[David] Thank you Matt Graham. Good content all the way around. I keep going back to Les Parker if the 10 year stays below 4.50 and US crude or the West Texas crew doesn’t go above $65. We’re under four in the tenure. That is good news. So Bill, when you hear that, when you listen to Matt and he’s giving you blow by blow, not taking the position, forecasting anything, Les gets right out there and you’ve known Les and we all know come to respect his forecast. So comments, your thoughts.
[Bill] So, first, late late breaking news. So we have Mark’s Rant are a feature of this podcast. We’re now gonna introduce a new segment called Bill’s. Bullet.
[David] Bill’s Bullet.
[Bill] Bill’s Bullet. I got three things I wanna hit, and then we can into one of my, one of my clients. Volume. If so, you take the holidays out. If you look at their origination volume mid-January to mid-February, they’re up about 200% in the current 30 day period. There’s no way to count how many times Mr. Kittle, myself and others have talked about not paying attention to the rates and go originate loans. All the uncertainty and volume is still growing day by day. That’s number one. Number two that’s great. Economists are great. The data is great. There’s so much going on right now that it’s real time. You’ve gotta practice anecdotal economics, which is economics. Talk to people, friends, business people because that’s where you’re gonna learn what’s really going on. And for example, I was in an event Thrsday evening talking to two guys who were both in the kind of intermediate to metal business and one of them was saying they spent a long time talking to their suppliers about whether the aluminum, in their case that they got came from Canada or not, or from overseas. Just as they got comfortable that they were dealing with domestically produced supplies, they got notice of a 20% price increase. He called up the supplier and he goes, what the is going on? You said that you’re not importing from Canada. He goes, yeah, but if the Canadian metal just went up by 25%, he goes, I should be able to raise my prices 20% and it’s still a great deal. There are folks looking to take advantage of what’s going on, number one. Number two, that starts to tell me what’s really going on with prices paid versus waiting 60 or 90 days for some backward looking economics statistics to come out. The third thing is, as we’re hearing everything about the tariffs and especially now that there’s been huge progress with China. I go back to, some of us are old enough to remember an old Saturday Night Live skit where they had whatever their product was, and is it a floor polish or is it a dessert topic? Are tariffs going to be to rebalance and drive trade, or are they there to generate revenue? But what we’re seeing just over the last 48 hours is it can’t be both, you can’t put blockbuster numbers on and say, here’s how much revenue we’re gonna raise when that’s not your real intention. So, keep that in mind as you’re hearing both the trade discussion and the budget discussion. You can’t use the same dollar for two different purposes. The last thing is, I thought Les’s piece was very interesting because he brought into the conversation this week two qualifiers, which you just mentioned around the path to 360 and, we go back to the tape or we can go back to Alice’s note, which is easier, Les’s been saying We’re going to 360 right now it’s if the market hold a certain level, we’re gonna go there. And I still agree with them. I think that shows how more condition and conditions can change. So understanding where things are going, you need to understand the why behind it, and be able to pamper your logic as the environment changes because it’s changing at a rate that frankly nobody’s ever seen before.
[David] That’s right. Yeah. Very good. Anyone else wanna jump on that? Marc, I’ll give you a chance, seeing, as you brought up Marc’s rant, do you have a rant around this or do we save you a rant until the end? We normally have it in there.
[Marc] I need to save it towards the end. But I think what Bill brought up is something very on point that we need to think about because it’s happening every day and it’s movement every day. Same time people want to get on bandwagons that causes things to accelerate and if you have somebody that sees a window there and then other people jump onto it, then things are gonna really get outta hand.
[David] I like the new segment bill. Bill’s bullets yeah you always speak of bullets anyway, so I like that. So we’ve got Bill’s, bullets, and that’s really good. I think Bill, what really leaped out at me is what you said at the beginning of this is you have several clients that you’re working with and their production, one of them was up over 200% was that year over year?
[Bill] No, that is from or mid-January to, to current activities. It’s as close to realtime. It’s progressive. You can get.
[David] Yeah. But the bottom line is we’re hearing that across the board. It’s really interesting. When leadership brings out the right mindset and reinforces what we’ve been saying on this podcast, and we’re getting quoted a lot, you need to listen to Lykken on Lending podcast because we have when you’ll hear consistently, you need to quit focusing on what rates are doing at focus on getting more business. And as people do that, they realize that there’s, it’s like, what do you say about your car? You go, your car goes where you’re looking, where are you looking? And that’s it. So Mr. Kittle will jump in and give your commentary and then can’t wait to get into a couple of the other things that you have for us, especially you held up on your phone.
[Kittle] The thing that I like most about Matt’s commentary today was I learned a new word deleterious and deleterious. Don’t tell me I wasn’t listening, which, so I had to look it up. Full disclosure, hurtful, noxious, destructive and pernicious. Yeah. So there you go. A new word.
[David] Yeah. Matt is one. It says a lot like Les does and uses a few more words, but he does give us a lot of great information.
[Kittle] It’s not like I, Les’s piece today. I hope he is right.
[David] Yeah, here’s the thing, we are watching someone that we’ve been in relationship with in case of Bill and I, 40 years 30, 30, almost 40 years and Les has proven himself to be extremely accurate. I appreciate the qualifiers he put on at this time. Kinda, I like talking about the, West Texas intermediate is it intermediate or immediate? Crude and intermediate.
[Bill] Intermediate.
[David] That’s why. Okay. And so when you look at that, I have that graph up right now, and you’re looking at where it has been and where it’s down to. I think that’s a real good indicator and then we all follow the 10 year treasury. What, and you.
[Kittle] So what is it right now? Is it 62 bucks a barrel, somewhere around there? $62.48 a barrel right now.
[Kittle] So where we’re under the five, 10 years at 4 42 or whatever.
[David] And yeah we’re testing a trading range. What we’re really doing is we’re testing the upper ends of a trading range of both of those, and we’ll see, we break through. So listeners pay attention to these kind of details. I’m on business or markets insider. So a business insider is it’s markets.business insider.com. It’s where I went and found the crude oil prices for all that and there’s many good places find this information, but nothing better than what Matt has behind us. So sign up for Matt’s MBS live.net service. You can do so by going there and putting in the code LOL and you get the extended trial period for free. Matt Graham, thank you so much for doing that. Bill, bill, bullet Bill. Thank you for your commentary.