Treasury Secretary Bessent said FSOC is readjusting its approach to avoid stifling growth in moves with implications for capital, technology and mortgages.

ETHZilla partnered with Zippy to bring manufactured home chattel loans on-chain as tokenized real-world assets.

Approximately 70% of home purchasers do not get more than one quote in the mortgage process, doing so could reduce their rate by 50 basis points, Zillow said.

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors voted Wednesday to reappoint 11 sitting regional Fed presidents, without any dissents. The move precludes any effort the White House might have made to pressure the board to deny reappointments.

On Thursday, prosecutors unsuccessfully tried again to ask a grand jury in a different Virginia court to return an indictment.

Two-Way Trading But Not Much Day-Over-Day Movement

Bonds had a solid morning, adding moderately to yesterday’s rally and taking yields well into the lowest levels since last Friday. But from just after the 9:30am NYSE open, bonds leaked slowly weaker, ultimately ending the day closer to unchanged levels. In the bigger picture, nothing interesting or significant happened, and December 16th (jobs report day) is set to be the only other obviously tradeable day of 2025.

Econ Data / Events

Jobless Claims

236k vs 220k f’cast

Continued Claims

1838k vs 1950k f’cast

Market Movement Recap

10:23 AM Stronger after claims data. MBS up 6 ticks (.19) and 10yr down 3.6bps at 4.115

12:44 PM MBS up an eighth and 10yr down 2.7bps at 4.123

02:30 PM Gains fading a bit. MBS up only 2 ticks (.06) and 10yr down 1.1bps at 4.14

03:57 PM drifting out at same levels as last update.  MBS up 2 ticks (.06) and 10yr down 0.9 bps at 4.142

As is sometimes the case on the day following a Fed day, the bond market carried a bit more momentum in the same direction as yesterday afternoon. Fortunately, the momentum was toward lower rates this time around–a nice break from the past two Fed days which resulted in several days (and weeks) of higher rates. This leaves the average lender roughly in the middle of the range over the past 3 months. These are also the lowest levels seen since last Thursday for the average lender.

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Bonds are adding moderate to yesterday’s post-Fed gains. Most of today’s rally has followed this morning’s jobless claims data, but we wouldn’t necessarily give it all the credit. This is a tricky week to try to make sense of jobless claims due to the very late Thanksgiving holiday this year. It threw a wrench in seasonal calculations. In a nutshell, last week’s initial claims plummeted due to Thanksgiving and seasonal adjustments didn’t help much because, on average, Thanksgiving falls on the 25th (thus, last week’s claims were too late in the month to get much benefit from the adjustment).  Continued claims magnify the same issue with this week’s data (continued claims run 1 week behind initial claims). This is why we have the biggest jump in years in both metrics with one being higher and the other being lower. It’s all about seasonal adjustments.  If we do our best to look through that, non-adjusted continued claims are the highest in years, and bonds could be paying some attention to that.
This seasonally adjusted chart shows the snap back to reality for initial claims.  It would have been a smaller jump if last week wasn’t distorted on the low side. 

Opposite problem for continued claims, which are reported 1 week later (i.e. you can bank on a big snap back next week):

The following chart shows NON-seasonally adjusted continued claims.  With this chart, it’s easy to see 2025 running at the highest levels in years. Bonus point for those who see the gray line poking briefly higher only to realize Thanksgiving was on the 11/23 in 2023.

With the Federal Reserve decision largely factored in, Jerome Powell’s comments on future outlook is more likely to influence the housing market.