Happy Friday! Brian Manning here with your weekly update. Let's get right to it. Ok. So, Monday this week, I was really looking back at Friday's jobs report, which is really a strong jobs report, but... you know, I think it was kind of an illusion of a report. The reason why I say that is because if you look at the jobs that were counted, there was 165,000 jobs that were counted twice.

So, that was people that have multiple jobs, right? So, we have a full-time job and a part-time job or two part-time jobs. 165,000 of those got counted twice in the process. So, I still think that a little bit of an illusion on that jobs report. I don't think it was really as rosy or the jobs market is as rosy as it made it seem, especially because we look at ADP.

So, I really think ADP now takes more stock than the BLS. The reason why I say that is because the ADP report that we got last week on Wednesday, ADP has 25 million records, whereas the BLS report is really doing a lot of modeling based on companies that are open and companies that close, and the modeling is not always as accurate. So... So, we'll have to wait and see what happens with more employment reports. But I would say we want to keep close eye on ADP because it's feeling like that's more accurate.

Tuesday this week, we had some negativity from Jamie Dimon. Really smart guy, you know, he runs Chase. Bond markets reacted negatively to his comments. You know, I would say a couple of his predictions in the last year or so haven't been correct. His prediction of what the bond market is going to do over the next year or so, I'm not going to fully agree with. The markets didn't like what his predictions were, and it did have a little bit of negative impact on interest rates.

Also, Tuesday this week, we got CoreLogic. CoreLogic gives us feedback on home appreciation. This was for the month of October. Across the country, home appreciation was only down 1/10th of a percent. So, prices still hanging in there. Core Logic expectations are that home appreciation will be flat for the month of November, flat for the month of December, and they anticipate homes will appreciate a 4% in the year of 2023. So, you know, is that the 20% we got the last couple of years? No, we all know that it wasn't sustainable, but it's certainly seeing 4% appreciation is not a housing collapse like, you know, some doom and gloom media is stating right now. So, I was really happy to see those numbers.

Thursday this week, we got unemployment. So, every Thursday we get unemployment reports. This gives us feedback on continuing claims. So, these are people that have filed for unemployment and they're continuing to file for unemployment claims. That was up 62,000 people last week. That was up 1.67 million people or how many people were filing for continuous claims right now, and on an eight-week average right now that's up 325,000 people. So, we got to keep a close eye on the continuing claims as we start to see some more softening in the labor market, which I think we are going to see that some of the Federal Reserve has to look at when they're making decisions on whether they should continue to hike rates or what their plans are.

Today, we got PPI. So, PPI stands for Producer Price Index. This measures inflation at a wholesale level. For many years, there wasn't a lot of weight put on this report. But now, because there's so much talk about inflation, this is definitely very highly looked at. It's not the most accurate because measuring inflation on the wholesale level does not always translate to costs that we're going to experience on the consumer level. But again, because there's a lot of talk of inflation lately, something gets looked at.

So, on a month-over-month basis, the inflation number was up 4/10th of a percent, slightly higher than expected. But on a year-over-year basis, this number moved from 6.7% to 6.2%. And then if you look at the headline all-in number, on a year-over-year basis, the inflation number moved from 8.1% to 7.4%. So, we are seeing easing on inflation. This is really good for us to see. Something that we really want to pay close attention to is going to be the CPI report. That's the consumer price index. We get that next week on Tuesday. We truly think there's going to show some continual easing of inflation there.

We've talked about this in the past. Inflation is the arch enemy of mortgage rates. As we continue to see inflation calm down, it's going to help us with mortgage rates. We truly think we're going to see mortgage rates in the 5% range Q1, Q2 of this upcoming year. As we continue to see calming down of inflation reports like we expect we're going to see this upcoming Tuesday. That's only helping us with mortgage rates and it's going to keep them slowly moving lower, which is exciting to see. I'm around all weekend. If you have any questions, let me know. If you want to go through our strategic buyer consultation, give me a call. I'd love to help you with the pre-approval. Happy Friday. Have a great day!

-Brian

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