It is Memorial Day. America is grilling. Fridges across the country are being raided at 1:47 PM by people who have not thought about condiments in eleven months and are now making life-defining decisions in front of an open Frigidaire while their burgers burn.

Below is the official ranking, ordered by how the universe should work.

1️⃣ Tabasco. The reference standard. Older than your grandfather. Will outlive us all. Two drops on eggs and you understand why the company has been family-owned for 150 years. To be clear: I have 5 to 6 other hot sauce bottles in my fridge at any given moment. They serve their purposes. None of them are Tabasco.

2️⃣ Stadium Mustard. Cleveland's gift to the world, you're welcome. Looks like sadness, tastes like home. Yellow mustard's older, more interesting brother who left town and never came back to visit but everyone agrees was the cooler one. If you've never had it on a hot dog at Progressive Field on a Tuesday night in June, your life has a hole in it that ranch will not fill.

3️⃣ Jalapeño Ranch. Regular ranch's older brother who took one trip to Texas and came back different. The greatest condiment innovation of the 21st century and most people are still sleeping on it.

4️⃣ Soy Sauce. The Switzerland of condiments. Quietly making everything better while no one notices. Underrated as a marinade builder, underused as a finisher, completely ignored on a Memorial Day cookout when it should be in the rotation.

5️⃣ Horseradish Sauce. The most criminally underrated condiment in America. On prime rib, yes. On a roast beef sandwich, obviously. On a burger, the bravest among us know. Sinus-clearing in the best way.

6️⃣ Mayo. I am one of those psychos. Hellmann's AND Miracle Whip in my fridge at the same time. They serve different masters. Hellmann's for the BLT and the burger. Miracle Whip for the deviled eggs and anything my mother made. I will not be taking questions.

7️⃣ BBQ Sauce. Forty-seven types exist. Six are good. The rest are sugar in a bottle. Sweet Baby Ray's is the Honda Civic of BBQ. Reliable. Universal. Nothing special. Still in my fridge. Stubbs Spicy and Montgomery Inn also staples.

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The best talent in this industry is not on a job board.

The best COO at a mid-sized lender is not updating their resume. The CIO who just finished a 3-year tech transformation is not refreshing Indeed at 11 PM. The Head of Capital Markets who quietly hedged your shop through three rate cycles is not posting "open to work" with the little green badge.

They are heads down running things. They are also, in a lot of cases, quietly listening.

I have spent the last 3 years building a recruiting practice that puts mortgage lenders in front of exactly those people. Senior operators who would never apply to your job posting but would absolutely take a call from someone they trust.

Recent engagements have placed....

✔️COO and senior ops leadership
✔️Heads of Compliance and Risk
✔️Capital Markets and Secondary Marketing leadership
✔️CIO and CTO
✔️CMO and Head of Marketing
✔️VP/SVP Sales and Production

Banks, credit unions, IMBs, brokers. Retained, project-based, whatever fits.

Two things make this different.

First, the network. 32,000+ LinkedIn followers heavily concentrated in mortgage and financial services. Eight and a half years running The Mortgage Collaborative. Real relationships with the operators big retained firms cannot get on the phone, which is awkward for them because they will charge you $150K to try anyway.

Second, the math. My fees are a fraction of what the big retained shops charge for the same caliber of placement. I am not paying rent on 14 floors of Manhattan office space. You are not paying for it either. The candidate is not paying for it in a depressed offer. Everybody wins except the firm with the marble lobby.

If you have a seat that has been open for 90 plus days, or a quiet seat you would fill tomorrow if the right person walked in, that is the conversation I want to have.

[email protected]

The right hire is already employed somewhere else. The job is finding them and giving them a reason to take your call.

The First Saturday As A Free Man: Jerome Powell Goes To The Grocery Store

Jerome Powell wakes up on Saturday morning a free man. Seven years at the Federal Reserve. Eleven trillion dollars in stimulus. One global pandemic. 43 press conferences in which he said the words "data dependent" with the same energy a hostage uses to confirm he is being treated well. A housing market in tatters left in his wake.

It is over. He is out.

He stretches. He smiles. He inhales freedom for the first time since 2018. His wife walks in and says they are out of eggs.

He pauses. He has not personally been inside a grocery store since 2019. Things have been delivered by a man in a black SUV named Marcus. Sometimes by Marcus's son, also named Marcus.

He puts on a Patagonia vest. A baseball hat. He gets in his Range Rover and drives to the Whole Foods. He gets a cart. The wheel pulls slightly to the left, which feels appropriate.

He picks up an avocado, turns it over in his hand, finds the sticker. $3.49. "Each?" he says, out loud, to nobody. A passing shopper glances at him. There is a flicker of recognition. She keeps walking.

He walks to the egg cooler. A dozen eggs is $7.99. He stares. "These must be the fancy organic ones," he says. They are not. They are just eggs. He picks up an organic carton. $10.99. He puts it down like it bit him. "Has there been a chicken shortage?" he asks the woman next to him. She does not answer. She just slowly moves her cart away from him.

The bread aisle is worse. A loaf of sourdough is $7.99 and it is the size of a paperback book. "Did the bread get smaller," he says. A man stocking the shelf, name tag Devon, looks at him. "Sir, that's shrinkflation. Been happening since 2022." Jerome blinks. "Shrink what?" "Shrinkflation, sir. They make 'em smaller so they can charge more without you noticing." "And we just... let them do that?" Devon stares at him for a long beat. "Sir, are you OK?"

At checkout he gets in line behind a young couple. Their total comes to $164. The young man pulls out his card, looks at his girlfriend, and says, quietly, "We have to start using the Aldi again." Jerome leans forward. "What's an Aldi?" The young man slowly turns around. The girlfriend grabs his elbow.

Jerome's total comes to $87 for what he would have called, in 2019, "a couple things." He looks at the receipt. He looks at the cashier. "There has to be a mistake," he says. The cashier, a teenager named Brayden, does not look up. "There's no mistake, my guy."

Jerome sits in the Range Rover. The $164 cart. The Aldi comment. The look on the young couple's faces. He puts the pieces together, slowly, the way he used to assemble a rate decision from incoming data. He nods.

"It's the supply chain," he says, to nobody. He is very pleased with this. He has heard serious people say "supply chain" for years and it has always sounded correct.

He pulls Marcus's silver flask from the door pocket and takes a long pull. It is 10:47 AM.

He is free.

The host hotel for our annual conference just sold out for Monday night. We're still three weeks out.

If you've been telling yourself you'll register later... later might already be gone. We did secure a 50 room block with shuttle service at a nice property a mile away, but those rooms are going quick as well.

Here's what you'd be walking into June 14-16 in Columbus at the 59th Annual Ohio Mortgage Bankers Association Annual Conference ...

The keynote stage. Maurice Clarett on reinvention. Bill Cosgrove, Union Home Mortgage Corp. CEO and owner of the Tampa Bay Rays. Robert Broeksmit, CEO of the national MBA. The Mortgage Collaborative CEO Jodi Hall, FICO's Julie May, Steve Richman. Ohio State Senator Bill Blessing. Plaza Home Mortgage, Inc.'s Melanie Coulton, CMB®, AMP, representing the Mortgage Bankers Association Certified Mortgage Bankers Society.

That is a national-caliber lineup at a state conference. But the keynotes are just the headline.

21 breakout sessions across talent, AI in lending, secondary, the post-CFPB regulatory landscape, and the appraisal overhaul that's about to hit all of us. A tech demo showcase. A plated awards dinner. And Ohio's Own, where we put 15 of the most influential women in Ohio lending on the main stage.

We're also using this stage to formally introduce the Cleveland Mortgage Bankers Association... bringing Northeast Ohio's mortgage community back together. If you'd like to learn more, DM me!

Conference registration is $495 for members, $695 for non-members. The programming is done. The lineup is set. The hotel is filling up. Click here to get your ticket!

Kevin Warsh Confirmed As Fed Chair By Closest Vote In Modern Era

Powell Stays On As Governor Through 2028

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May 31 - Indy 500 (Indianapolis Motor Speedway)

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 21 - 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 21 - Father's Day

Jun 22 - NBA Draft

Jun 29 - Wimbledon begins

“A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” — Joseph Campbell

Until the next one,
Swerb
[email protected]