What We're Reading

Having worked in the mortgage field for a few decades, the scoring of FICO (or disgust of it) definitely caught my attention.  Some of the credit-scoring travesties are given.  In my opinion, they can't make changes fast enough......or merely admit you're only going to lend to the rich.  That's what it's coming down to; slowly but surely.

Naturally, lenders of all stripes have been evaluating credit for far longer than FICO (originally founded in the ’50s as Fair Isaac Co.) has existed. In fact credit rating standardization wasn’t a priority until the 1970s with the passage of the Fair Credit Reporting Act — and FICO data has only been widely available to lenders since 1987. The FICO scoring system (the 300-800) as we sort of understand it today has only existed since 1989 and it  wasn’t until 2003 that consumers had legal access to it.   

The question now, it seems, is are the days of the FICO score as the be-all, end-all consumer credit scoring standard coming to an end? Driven by al

Back in the 1990's, we as Managers were trained in racial diversity and businesses began their slow and gradual integration for the Hispanic community (Spanish calls center workers, select "5" for Spanish on automated phone services, packaging with alternate language, etc.). The CBO had already made the predictions of the shift in U.S. ethnicity and companies had to prepare. Fast forward 10 or 25 years from now now and just what will be the face of the consumer ahead?  What about job growth, income growth and how many older Americans will fall off of the economic spending gap?

Cue Gomer Pyle. 

The consumer is alive and well.  In fact the consensus for consumer sales was for a paltry 0.6% and it came in at 1.1% with prior revisions being moved up rather than down leaving even Rick Santelli somewhat speechless with nothing to complain over in the details.  This proving once again that all the fear mongering about allowing temporary  tax breaks to expire and dreaded sequestration cuts would kill the consumer were an outright fallacy.   If used to influence votes in Congress and you'd think at some point those men and women would learn how to play the game.

In fact this release could prove to be a game changer from a chartist point of view if the trend continues higher.  While some may remain nonbelievers, we have Easter purchasing as well as Spring dead ahead which can do nothing but boost spending further.  Bring it!

What a shocker people still need to eat and last time I looked, small children continue to outgrow shoes and clothing requiring new.  We a