[David] Appreciate it very much, Matt. A lot of data in there. A lot of yeah buts. I like that. And revisions, man, have we heard about revisions, always revisions to the data.
I’m really going to be interested in, I’d like to get a talk, Bill, I want to start off with you talking about revisions because you look at what happened with Doge going in and going after USAID and the jobs now, technically those jobs are not gone away. But those and many other federal jobs are going to be furloughed or they’re going to get a compensation for eight months. The heck of a deal for a government worker. Take the rest of the year off. But I think the biggest reflection I keep thinking about is where this could be taking us in jobs on the government sector, which is something Kittle talks about. We’ll get your thoughts to 1st, get off the Kittle.
[Bill] So, there’s been an interesting back and forth in the state of Virginia over the jobs from the top level elected officials and both senators from the state of Virginia are on the top of the mountain screaming that this is going to be an economic calamity for the state of Virginia and Glenn Youngkin, who is the governor of Virginia, has been equally outspoken saying that there is more than enough job opportunities in the state of Virginia today for people that are qualified and motivated to work hard in the private sector, if you parse those two comments, I don’t think I have to say which side of the political spectrum the respective folks are on we’re not going to know the impact of this on the labor force really until after the fact and I think anybody that’s trying to speculate what it means is really just political grandstanding and I even saw an article over the weekend that was trying to go almost county by county and government workers, government contractors, and there are absolutely places if this plays out that are going to be impacted, but that’s been happening since the US was founded and as the economy evolved, it’s constantly changing and to me, it’s not the initial part that is driving the ultimate effect. It’s how everybody can adapt to it and it’s not going to be perfect and God loves the media. They’re going to be able to come up with fantastic, heartfelt stories about the negative impact. But that’s happened day in, day out, year in, year out as our economy is about and we’ve got to wait and see what the effect looks like over time.
[David] Yeah. That’s a great point. Kittle, what’s so interesting about this is that so many people are saying that the press is going to play this up. It’s a travesty of what’s going on. Look at the American response generally across the board to what is going on. It’s go find another job. You’ve been on the government dole for so long and so many have and so I don’t think there’s a whole lot of sympathy for that. So the guys that are screaming that this is going to be just terrible are not in tune and it’s their voice is going to get drowned out by the gazillions of Americans that are absolutely supporting all that’s going on. So, your thoughts?
[Kittle] Trump’s approval rating on a CBS poll is up to 70% right now. And I think if you equate that back to the election and what the Democrats are doing they still don’t get it. They didn’t get it in the election and they’re dying on a hill that is not the right hill to die on. Let’s go back and talk about all the we talked about this for the last year. Every time we got a jobs number, which always got revised down, by the way Bill would analyze it for us and there would be these tens of thousands of government jobs in the increased jobs report we are bloated in the government. This is a good thing. I totally agree with Governor Youngkin. Go find another job, retrain yourself. What was it that Biden said when he shut down the pipeline, go recode or whatever it is now to come back to get them and I feel sorry for them, but not for the ones that have been sitting home for months and probably had other jobs and doing other things. So it’s time. It’s time for all this to happen. It’s way,
[David] It has the case, Alice, as we bring it into looking at HUD and VA. When you look at Secretary Collins and Secretary Turner. Both of these guys are going to be following the marching orders of this administration. Let’s look for excess. Your thoughts on, as you look at this from a mortgage perspective and the cuts that could be coming, what are your reflections and thoughts?
[Alice] Cuts are specific to the government agencies that we’re talking about. And so I’m going to play my Detroiter card. Who has had to pay for the auto industry on the many times they have had decimation in layoffs and they had to recover and Detroit has done that, they have recovered and you get leaner and meaner and you figure it out. Yes, I like David said I’m always sorry to hear when people have to lose their job. But the fact remains is what the mission that is happening today to reduce the government expenses is important. Each agency is very different. Like we’ve talked about. So Ginnie Mae, we were talking about Marc Helm brought this up that a lot of their services are contracted out and I was just looking this up and, 80% of Ginnie Mae is contractors anyway. When you’re talking about who’s losing their job, I don’t know how much of that number is actually a government employee and how much of it is contractors now have to go find another job.
[David] Yeah, if you look at who has those contracts to Marc way in on this, you’re very familiar with Ginnie Mae.
[Marc] I’ve known for a long time. They were heavily contracted out. I’m surprised it’s that much, but I did not know it was 80%.
[David] I did not know it was 80%.
[Alice] So I’m going to say that’s a GPT thing. I’m still researching, but then they listed and showed the reasoning.
[Marc] But, I know the approval thing has been contracted out for a long time and that’s been, I think, a problem with approvals, but I will tell you that one thing about the other government employees too I know a bunch of people that interface with the government employees in Washington, DC especially the company I own and the systems involvement and all that stuff and it’s amazing how many of the government employees are working remote. They never came back after COVID.
[David] Interesting. Yeah. They did not. And now that they’re required to come back to work, Alan, wasn’t it you that was talking about? Some of the workers what department were you talking about, Alan? And where they’re going into a local office there in where you live.
[Allen] Yeah. Somebody I was with this weekend works for the department of health and they’ve been there their whole career and they’re under 10 years away from retirement and since COVID they have not had a physical office. Their office is actually in Virginia and make a long story short. They are going to go back to work because the buyout plan didn’t include anything about accelerating the retirement, and they’re happy to go back to work by the way, they’re from the person I spoke to, and then her circle, I asked specifically what do you think about it and she said, we’re tired of working from home. The interruption from the dogs, the UPS guy, everything is valid, but more importantly the FBI office in Jacksonville has a lot of space and I guess some of them are going to be working there.
[David] Interesting.
[Bill] So David, to put a little bit different perspective on it, because I don’t want this to come across We’re anti government workers because we’re not. So, we’ll take it back to yesterday. So Philadelphia, right? So they won second Superbowl in four years, in the intervening time, your first Superbowl to win from now, they are now on their third offensive coordinator and their third defensive coordinator. So, if you think about the head coach, he’s had to reinvent his next level down his coaching staff, two full times in effect from one Superbowl to the next and that’s what’s successful people in organizations are constantly evolving, constantly reinventing themselves. So that’s the key to success and look in our industry. If you write so much of the listener base our sales folks, they go, wow, it’s great. They have a great month. They get a bunch of deals in. They’re starting from scratch the next month. They’re constantly evolving in how they go about the business and I think that’s what’s got to be brought into a lot of this discussion, not a pedestal as a government employee where once you walk in the door everything’s static. We’ve all reinvented ourselves multiple times and again, we keep going back when you talk about individual people, individual departments, it all makes a ton of sense. But at the end of the day, the government just can’t keep spending the amount of money it is.
[David] That’s right. Yeah. We look at it, if they were spending it in a way that was positive, it’d be fine, but it’s not, it’s inefficient. And then you look at how much money is being redirected as the, USAID got debacled. They got revealed anyway, go on to that bill. Let’s talk a little bit about the market conditions. If you can give us your view of less comments and then Mr. Kittle had to go grab a call. So he’s going to not join us for the rest of the call. But if you can give us an update on that, I’d be grateful.
[Bill] So I think if you combining why last and Matt talk about we’re in the middle of a range and we’re data dependent, right? But it’s also, finding the balance between data dependent, but then moves by the Fed, especially have a long lead time so it’s contradictory that they’re reacting to news in the short term, knowing that it takes a longer time for things to come into play. But I still go back to what Les said, in his forecast for this year is look for a fairly wide range of rates and I think you’re going to see inflationary pressure and, forget what drives it. It’s going to lead at some point to higher rates. But I also think that moves on the downside are very likely.
[David] Yeah, very likely. I think it’s more downward pressure at this stage in the the overall rate scenario than upward and yet, what’s really interesting is we’re seeing good growth in the pipelines out there. Modest locks. I’m looking and talking to our clients, talking every time. I said, by the way, how’s your locked pipeline doing? and they’re all coming back and they said, it’s encouraging. We’re seeing some overhaul positive numbers week over week and then year over year. It’s actually better. So I think there’s reason for optimism this year. That’s what we picked up as I talked about last week’s podcast. I picked up at the IMB conference overall. It’s very good.