Two Stories to Highlight

We’re coming up on noon, and the stock market opened just a tad higher, but we’re currently just a tad lower on the day. Volatility has really dropped lately. This morning, the $VIX was at its lowest level since April 12.

I have two small stories that I want to highlight. One is that Ford ($F) has announced it will hire 3,000 salaried employees which includes 800 white-collar jobs at HQ; “Global employment is up to 175K from a recession-low of 158K.”

The other is that Wells Fargo ($WFC) is crushing it in mortgage lending.

When a Wells Fargo stagecoach rolled through lower Manhattan two years ago to mark the rebranding of former Wachovia Corp. bank branches, some New Yorkers laughed. Rival bankers weren’t among them.

The San Francisco-based bank has become the dominant U.S. mortgage lender, grabbing an unprecedented 28.8% share of all home loans issued nationwide last year, up from 11.2% in 2007, the year before it bought Wachovia. Its home-loan production hit $524 billion last year, the largest annual total ever for one lender and greater than the output of the next five largest lenders combined, according to the publication Inside Mortgage Finance.

In the lucrative Manhattan market, Wells issued almost 20% of new home loans—almost equal to the volume of its two biggest competitors together, according to real-estate research firm CoreLogic Inc. In San Francisco, it made 21% of new loans, in Los Angeles, 12%, and in Dallas, 9%.

“They are dominating the retail space because they are huge, and because there is so little competition from other big banks that have pulled back,” says Alan Rosenbaum, chief executive of GuardHill Financial Corp., a New York-based mortgage bank.

Posted by on July 23rd, 2013 at 11:43 am


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