Forecast for the Week 

After last week’s quiet economic report calendar, this week’s calendar heats up.

• Retail Sales will be released on Tuesday and investors will look to see if consumers opened their wallets during the holiday shopping season.
• We’ll get a double dose of inflation news this week, with the wholesale-measuring Producer Price Index on Tuesday and the Consumer Price Index on Wednesday.
• Housing Starts and Building Permits will be reported on Thursday along with Weekly Initial Jobless Claims.
• We’ll also see a double dose of manufacturing news, with the Empire State Index on Tuesday and the Philly Fed Index released on Thursday.
• To close out the week, the Consumer Sentiment Report will be released on Friday.

Remember: Weak economic news normally causes money to flow out of Stocks and into Bonds, helping Bonds and home loan rates improve, while strong economic news normally has the opposite result. The chart below shows Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), which are the type of Bond that home loan rates are based on.

When you see these Bond prices moving higher, it means home loan rates are improving — and when they are moving lower, home loan rates are getting worse.

To go one step further — a red “candle” means that MBS worsened during the day, while a green “candle” means MBS improved during the day. Depending on how dramatic the changes were on any given day, this can cause rate changes throughout the day, as well as on the rate sheets we start with each morning.

As you can see in the chart below, Bonds and home loan rates worsened last week as Stocks hit five-year highs. But home loan rates remain near historic lows and I’ll be watching closely to see what happens this week.

The Mortgage Market Guide View… 

Pardon the Intrusion

The High Cost of Office Interruptions

Getting into that peak state of performance some people call “flow”–where ideas come easy and productivity seemingly doubles, or triples if you’re lucky–is an elusive state for many office workers. Basex, a research and advisory firm, estimated the cost of workplace interruptions such as unscheduled calls, emails, and instant messaging at around $588 billion per year in lost productivity for the U.S. economy.

And that’s not all. New York Times bestseller Brain Rules, written by developmental molecular biologist Dr. John Medina, points out…

• A task that’s interrupted takes 50% longer and has 50% more mistakes than an uninterrupted one
• On average, an interrupted worker takes 23 minutes to get back to the original task, and an additional 30 minutes to return to the “flow” state
• 80% of the time workers will return to an interrupted task later in the day; in 1 out of 5 occurrences, however, they will not be able to return to it the same day
• Frequent task changes without completion significantly increases stress levels as opposed to handling things to completion one at a time

The bottom line is interruptions not only hurt your productivity but may also harm your health. Try to limit interruptions during your day as much as possible by:

• Checking email or taking calls only during certain times of the day
• Keeping your door closed
• Wearing headphones (even if nothing is playing)
• Making sure every staff member knows the true cost of their interruptions

And the next time you want to interrupt someone else, remember that your 30 second request may easily become an hour of extra work–not to mention additional mistakes that take even more time to correct later on.

Economic Calendar for the Week of January 14 – January 18

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