No Truth Coming From Mortgage Bankers Ass.

Apparently the MBAss (Mortgage Bankers Association) didn't like the fact that someone in the financial blogo-wackosphere actually had the temerity to make use of real, hard data, that they hadn't massaged. Now, not only do they not report the actual index level of their seasonally smoothed applications indexes, the charts of the not seasonally adjusted indexes have disappeared from Bloomberg.com in the past week. I doubt that Bloomberg would have pulled them on their own. Seems more likely that the MBAss wasn't too happy about anyone actually reporting the truth. So unless Bloomberg relents or I can find the data elsewhere, it looks like last week's report [7] will be the last time we get to see what the actual purchase applications look like.

 

For now, I'll return to looking at the seasonally smoothed data which, while not the actual numbers, should give us an idea of the trend. The MBAss stopped reporting the actual index levels about a year ago, but they still report the weekly percentage changes, so it is possible to reproduce a close approximation of their index.
Of course, if the news gets bad enough, like if purchase apps drop to new lows, they can always stop publicizing the data altogether. These are after all, the very same people who brought us the housing crisis in the first place. Things like fudging, lying, cheating, stealing, and committing fraud are part of their natural order. Getting the truth out--not so much. In fact, before joining the organization a prospective member needs to pass a sociopathy test.

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