In this final episode of the year, Optimal Insights dives into critical market updates and a forward-looking preview of 2026. Host Jim Glennon is joined by Alex Hebner and James Cahill to analyze recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, including unemployment trends and inflation surprises. They explore why job losses in government sectors and healthcare growth are shaping labor dynamics, and discuss the implications of CPI data anomalies on inflation readings.

The conversation then shifts to 2026 outlooks:

1. Interest Rates: Expect stability with limited downward pressure despite potential Fed rate cuts.
2. Federal Reserve Changes: Anticipated turnover in voting members could influence monetary policy and rate paths.
3. Housing Market: Possible affordability initiatives, homebuilder engagement, and HELOC trends may drive activity.
4. Industry Factors: GSE privatization, credit score model updates, and deregulation could reshape mortgage operations.

The episode closes with holiday traditions and reflections, offering a lighter note after a year of economic uncertainty.

Optimal Insights Team:

1. Jim Glennon, Senior Vice President of Hedging and Trading Operations
2. Alex Hebner, Hedge Account Manager
3. James Cahill, MSF/MSR Account Manager

Production Team:

1. Executive Producer: Sara Holtz
2. 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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from some of these numbers that seem to be defying gravity this year as it relates to things like tariffs and a economy or even a resilient economy that should maybe be driving prices higher.

on the inflation front, this is definitely a number I would not take at the headline were pretty quick to point out that this is a pretty major surprise to the downside. Expectations were for 3 to 3.1 % from all the major aggregators. come in at close to half a percent under is a pretty big miss.

Welcome to Optimal Insights. I'm your host, Jim Glennon, Senior Vice President of Hedging and Trading Client Services 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.

tightening of that spread. So let's go ahead and check out with Alex James and get into a little market update.

Okay. We're all excited to present the last market update for the year. Not a ton of big data coming out over the next couple of weeks, but we finally are getting data after the government shut down. So we have a couple Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers talk about that came out last week. The big one, think that was months awaited was the unemployment report. So what do feel like we learned from that after waiting for three months to get an official

sort of up-to-date unemployment report.

You know, Jim, ⁓ it was kind of showed us where the vibes and what everyone was kind of expecting out of this employment report to be. was a net loss on jobs, 105,000 lost in October, 30K added in November, I believe. overall, it does not show us a strong labor market, which is where everyone's at right now. And more so and more so, you are seeing that

You know, it's a slow to higher, low fire environment. There seems to be quite a lot of stickiness with labor right now. know, if you are employed, you're gonna stick with your employer, you're really not looking around too hard. that seems to be the theme that's carrying us through the end of the year here. There was definitely some interesting.

Crossover I think in regards to the layoffs that we saw in October and ticks up on the unemployment claims that I know James wanted to cover

Yeah. So I think, you know, you can go head over to the BLS website yourself and check it out if you want to see it, but they give you a pretty good breakdown, a drill down of where was the employment and unemployment, what's been happening in the last 12, six for the last month. So, you know, we had been delayed this report for a while, so we didn't really get to see October finally comes out and bang 105 K jobs lost. It's really kind of a shocking headline, but once people were able to look at it a little bit more, made more sense. So back in April,

You know when Doge came in they started laying off federal employees one of the offers they gave them was called the fork Right so the fork was hey you could leave right now We'll pay you for another six months or you could stay around risk getting out like chopped, right? So there's a lot of people who took the fork

they had about six months of pay that comes to an end in October. So if you look at the BLS's website and you check out, where were the jobs that we lost? It's almost entirely from the government. ⁓ It really kind of explains almost the whole number there. And it is just the layoff, the actual firings that they did as well as people who were finally done being paid. So now that they were no longer being paid, they counted into the unemployment reports. So it is a little bit settling that.

It was all part of the plan. However, 105,000 losses is, it's not a great plan. Interestingly, private education and health, which, know, the Department of Education has been also getting cut, and then health and human services, definitely a huge conversation across the economy right now. So those are two places that we have absolutely seen grown so far this year, past 12 months.

Yeah, that's a super interesting stat about the government jobs, kind of a little bit under the radar, just basically voluntary layoffs, that folks took. So six months of benefits and then now they're getting into the roles and saying that they have to be absorbed somewhere, which is an interesting dynamic we'll have to figure out in 2026, right? But then you've got healthcare kind of pulling all the weight, like it's been doing for the past two years, it feels like. was healthcare, was also hospitality, which has slowed down.

I think because people are spending less money, but still seeing just a ton of jobs added in healthcare without that number, we would have been deeply negative probably both of these last two reports, right?

That number is, if you look at the chart, is the overwhelming number. Even with the government cuts, it is the largest number on there. So without that, it would be scarier situation for sure.

Yeah.

Right. But still unemployment report is still right there around four and a half, four point six, which is getting into that that unacceptable territory for the Fed, despite the migration issue. Right. Which if we did not have a major drawdown and in migration into this country, we would likely have a much higher unemployment report because we're not we're not creating any jobs. the very least, we're not creating jobs that we're likely going to continue to show that we're losing jobs incrementally into next year, I would think.

two things there, Jim. Like you said, if you're going to take away anything from this unemployment report, think just top line, we saw another 10th of a percent tick up in the unemployment rate. And like you said, that's entering the ⁓ scary zone for the Fed. We're now at 4.5%. And between 4.5 and 5 is when they start to think that the labor market might be in a very weak position. then on top of that, as you already alluded to,

You know, we've seen mass exodus from this country this year, you know, both forced and voluntary deportations. ⁓ You know, we don't have an exact number on how many people have, you know, left the United States, but that has definitely helped to keep the unemployment rate suppressed just because a lot of those individuals would be sitting on the unemployment report as well.

Right. All right. Obviously we will talk about it a little bit later just in our preview for 26, but the jobs reports are going to be the number one, if not the number two thing that we'll be watching next year, ⁓ barring any sort of major global event. When we're worried about interest rates, what should we be watching? But the other one could be CPI, could be inflation. CPI came out last week, full report again this time, although there was some question about how

Reliable some of the data is becoming right remember all the career of labor statistics numbers are mostly based on survey information, right? You know, are you working? Did you have a job? Did you lose your job? And then on the inflation side, what are you paying for bacon? What are you paying for fuel that sort of thing? But nonetheless the headline number was lower than expected Still closer to three than two. It's at two point seven But I don't know. What are we learning? Do you think?

from some of these numbers that seem to be defying gravity this year as it relates to things like tariffs and a stable economy or even a resilient economy that should maybe be driving prices higher.

Yeah, on the inflation front, this is definitely a number I would not take at the headline Folks were pretty quick to point out that this is a pretty major surprise to the downside. Expectations were for 3 to 3.1 % from all the major aggregators. come in at close to half a percent under is a pretty big miss. And what people noticed was that ⁓ rents and owners equivalent rent were

just carried over from September. They didn't have any new readings there. And as you said, Jim, we've been talking about this for months now with labor constraints at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The more and more that they are just imputing certain numbers from a larger headline number, it's going to lead to...

some more static in the data. ⁓ That being said, I would have at least expected them to, you know, applied some sort of calculation to a September number, but you know, it looks like they control copy, control pasted the September numbers in. And these rents account for, know, most people, it's a major living expense for most people and in their weightings, it's about 25 % for the inflation reading. So, you know, carrying these numbers over from September, having a net 0 % inflation on

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

25 % of your weight of your total calculation is gonna suppress your inflation quite a bit. And so if you look at the bond market, the bond market didn't blink on this at all. the 10 year is still trading around a three month high, which is, we started cutting three months ago. So we're not seeing the long end of the curve come down.

Mm-hmm. Agreed for a number of reasons, which we'll get into here just in a couple of minutes, because I think it's going to be one of the bigger stories of 2026.

We're going to talk a little bit today about a few things. We'll get to some holiday fun and cheer here in a minute, but what we really want to get to in terms of content is what to watch out for in 2026. Obviously a lot to consider when you're thinking about interest rates. We'll try to focus mainly on what's going to affect potentially interest rates as we go into 2026.

drive mortgages and then what else is going on in our industry in terms of possible changes or possible improvements? So let's just start with mortgage rates in general, right? We all like to wax about this whether you're at a conference or you're talking to a client or we're just talking amongst ourselves at the dinner table, right? We find mortgage rate projections fairly interesting and over the past, know, four years I feel like it's been really there's been a lot of variability between different projections.

But this last year and a half, I think the economists have come to terms with the fact that if nothing major changes, rates are just going to stay where they are. So if you look at some of the major entities like the NBA, Wells Fargo, Fannie, Freddie, they all have interest rates sticking around where they are right now for the foreseeable future, going into the end of not just next year, but the year after that. I think

You know, it's for all the reasons that we've talked about on this podcast that you read about in the news. There's just very little reason for rates to drop. There's very little pressure, downward pressure on rates, even with global conflict going on, which you would think would drive rates lower. There's just all this upward pressure, right? Everything from defense spending, which we're still unsure what that looks like. We're, know, we're still putting a lot of pressure on our NATO allies to increase defense spending, which has yet to happen. So there's going to be a ton of debt.

new debt that comes online, not just our own national debt, but across Europe next year. There's all of this spending that you hear about with AI and technology investment. Much of that does not come from cash or stock sales. comes from generating more debt, issuing more corporate bonds. So who's going to buy that? We likely need yields to remain high to attract capital to actually fund a lot of these projects that are going on. So it's a good thing that we're

you know, as a nation and as a kind of developed world, we're looking to continue expanding, but it takes a ton of debt, world record ever debt to get that done.

Yeah, no, well put Jim. think it's a limited number of dollars chasing yield. It's really the headline story there. isn't the days of 2020, 2021 when we're awash with 0 % federal funds rate cash. We've returned to median in my opinion.

And like you said, there's immense capital expenditure going on out there in the private sector right now, much less so at the national level as well. But I think in the US economy alone, you're seeing some crowding out being done by those capital expenditures from mainly those major technology companies. But it's really everyone is investing pretty heavily right now. And they're funding that with I think with the current administration, there's been an acceptance of, yeah, we do

to reshore certain elements of national defense maybe not national defense, maybe it's under the guise of national defense, but reshoring of some sort of production in an industry. And all these things are very capital intensive. agree with the outlooks that Fannie Mae and the NBA have put out. I don't see much downward pressure.

Right. And you've pointed this out before too, an additional component would be that the equity markets have done very well over the past few years and the returns there are going to be at least what you would get in bonds if not better. So there's a lot of capital that's then parked in equities that's not going to make its way back into bonds unless we have some sort of capitulation in those two different asset classes. And that kind of generates itself too. The more money that goes into the stock market, obviously the better it performs. So we don't have that classic

don't know, seesaw effect where we start seeing maybe a weakening economy. We're certainly seeing weakening jobs. You would normally see more money come back into bonds and maybe a little bit of a sell-off in equities, but that's not happened. It could in 26, I suppose. We haven't seen it.

Yeah, no, that's a great point as well. think a number of factors, it's been a while since there's been a large drawdown, a long sustained drawdown in equities, which scares people out of the market into something safer, like your monthly or yearly payment on your bond. in addition to that, I think it's been made so easy to invest in equities, I think what we forget is how recent it is that just about anyone with a bank account can buy a share of an ETF, which is an instantly diversified portfolio.

Mm-hmm.

And

so I think that makes it really easy. And when we're averaging north of 10 % on the S &P 500 every year, yeah, why would you get a measly 5 % bond, right?

I think that is an excellent point to it is retail investors are more and more and more the story. You know, since 2020 it's been coming on and a lot of, you know, the CEOs, the execs at, you know, Robin Hood or Acorns or whatever these platforms are that are trying to push more and more people to get into it. You know, now that you're looking at the market, you're looking at actually investing. Why would you go with the 5 % bond when you get 10 or 11 on the stock market? You're, you almost seem silly and it's, if you've never lived through a downturn, you wouldn't know.

Mm-hmm.

the risk that you might be getting into.

Great point. There's definitely some macro effects here that have just like monumental shifts in the investor community. I would even add that, you know, was talking to some family this weekend about this where, you know, 30, 40 years ago, pensions were a vast majority of how people retired. But right now people are dumping money in the stock market because you have to, you have to have a 401k. You don't have that automatic retirement plan from your company that you work for or the business that you're running. You have to invest.

And there's almost nowhere else to put your money that gives decent returns that would give you a chance of retiring your 60s. So again, it's a snowball effect. So something to watch for this year. Can the equity market outperform bonds once again? Will we see double digit S &P gains? This year especially, it depends on who you ask. Whether it's Goldman Sachs or

Citadel or whoever you want to ask, right? There's very, different opinions out there. But again, everyone kind of has a little bit of a bias. If I'm an investment bank, I want people to continue investing. So my projections are probably not going to be dire, right?

Yeah, at this point, you know, and with how...

Captured the the top indexes are by technology firms. It's really at the end of the day. It's how long you think the technology Current upswing can can sustain itself and you You've had doomsday sayers from from day one and I think that there's a more emerging or maybe a more reasonable voice when it comes to talking about capabilities of some of these technology companies I you know The the markets can stay irrational longer than you can say solvent. So, know, we could see this

continue on for a long while more.

Very true. There's going to be winners and losers at some point though. I mean, it does feel like the NVIDIAs of the world are at least for short term the likely winners, but these things turn always at some point. right. So speaking of expectations, we got to talk about the Fed, right? The Fed is always on the front page, especially this last couple of years between the Fed having a huge participation in

So what should we be watching out for there in terms of the makeup of the Fed, but also where that interest rate path might go?

I think this is definitely gonna be a major story early, right? Because it's been a conversation of the Fed's independence and where it's gonna go, who's going to be in charge of this. We all know that Powell comes up in May and...

He's not done as a voter, but he is done as the chair. so, know, 50-50 on who you think the next chair will be, there's a lot of back and forth on that. But regardless, there are four other members who are going to turn over this year. So Collins, Gouldby, Schmidt and Musaylim will all be done in either February or March of this year. So by Q1, that is four voting members of the Fed will be gone. You know, it's individual board.

Mm-hmm.

⁓ two of them were already picked by the current administration. The chair will be picked by the current administration and you could put a giant asterisk next to Lisa cook as to what will happen with her because she's currently under investigation for mortgage fraud. Right? So you, know, by the beginning of Q2, you could have almost eight to nine members of the fed would be picked by the administration. ⁓ the conversation, you know, if you look at a guy like Mirren,

Mm-hmm.

He's been saying now 50 basis points, we do 50 basis points, we can keep going. Some of these members who are going to leave are saying we should stop, right? We should keep it here. Those are the voices who are leaving who will be replacing them will probably be more aggressive on rate cuts. So it does paint the picture of we will see more. I think that's why if you check the CME's website, you can still see there's some projection that we'll get rate cuts moving forward, you know, two more next year, but.

Mm-hmm.

with jobs numbers as we've talked about in inflation, that is the ⁓ tension.

Yeah. mean, we always say follow the money, but to me, the money seems like it's a little bit light on rate cuts next year, given all the things you just said and what we see in the jobs numbers, right? If we have a pretty quick shift in the makeup of the Fed towards more dovish and we have a jobs market that continues to stagnate or get even worse, yeah, two to three cuts are what is priced in with futures contracts. That seems low, doesn't it? You'd feel like we'd get at least a point, if not a point and half.

You could push the argument that in the long arm of American rates, 5 % has been kind of an average or a low. So getting below that to like three and a quarter or three where those rate cuts would get us, that's pretty low. That's pretty kind of loose with the capital. So it is maybe a, return to mean.

Mm-hmm.

that there's just kind of this, it's very low. What would that do to inflation? Could we really justify it? Will it snap us back? Even if these voices are coming in and want to cut, does it make sense?

Mm-hmm. Right.

So we're kind of approaching a natural neutral policy if we have two to three cuts versus if we were to cut two points, like I think Myron would like to see, we might stoke inflation again or we might be in a more expansionary policy realm where we don't need to be yet.

Yeah, I mean, when you say point point and a half to to the to the low, you know that that's the most aggressive voice in the room of Myron. You know, I'm definitely of the opinion that once they have, you know, board capture, if you want to call it that here, starting in Q2 or the second half of next year. I'm of the opinion we're going to see three, maybe four cuts next year. I'm not sure if we'll see as many as Myron wants, but I expect the rate path, at least for the federal funds rate next year, to be what everyone was freaking out about middle of this year. So I think the

Hmm.

the 2025 rate payout people are calling for is just being pushed forward into 26 early part of 27. Keep in mind this year is a election year as well. will play I think into some of the right decisions in the summer.

Right. Yeah. Another thing to watch out for mid-year end of years is control of the chambers. It is a midterm election year. Great. So yeah, Fed, probably a few cuts. Despite that, projections for mortgage rates are still between 5.9 and 6.2. So the expectation there would just be a steeper yield curve, I suppose, which could be then indirectly good for interest rates on mortgages, you would think, because banks start to get a little more profitable. They start to

have a little more incentive to buy longer term assets because those rates are higher and they can borrow cheaper from the Fed. But still the projections from most economists don't see even three rate cuts doing a whole lot for our industry in terms of just notional interest rates.

What else do we have like jobs? That's again, probably the biggest one. What's the job market going to do next year? That could affect how the Fed operates, affect stock market, certainly could affect the possibility of recession, you know, by way of lowering GDP at the same time that tariffs are really starting to take hold and folks are figuring out where to extract additional profit margin as James pointed out last week, right? We're still not sure who's paying for these tariffs really, ultimately.

It's a little hard to see the jobs just, ⁓ I've heard the conversation that, by Q2, it might, this kind of down climb that we're on might slow out and even start to rebound. I'm not sure I see that so rosy. know, if we get rate cuts that adds more, you know, liquidity to the market and to people ability to start new businesses, businesses to take on debt wonderfully and hire more people. But this low hire, low fire environment, I think we're going to be in that for a minute. We're probably going to be.

kind of camping here, even if you have more money, is the first thing you're going to do, you know, hire new people when everyone's a little freaked out about the AI bubble maybe coming to a stop or, you know, what is going to happen with these tariffs? Is our market going to take another hit? Are we selling enough overseas or even internally if people have been slowing down consumer spending and consumer outlook is so low, why would you hire more people to produce more? You're kind of taking a risk there.

Right. So uncertainty is still just driving a little bit of conservative approach to growth and thus hiring additional people within your business. That makes a lot of sense. I think we'll see something similar probably in our industry. I I think we will see a little bit of an improvement in volume in the mortgage industry. That's what the MBA is saying. And, you know, based on where interest rates are and the fact that there's still, there's still several million mortgages out there that have a

don't we talk about that? Let's talk about housing. I think we don't talk a ton about it here because it's not exactly our full expertise, although we were very close to it, you know, living in the mortgage industry. So we follow a lot of the drama around the FHFA certainly that directly affects housing, housing prices in general that affect things like loan limits. We're all following Bill Pulte's activity recently. In fact, there was a

Obviously we should be cautious. you know, we had the, discussions a couple of months ago where, Pulti had pulled in mortgage experts like Barry Habib and some others to talk about what could be done about LOPAs or G fees and other things in the, you know, the GSE space to make housing more affordable. But now they're talking to the builders. I think, you know, during the campaigns, there was talk from both, both candidates about what could be done potentially about housing.

I don't know that the Trump administration relied heavily on that part of their campaign promises, but they did say that they would do everything possible to bring the right people in a room to talk it through. So again, cautiously optimistic that we get some creativity there from the home builders, even if it's something that doesn't just affect new homes, but hopefully affects existing sales as well.

Absolutely, I think we're all well aware of that.

the long term way we get out of the issues that we see in the housing market is to build more. At the end of the day, there are simply not enough homes for the number of people in this country that would like to own a home, which I think is just about everybody. And bringing in the home builders is absolutely a good idea. I think though was said on one of our first casts with the BOK guys, they were talking about how at the end of the day, you can subsidize at the national level, you can put together economic plans that favor the home builders, but in a lot of cases, it turns out to

be a pretty local issue on home building. And there's a lot of regulation and red tape at the local level or the state level that would also need to be So I'm cautiously optimistic there. I do hope that they come out with something. If there is some sort of subsidy that they're going to do or.

Anything to push home builders to build more would be great. Make it affordable to build those entry level homes, which are historically the least profitable items for them to build. Which but is also the most in demand unit for those of us that are on the younger end of the age spectrum. So yeah, I hope they do more there. And I've also heard some inklings just to change the ⁓ conversation just a little bit. I heard some rumors last week that Bowman who's on the federal board, Michelle Bowman.

She was meeting with some regional bank heads just talking about liquidity ratios and capital requirements and everything. they could be pushing on a couple different fronts to try and stoke mortgage industry here, both on the supply side of the physical asset and maybe to lower rates a little bit with some capital requirement changes.

Yeah, good call there. I'd read that as well. And, you know, as is the case with most Republican administrations, they're looking to deregulate a bit. most banks, I think, would tell you that they feel like the regulations over the past decade plus, at least since the great financial crisis, have leaned to the restrictive side, have probably made business a little bit, quite a bit more difficult to get done with maybe not reducing the risk as much as we would have hoped. So, yeah, that could be another story that

just a bunch of liquidity of homes is dumped onto the market. You can see there being, really being a buyer's market at that point. You you still have all these young people, right? The average home buyer age is higher than it's ever been. That starts, you know, those younger people start to finally jump in and say, okay, the house I've been looking at or the neighborhood has dropped, you know, 10, 7, 10%. I'm going to jump in now. Like that makes my payment something that I can handle. Anyway, that could, again, that could snowball to where we see.

A little bit of a counter idea to you that I heard. was listening on a town hall earlier this week and just the conversation about people who are sitting on these lower rates who have been here for a long time. One of the major themes we might be looking at in 2026 is HELOCs, right? A home equity line of credit. Someone who's been sitting there. If your house is not really appreciated anymore and you can't afford to upgrade, what you're gonna do is you're gonna upgrade your house yourself, right? So you're gonna take out that line of credit. And so you're gonna try and make the house worth a little bit more.

Mm-hmm.

you're gonna use the money in that way to push it up and to stay in that lower rate, right? So that's kind of a theme that I thought was an intelligent thought that looking at 2026, we might be seeing more of.

Yeah, good call. think you see that in economies like we're seeing today. If you can't upgrade by moving, you upgrade by staying and, you know, popping the top, if you will, or adding an addition or finishing your basement into a couple of bedrooms to allow for a growing family or just maybe your income, your job situation has improved over the last few years and you want something a little nicer, but you don't want to double your mortgage just by way of the interest burden.

The nice thing about both these stories is for our industry and those of us in the mortgage profession, it both produces a couple more mortgages out there to volume.

Alright, what a-

volume. All

about volume. All right. So we talked about a couple things, other just kind of industry related items with the FHFA potentially getting creative again this year by way of doing something through the GSEs. Could happen, might not happen. I feel like a lot of the ideas that were kicked around earlier this year would lead to lower profitability of the GSEs, which

Do we want to see that or is that something we're trying to maintain? You can't have both, I don't think. Have a wildly profitable GSE and somehow drop rates half a percent. So we'll see how that, if anything more pans out there, the privatization of the GSEs is definitely something to keep an eye on, but we've been talking about it since November, I would say, since the election pretty heavily and it's not happened yet. It still could. I don't know.

Finger in the air, minor disruption to the industry if that happens. It's unlikely that would lead to instantly lower rates, but could be, I don't know, could lead to maybe more efficient management, different type of process, more seeking profit rather than relying on some of the missions and goals of the FHFA. I don't know, anything else you all would think we'd want to keep an eye on in terms of the GSEs next year?

I agree with you. think out of the gates, it'd be more headlines than tangible benefits or downsides on the long term. Depending on how they behave out in the private markets, could definitely in rates, so long as they keep themselves afloat. We don't see a repeat of history.

Right.

Otherwise, yeah, I mean, look for more drama around the credit score agencies. You know, you've got Vantage, which is relatively new. You got FICO coming out with their FICO 10T. Like those are, those are there. They've not yet been fully adopted by the ultimate buyers, you know, the, the, the investors or the, or even fully by the GSEs. mean, they haven't been built into their pricing structures yet, but probably some noise around that this year. Hopefully good noise and a little bit more efficiency. Obviously watch the FHFA.

recapture, recapture will continue to be a big topic this year. Again, you know, there are millions of mortgages literally, that are over 6 % still that were originated over the past few years. So there's still opportunity there for refis. Obviously, like we talked about with the housing market opportunity for purchases.

What else did we miss today? mean, you never know what could happen. I mean, you still have global tensions. mean, we're, we are flirting with a conflict with Venezuela right now. Typically global conflict, especially if we're directly involved leads towards lower rates. mean, the rates we're seeing right now to me go all the way back to, ⁓ the Iran, the very short Iran conflict we had along with Israel over the summer, right? Rates have not recovered from that.

So maybe that's a good thing. At the same time, you have the fed starting to dabble more in buying treasuries, which is going to keep rates a little bit lower.

like what else is gonna happen in the world. also have, they're gonna vote on health care in January.

Right, so that's coming

up here in a few weeks.

Yeah, so in January, the Congress still needs to vote on what to do with ⁓ health care, the Obamacare subsidies. It's definitely in this story about inflation and affordability doubling in some places, you know, more costs that you're going to be paying every single month, kicking like a million or more Americans off of health insurance. It's going to be a major story, especially again, leading into an election year. I think that they're going to have to.

figure something out to save face and to make sure that power can be maintained.

Right. Big vote coming up. Hopefully does not lead to another shutdown in the first quarter. That's not free to do, right? It's not inexpensive to the economy or to the general morale of the nation.

Not at all, but I think.

or to our economic data.

Yes, that as well. gives us nothing to talk about this podcast almost other than the shutdown.

I think a bright spot there is.

All right, great.

have a good path forward there in that four Republicans ⁓ defected from the majority there to secure this vote on health care. So I think it seems to be kind of crossing party lines and maybe the ⁓ Republican hold on the Senate is a little bit more tenuous than it was during the shutdown.

I think I agree with that take very much.

Okay, so maybe the first thing to watch out for is this vote, which will come in about mid-January when everybody comes back from their respective holiday breaks in the House and the Senate.

Alright, maybe we wrap it up with a little holiday cheer then speaking of the holidays. you James for having the tree in the background this week. That's that's incredible. Love the hat there. That's that's just been fun to. To have on here in case anybody was wondering whether or not this was recorded right around the holidays. There's your answer. Let's go maybe around the room. What's your like holiday activity? What did you do last week or were you going to do this week or?

towards the end of the year. Like what's your favorite thing to do around the holidays with friends or family? I always start with you, James, other than putting up a Christmas tree in your podcast studio, what are we doing for the holidays?

You

You know, Maya, I live real close to my family, which is nice and convenient for the holidays. So we always get together for it and we tend to get a puzzle and we put it together and it's kind of, you know, over the course of December and January, you know, whenever you're at the house, you throw it together. So by the end of ⁓ the year, we should have finished it out. So that's always a nice tradition.

Nice, you talking like a big like thousand piece jigsaw type puzzle.

Yeah, we're

like the old folks homes kind of want to be supposed to keep you going for months, but we tend to put it together pretty quick.

Yeah.

Nice. Good brain exercise. Good way to kind of gather people around a coffee table or the dining room. Nice. How about you, Alex?

Exactly.

For me, it's just the general vibe around the holidays. It's just sitting around, a little bit less work, take a few days off work, string together a couple nice four-day weekends into the new year, and eat to my heart's content. ⁓ yeah, just relaxing through the end of the year.

Nice. Very good. Yeah, I guess mine's somewhere in the middle. It's, you know, obviously kind of a nutty time of year, especially with a growing family. So you've got, you're hosting this or you're driving to that. But one of the things we do, just the four of us, know, Jenny and the girls, is we go see the Nutcracker every year right before Christmas. So we're to do that tomorrow night. So that's, that's just a fun tradition we've had forever. Actually, Jenny used to go with her grandmother.

way back in the day before we ever met, but when she was a little girl. it's fun to bring our daughters to that show and have a nice dinner and just kind of disappear for a couple hours in the, I don't know, if you've ever been, it's kind of a magical thing, right? The Nutcrackers, it's not, I've never much been into ballet in general, but it's just kind of a cool holiday. Holiday tradition, fun thing to do.

Alright, what are you? So last thing, what are you hoping to get for Christmas this year, James? What do want or or hotic or whatever holiday like? What do you hope to get as a gift this holiday season?

⁓ You know, I'm looking for a few more rate cuts. That's what I'd like for Christmas this year. ⁓ You know, ⁓ I think I've been looking for a new background. So it might take me a little bit longer than Christmas, but we might be changing this up behind me, which will be nice.

All right. Yeah, as long as the trees are great touch, but if you replace that with something, you know, once we get into the first quarter, maybe it's something that's a little also wintery. And then you get into spring, something that's that could be cool. Could be a running deal.

yeah.

Yeah,

keep the tree around until July. See if I can't turn it around. ⁓

Yes.

How about you, Alex?

You know it's very utilitarian and actually I already got it from the girlfriend for ⁓ Black Friday, was on sale, but just a good pair of all-weather boots ⁓ needed that moving out east.

That's

right. That's right. You're walking through New York City in the winter. That's it hasn't snowed a lot yet, but it will. You'll get that. You don't want you don't want absorbent footwear in that kind of environment. ⁓ I'll stay on the footwear vibe, I guess. I've always wanted a pair of Jordans. Never had one when I was a kid. And we did a we did a secret Santa exchange with with Jenny's side of the family this weekend. And my brother-in-law got me a pair of Jordans, my first pair ever.

No.

So I'll be wearing those maybe into the office tomorrow. Everybody can check them out. can kind of strut down the 17th. That's right. That's right.

I knew I was coming back to Denver at a good time.

You guys gonna hit the court together?

Yes, we'll be hooping it up out in the parking lot outside Dominion Towers tomorrow if anybody wants to join us.

I didn't.

You

Next week I'll be wanting a new ACL for Christmas. ⁓

Hahaha!

Oof, yeah.

My Achilles hurts just thinking about it.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Happy Holidays!

And that is it for today. Another great episode. Alex, James, thanks so much for the conversation. This will be our last podcast of the year. So we won't have one next week, but tune in on January 5th. We'll have a brand new episode to kick off the year. Make sure you register for our summit. That's coming up here in February. Can't miss out on that. Just a big thank you. I want to say thank you to everybody. To all of our listeners, people who have followed us this year, to our podcast team, to Matt and the rest of the crew that

that produced this podcast and of course, everybody within OB that's on the podcast. A big thanks to all of our guests. We've had some really spectacular guests this year. And thanks to our team at OB, just the desks that we work on, the trade desk, as well as just all of OB who just makes this a super special place to work. And happy holidays, everybody. Again, reach out to us. We mentioned this last week at podcast at optimalblue.com.

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