Grant Ellison

The 10yr closed on Friday at 4.86%, back to where it was before the September selloff. The Fed delivered a 25bps hike in between. Same yields, 25bps more policy, and the forward path priced now sits below the one priced in early September. The Tape №13: scndordereffects.substack.co…

A month ago one-sixth of the bond rally was reaching the mortgage quote. Last week it was roughly two-thirds. Over the matched four-week window the survey-week 10yr fell 34bps and the 30-year fixed gave back 22. The lag arrived on schedule. The Tape №13: scndordereffects.substack.co…

Veterans Day. A VA loan feature most people miss: anyone the servicer approves can assume it, veteran or not, for a 0.5% fee. The catch is cash. The buyer pays the seller’s equity at closing, and if the buyer isn’t a veteran, the seller’s entitlement stays tied to that loan.

The FOMC decides on Dec 9. November CPI comes out on Dec 10. So the last inflation print before the decision is today’s, and it came without a 12-month rate. The November jobs report lands on Dec 4 and is the one major input the committee gets that’s fully clean.

October CPI: headline +0.4%, core +0.3%, both a tenth above consensus. The YoY cells are blank because BLS never collected October 2025 prices. Any 12-month rate you see today, someone built. The 10yr is up 8bps to 4.94% on the last CPI before Dec 9.

Last October BLS couldn’t survey rents, so it carried them forward unchanged, freezing part of the base. Rent comparisons through March run against that low starting point. UBS calls it an upward bias that fades by spring. Some of this winter’s rent firmness will be the base.

Homeowners with a mortgage: what rate would the 30yr fixed have to hit before you’d sell and buy something else? I mean the number where you’d actually list. It’s usually lower than the one you’d like.

With no YoY CPI tomorrow, the monthly print is the whole show, and the rounding matters more than usual. 0.2% MoM annualizes to 2.4%. 0.3% annualizes to 3.7%. Consensus sits right around 0.29, which means the second decimal decides which of those headlines you read.

Tomorrow’s CPI won’t have a headline inflation rate. BLS couldn’t collect October 2025 prices during the shutdown, so it says it won’t publish 12-month changes for all items, core, food, energy or rent. The YoY numbers it will print: gasoline, new vehicles, used cars.

Week ahead: October CPI on Tuesday, and it is the last one the Fed sees before December. November CPI prints on December 10, a day after that meeting ends. So Tuesday is the final inflation reading that can move a decision still sitting in the low 70s.

Here’s one I’d like other people’s read on. Core PCE says 3.1%. Trimmed mean says 2.3%. Q3 annualized says 2.1%. Same agency, same release week. If you had to put one number in front of a committee deciding rates next month, which one and why?

New homes for sale that haven’t been started hit an all-time high last month: 115k of the 476k on the market. Under construction is 22% below the cycle peak. Builders are selling houses that don’t exist yet and waiting for a signature before they dig.

Took the 911 out for the last decent weekend of the year. Top down, 45 degrees, heat on. There is no version of this that makes sense on a spreadsheet and I have stopped trying to build one.

Trimmed mean PCE was 2.3% over 12 months and 2.4% over six, against core at 3.1%. The trim removes whatever is extreme. The Dallas Fed also warns that when prices skew positive the trim cuts too much off the top and understates. Both halves of that are worth holding.

Something I keep running into: every housing series answers a different month. Pending contracts lead closings by 30 to 45 days. Permits lead starts by whatever the builder decides. Case-Shiller is a three-month average reported with a two-month lag.

Treasury bought $6bn of par for about $3.84bn of cash last week. One 2051 bond went at 52.4 cents. The discount is arithmetic, since a 1.875% coupon in a 5% market is worth about half. Reported debt falls because it’s counted at face. Economically nothing was retired cheaply.

Really amazing to me how much absolute fascism is being spewed by those who claim to be anti-fascist. Putting opponents in jail, seizing companies and assets, etc. Truly a wild time to be alive. What has happened to our country? For one, our education system has very obviously failed... I feel terrible for how badly our young adults in particular have been hoodwinked.

Payrolls 165k against a 65k consensus, unemployment down to 4.1%, participation up to 61.9%. Strong print. One series inside it went the other way. U6 rose from 7.6% to 7.9%. The gap between U6 and the headline rate widened 40bps in a single month, to 3.8pp.

Payrolls tomorrow. The thing I’d watch is the revision to the prior two months rather than the headline. Last year’s benchmark took 79k off total nonfarm, and 178k off private, with government revised the other way. The monthly print is the least reliable part of the release.

Wages rose 3.1% over the last year. Headline PCE rose 3.6%. Real compensation went backwards, and that’s before you get to the fact that benefits grew 3.9% while the paycheck line grew 3.1%. Employers and employees are seeing very different things.