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TIAA Bank to sell its correspondent biz to PenFed

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TIAA Bank is selling its correspondent lending platform to Pentagon Federal Credit Union for an undisclosed amount of money. The deal represents the latest mortgage space exit for the Jacksonville-based financial firm. TIAA Bank has laid off more than 200 workers over the past six months as it pivots away from mortgage servicing. In 2019, […]

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AOC steps up criticism of infrastructure talks with GOP, saying Democrats are ‘burning precious time’

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Summary List Placement Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York assailed the crawling pace of negotiations with Republicans on Wednesday, arguing Democrats are wasting time on the legislative calendar. “Dems are burning precious time & impact negotiating w/GOP who won’t even vote for a Jan 6 commission,” she wrote on Twitter. “McConnell’s plan is to run […]

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Most Democrats want to permanently send $300 to families per month, but some centrist senators may push big cuts in Biden’s infrastructure plan

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Summary List Placement A strong majority of Democrats in the House and Senate back making permanent a one-year cash benefit from President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus: up to $300 monthly checks to the vast majority of American families. The $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package passed in March increased the child tax credit’s amount to […]

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Top Republican accuses White House of moving goalposts on infrastructure — but she didn’t budge on either of Biden’s requests

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Summary List Placement After nearly six weeks of back and forth between President Joe Biden and West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito on infrastructure, Biden ended the negotiations on Tuesday after failing to come to an agreement. Capito said in a Fox News interview on Wednesday that the White House “kept moving the goalposts” on […]

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IMBs have a duty to serve lower-income communities

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Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell recently observed that across all kinds of financial services, activities that had once been principally the province of banks have moved into the nonbank sector, including IMBs. In discussing whether more financial institutions should have a duty to serve the capital and credit needs of lower-income communities — an obligation […]

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Hospitality workers are quitting at the fastest rate in 20 years just as employers are raising wages, showing the strange state of the recovery

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Summary List Placement In May, wages for workers grew as employers struggled to hire. It seemed to show that businesses were embracing a simple strategy for luring workers back: Paying them more. Wages rose across the board for workers, increasing by $0.15 to average hourly earnings of $30.33. As Insider previously reported, the wage gains […]

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Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to cancel $50,000 in student debt would benefit low-income borrowers more, report finds

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Summary List Placement Some Democrats’ calls to cancel $50,000 in student debt per borrower has critics, with even President Joe Biden arguing it would benefit the high-earners more than the low earners. But a new study challenges that argument. The left-leaning Roosevelt Institute released a report on Tuesday analyzing the “regressive cancellation myth” that Massachusetts […]

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Welcome to Wall Street’s ‘Summer of Anxiety’

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Summary List Placement As summer comes to the United States, the coronavirus is receding, businesses are reopening, and people are going back to work. There are memes everywhere trying to encapsulate the elation of the season — “hot vax summer,” “the new Roaring 20s,” etc.  But on Wall Street, things are a bit darker. Among […]

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Americans have saved up to 70% of their latest stimulus checks, Bank of America’s CEO says, potentially leaving hundreds of billions unspent in checking accounts

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Summary List Placement Americans have collectively saved billions from the last two rounds of stimulus checks, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan told CBS in an interview on Sunday.  “Our consumers have lots of money in their checking accounts,” Moynihan told CBS. “They have not spent about 65-70% of the last couple of rounds of […]

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Mortgage applications are thinning as summer approaches

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For the third week in a row, mortgage applications decreased. Mortgage applications fell 3.1% in the week ending June 4, and refis took the biggest dip, according to the latest report from the Mortgage Bankers Association. “Most of the decline in mortgage rates came late last week, with the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage declining to 3.15 […]

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4 million Americans quit their jobs in April — a 20-year record. Many of them worked in the retail sector, which is in the middle of a massive labor shortage.

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Summary List Placement Job vacancies rose to a 20 year-high in April, a Labor Department survey showed Tuesday.  The survey also showed that 4 million workers quit their jobs in April — another 20-year record. Job quits rose most in the retail sector and the professional and business services sector.  Companies were advertising 9.3 job […]

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Regions Bank places $1B bet on home renovation market

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Regions Bank is looking to make a big dent in the home improvement lending space, striking a deal to acquire EnerBank USA for $960 million in cash. EnerBank, a Utah-based subsidiary of publicly traded CMS Energy, has loan balances totaling $2.8 billion as of March 31, 2021 and is one of America’s largest specialized home […]

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Senate Democrats signal they’re ready to ditch GOP on infrastructure as White House turns to new bipartisan group

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Summary List Placement Senate Democrats are starting to signal they are prepared to ditch Republicans on infrastructure, as the Biden administration’s talks with the GOP collapsed without a deal after more than a month. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats were preparing to use reconciliation, a tactic to approve certain bills with a simple […]

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Jeff Bezos reportedly didn’t pay any income taxes for at least 2 years between 2006 and 2018 (AMZN)

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Summary List Placement In 2007, and again in 2011, billionaire Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reportedly paid nothing in federal income taxes. That’s according to confidential tax documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service obtained by ProPublica, which were revealed in a bombshell new report on some of the world’s wealthiest people. Bezos is currently listed […]

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Non-QM shop Angel Oak Mortgage prepares IPO

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It was barely a year ago that Angel Oak Mortgage and the rest of the non-QM lenders were holding on for dear life. Now, the Atlanta-based lender is looking to raise $165 million as part of an independent public offering. Angel Oak Mortgage, managed by parent company Angel Oak Capital and Falcon I, is looking […]

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Content specialist Neel Dhingra to speak at engage June 17

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Growing your personal brand is an important skill in a purchase market, which is why we’ve invited Neel Dhingra, a top producing manager at All Western Mortgage, to speak at HousingWire’s annual engage.marketing on June 17. Dhingra, who has grown his business through content marketing on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube along with The NeelHome […]

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Student-loan interest rates are increasing nearly a full percentage point starting in July, showing no end in sight to the debt crisis

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Summary List Placement Although the pause on student-loan payments, accompanied by zero interest accrual, is continuing through September, the Federal Student Aid (FSA) office announced new increased interest rates for the next year. It’s another sign that the $1.7 trillion student debt crisis, which President Joe Biden vowed to address in his campaign last year, […]

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A $15 minimum wage would cause fast-food chains to raise prices or put workers out of jobs, a former McDonald’s CEO said

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Summary List Placement The push for a $15 federal minimum wage could cause fast-food chains to raise prices or slash jobs by turning to automation instead, a former McDonald’s CEO said. McDonald’s last month announced it was raising minimum pay at corporate-owned stores across the US amid the current labor shortage, and said that it […]

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Servicers’ forbearance volume steadily falling

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Servicers’ forbearance portfolio volumes decreased again last week, falling two basis points to 4.16%, according to a survey from the Mortgage Bankers Association. Despite May 30 marking the 14th consecutive week of overall declines, a nearly equal number of forbearance exits and re-entries have left forbearance portfolio volumes essentially unaltered. Broken down by investor types, […]

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Biden estimates taxpayers are on the hook for $53 billion worth of student-loan losses from pandemic relief efforts

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Summary List Placement To provide pandemic relief to the 43 million borrowers in the country with federal student loans, President Joe Biden extended the pause on payments through September. His Education Department has even cancelled student debt for some groups of people. Now there’s a number on how much those efforts increased losses in the […]

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UWM goes on the offensive with price-match guarantee

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United Wholesale Mortgage has been aggressively price-cutting loans to put pressure on competitors for months now. It appears they’ve just thrown gas on the fire in the hopes of boosting their second quarter numbers, while hitting their rivals ahead of earnings call season. UWM said on Monday that they’ll price-match any conventional loan on primary […]

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G7 leaders reach ‘historic’ agreement to crack down on tech giants by forcing Amazon, Facebook, and others to pay more tax

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Summary List Placement Finance ministers for some of the world’s wealthiest nations have reached a “historic agreement” to tackle tax abuses by internet giants and to introduce a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15 percent. “I am delighted to announce that today after years of discussion G7 finance ministers have reached a historic agreement […]

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25 states are moving to end unemployment benefits. 15 of them have lower than average vaccination rates.

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Summary List Placement Half of all states in America are ending their participation in federal unemployment benefits early, leaving millions of workers with greatly reduced benefits — or no benefits at all.  Twenty-three of these states are still below pre-pandemic employment, while 15 have lower than average vaccination rates. That means that workers being pushed […]

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How big-city suburbs won the 2020 migration boom

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Summary List Placement 2020 was the year urbanites took flight. But many of them didn’t go very far. The pandemic’s great migration boom mostly consisted of urban dwellers leaving big cities for its directly outlying suburbs, according to a recent Jefferies note that analyzed the latest USPS data. “Large central metro” areas like New York […]

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Bill Dallas to speak at engage.marketing on June 17

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Bill Dallas, president of Finance of America Mortgage, will speak at engage.marketing on the panel: Winning in a red-hot purchase market. Dallas is a mortgage industry veteran, building two mortgage companies from the ground up: First Franklin and Ownit Mortgage Solutions, starting in 1981. In 2009, Dallas purchased Skyline Home Loans with Upfront Ventures and […]

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May’s job report shows hard-hit industries are still below pre-pandemic employment

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Summary List Placement Industries hit hard by the pandemic, including accommodation, museums, and performing arts, are still far below pre-pandemic employment. Nick Bunker, economic research director at Indeed, told Insider that some of the industries that have the highest percent declines from February 2020 employment to May 2021, are “industries that just aren’t going to […]

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Women’s employment is moving in the right direction, but it hasn’t turned a corner yet

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Summary List Placement Throughout the pandemic, the story of unemployment has been a roller coaster, taking myriad twists and turns. March’s jobs report brought new highs, and April brought disappointing lows. May’s jobs report falls somewhere in between, coming in below expectations but still showing acceleration as unemployment dipped. One group, however, has been disproportionately […]

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The GOP said enhanced unemployment benefits were stopping folks from taking jobs. The US saw sharp payroll growth last month anyway.

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Summary List Placement Republicans in 25 states are cutting enhanced unemployment benefits early under the argument that the additional measures discourage people from re-entering the workforce. But the May jobs report released on Friday, which saw 559,000 payrolls added — a sharp increase from April — and a bigger-than-expected drop in the unemployment rate, suggests […]

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A ‘megadrought’ in California is expected to lead to water shortages for production of everything from avocados to almonds, and could cause prices to rise

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Summary List Placement A megadrought in California is threatening to push food prices even higher. The state is already facing its worst water shortage in four years and the its driest season has only just begun, according to data from the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS).  As water levels continue to fall, farmers and […]

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House Democrats propose an additional $547 billion for roads and bridges as infrastructure stalemate continues

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Summary List Placement As President Joe Biden continues his effort to reach a bipartisan agreement on his infrastructure proposal, House Democrats have proposed additional funding for rebuilding the country’s physical infrastructure — an area Republicans have argued doesn’t have enough focus. On Friday, Chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Peter DeFazio, Chair […]