the other quarters of the year.

That's something that I've picked up. pounding the table on that until the BLS hears me I can speak to their manager and ultimately get this situation corrected on good terms. So that's my metric that I'm going to typically throw right out the window every year.

Understandable. Maybe they need to start smoothing by which weather pattern we're experiencing that year. We La Nina, La Nina is yours.

Yeah,

know, plug right into you. You the National Weather Service right there. You could just plug right into their APIs, I'm sure, and start to start to better understand what's going on there. But but you know, they haven't answered my phone call so far, so.

you

Fair enough. ⁓

Okay, well there you have it, Kevin's underappreciated economic indicators along with one that you can throw away. So we're moving to, we're going to need to move to some sort of trimester system, I suppose, because you throw away the first quarter every single year and just focus on the other three. And then, ⁓ yeah, some cool other things to kind of check out, including an app you can get that's hosted by the Atlanta Fed. All right. Thanks a lot, Kevin. Thanks Alex. Great conversation.

Thanks Kevin.

Awesome, thanks for having me guys.

Okay, let's wrap this thing up. Thank you so much, Alex, James, and of course, Kevin. That's it for today. Join us next week for another episode of Optimal Insights, where we'll continue to provide you with the latest market analysis and insights to help you stay ahead. Check out our full videos on YouTube. You can also find each episode on all major podcast platforms. Thanks again for tuning in to Optimal Insights.