Richard Christopher Whalen at The Institutional Risk Analyst just dropped a piece titled "Who is the Next Countrywide Financial?" and named UWM as Exhibit A.

If you have not read it yet, go do that first. Then come back.

The piece confirms what a lot of us have been saying out loud for months and what a lot more of us have been thinking quietly. UWM is running the Countrywide playbook. Pay too much for loans to dominate market share. Force competitor margins down across the industry. Accumulate debt. Mark MSRs at multiples nobody else in the market can justify.

The numbers Whalen lays out:

✔️ UWMC at 40%+ wholesale market share. Rocket second at under 10%. PennyMac third around 5%.
✔️ $450 million in liquidity. Whalen's read: not nearly enough for a firm of their size.
✔️ UWM marking MSRs at 5.5x cash flow. Market reality per major MSR brokers: 4.8x conventional, 3.8x Ginnie Mae.
✔️ If UWM were forced to sell that MSR book at market values, the writedown would clear $1 billion. That could wipe two-thirds of the company's equity. 🤔

The double-digit MSR mark adjustment in Q1 accounted for most of UWMC's reported GAAP earnings. Vaporware.

Then this quote from an unnamed industry source, which I think is the truest sentence written about this industry in years:

"If UWMC disappeared tomorrow, gain on sale margins in the industry would at least double."

That is not analyst speculation. That is operators saying out loud what they have been seeing in their P&Ls for the better part of two years.

The Countrywide parallel is not a rhetorical flourish. The playbook is identical. Loss-leader pricing to drive out competition. Aggressive volume tactics. MSR valuations that do not survive market scrutiny. Insufficient cash relative to scale. The only meaningful difference between 2008 and 2026 is that mortgage rates may not come down significantly for a while, which removes the lifeline pre-crisis Countrywide briefly had.

Read the rest of this post here …

I'm about to walk on stage in Cincinnati and tell a room full of mortgage professionals the brutal truth about what's bleeding away their referral partners. Most won't like it. The ones who want to will leave changed.

I have the privilege of addressing a joint room of the Cincinnati MBA and Dayton MBA today, supporting two longstanding incredible chapters of the Ohio Mortgage Bankers Association.

State-level advocacy is having a moment. While most of the industry is focused on what is happening in Washington, Cincinnati MBA, Dayton MBA, and the Ohio MBA are quietly building the kind of grassroots influence in Columbus that actually moves policy for our members.

I am fired up to be part of it.

I'm in the trenches on LinkedIn, AI, content, and business development every single day. The presentation I gave last month was different from the one I'm giving today, because the algorithms, the AI tools, and consumer behavior are evolving that fast.

I talk about what's working right now.

And every single thing I cover from the stage can be implemented by anyone in the audience that day without spending one penny. Not next quarter. Not after a budget approval. That day.

Here's what I tell every room I walk into ...

The mortgage industry is sitting on the biggest opportunity in a generation. The tools to get better at AI, digital, and LinkedIn than 95% of your competition are free. Right now. The playing field has never been more level for someone willing to put in the work. Ever.

If you're not adopting this stuff, someone like me is slowly or quickly bleeding away your referral partners, your prospects, and your relevance. Not because I'm smarter. Because I showed up and you did not.

That's the brutal truth. I don't sugarcoat it from the stage.

What I've found is that combination opens people's eyes. It terrifies some into action. It inspires others who have been on the cusp. And it leads to immediate changes in behavior that lead to changes in results.

Not in six months. That week.

Read the rest of this post here …

Quick housekeeping. Through May 31, I am running a referral contest. Three prizes, three drawings, three winners. Every new subscriber you refer earns you one entry in each drawing.

One referral equals one entry in each drawing. Refer 50, you have 50 entries in each. Refer your entire LinkedIn network, the math gets aggressive.

Three winners drawn the morning of June 1.

Your personal referral link is at the bottom of this email. Or click here: {{ rp_refer_url }}

Three weeks until we lock in the founding crew of the Cleveland MBA.

Here is what the inaugural year looks like ...

✔️ Quarterly programming with national mortgage industry speakers
✔️ Monthly informal networking events around Cleveland
✔️ A founding-class golf event Fall 2026
✔️ Industry advocacy on Cleveland-specific lending issues
✔️ A real community for mortgage professionals across NE Ohio - originators, ops, capital markets, tech, recruiters, leadership

The board sets the strategy. The committees do the work. The members show up and make it real. Every one of those roles needs people who actually want to build something from the ground up.

If you have ever sat in an industry event and thought "I would do this differently if I had a hand in it," this is your moment to actually get the hand in it.

You do not need a fancy title. You need to want to show up, plan good events, meet new people in our industry, and have some fun with it.

Fill out this quick form if you want to be involved. Takes 2 minutes.

All founding members will be announced live from the Ohio MBA Annual main stage in Columbus June 14-16! Which is now trending towards 300+ in attendance!

Americans are starting businesses at a near-record pace. 470,000 new applications a month in 2025, about 66% above pre-pandemic norms, per the Census Bureau. This year is tracking even higher.

Through the first four months of 2026, businesses with fewer than 20 employees have added 236,000 jobs. That is 95% of net job gains in the entire US economy, per ADP.

But here is the part that caught my attention.

The fastest-growing segment is not small companies hiring more people. It is solo operators. People starting businesses without a single employee on the books. My exact situation. Had half an employee two years in. Now have four.

One person is doing what used to require five.

The cost of starting and scaling a business has collapsed. A founder today has access to drafting tools, research tools, design tools, analytics tools, content tools, and customer-facing tools that would have cost a quarter million dollars a year in 2020. Today, most of them cost less than a Netflix subscription. Some are free.

That window is going to close.

The pricing on AI tools today does not reflect what it actually costs to run them. The frontier labs are subsidizing usage at a scale that would make a casino blush. Anthropic just committed $200 billion to Google Cloud over five years. OpenAI reportedly signed a similar deal. The underlying economics will eventually catch up with the $20-a-month subscription. They always do.

If you are a founder, operator, or senior leader, the highest-ROI thing you can do in the next 12 months is get extremely good at two things.

1. Using AI as a force multiplier.

Not "I tried ChatGPT once and it told me my marketing copy was great." Genuinely fluent. Built into how you write, research, think, decide, and deliver. The people who get fluent right now will look like wizards in 24 months. The ones who wait will look like the people who were still printing their emails in 2010.

2. Making content.

Whatever business you are in, the cost of being seen has never been lower and the value of being seen has never been higher. Personal brand used to be a luxury. It is now a survival mechanism. The founders, sales leaders, and operators who own their audience own their pricing power. Everyone else is renting.

The single luckiest break in business right now is that the tools to do both of these things are sitting in your browser tab. Mostly free. Mostly accessible. Mostly underutilized by the people who would benefit most. The barrier to entry is not money. It is the willingness to actually do the work.

Read the rest of this post here …

Protein powder shortage threatens America’s biggest food craze

Venmo getting its first redesign since 2009

Zillow: 309 of 894 Markets Set to See Prices Fall Over Next Year

Anthropic Launches Wall Street AI Agents and Claude Opus 4.7 with JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon

Cavs Tie Series 2-2 as Mitchell Ties Playoff Record with 39 Second-Half Points

The Midterm Horse Race six months out

May 14-17 - PGA Championship (Aronimink Golf Club)

May 16 - Preakness Stakes (Laurel Park, Md.)

May 17-20 - MBA Secondary and Capital Markets Conference (Marriott Marquis, NYC)

May 25 - Memorial Day (markets closed)

May 31 - Indy 500 (Indianapolis Motor Speedway)

JUNE 2026

Jun 3 - Jobs Report (May)

Jun 5 - Belmont Stakes (Saratoga Race Course) -- Triple Crown on the line

Jun 11 - FIFA World Cup kicks off (USA, Canada, Mexico -- 48 teams)

Jun 14-16 - Ohio MBA Annual Conference (Columbus OH)

Jun 15 - Father's Day

Jun 16-17 - FOMC Meeting (rate decision, press conference)

Jun 18-21 - US Open Golf (Shinnecock Hills)

Jun 19 - Juneteenth (federal holiday, markets closed)

Jun 22 - NBA Draft (approx.)

Jun 29 - Wimbledon begins

"Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck where you do not belong." — N.R. Narayana

Until the next one,
Swerb
[email protected]