More home sellers than buyers, a lot more

Pulling the kill chain
There's no such thing as good crime, but crime that targets the most vulnerable, usually the very young and very old, is the absolute worst. It takes a special kind of evil to harm young kids or steal from old folks.

The problem is, technology is making it far easier than it used to be to run scams and fleece the unsuspecting, and banks need to step up and get involved earlier, at some point before their customers' life savings are drained and sent to a labor camp somewhere in Asia. That was the message at one of the top cybersecurity conferences, which our Carter Pape is attending this week.

Banks should not be expected to do it on their own, said Rick Swenson, head of enterprise fraud management for TIAA, in a panel about elder fraud. It should be a community-wide effort. 

But banks are integral because they are often the last line of defense, the so-called final step in the scammer's kill chain. What the focus for banks should be, he argued, is to get involved earlier, to get involved with telecom providers and tech platforms and work together to defeat the scammers.

Infrastructure is boring, blockchain is exciting (and they're the same thing)
One of these days you will not be hearing anything about stablecoins. You will not be hearing hype about digital assets and tokenized securities and crypto this or blockchain that. Because someday all those infrastructure systems will be managing the back-office functions of the global financial system, running quietly in the background. Companies will use them and not talk about them because they've gone from a novelty to a commodity, from "the future" to just the way things are done.

Our Melinda Huspen has an exclusive report today that Invesco, the big investment manager, agreed to become a portfolio manager to a tokenized treasury fund offered by a fund-manager called Superstate. The product will be renamed the Invesco Short-Duration U.S. Government Securities Fund, and it's very likely that the customers buying it won't have any idea that the infrastructure that maintains it is a tokenized securities platform, that it's run using smart contracts and token address and a blockchain-type ledger. They'll just care about things like, you know, yields.

A buyer's market
I don't know what the housing market looks like in other areas, but where I live it seems like a seller's market. The prices for homes in my town keep going up and up and up. It's become something of a parlor game for my wife and I to drive around town, see the homes for sale, and try to guess at how much the seller is asking. Unless I go absurdly high, I'm almost always too low. 

But I must live in some favored pocket, because apparently it is very much a buyer's market out there, according to a report from Colin McNamara at our sister publication National Mortgage News. Data from Redfin showed there were 630,000 more sellers than buyers in February, the largest gap since the firm started tracking it in 2013, and up nearly 30% from just a year ago. And that is despite mortgage rates at four-year lows.

Buyers have left the market due to high home prices and high mortgage rates (despite the recent drop) and asking prices as a result are down, or at least there aren't the kinds of crazy bidding wars where people were offering way over asking price. The cool-down has been so widespread that, according to Redfin, there were only five markets in the whole country that could be called a seller's market.