The road to economic recovery
As I write this, I join all of you as we isolate ourselves from our offices, family and friends. Literally just three weeks ago, I was in Los Angeles on travel to visit my daughter. The pace of change that has impacted all Americans and people around the world is unprecedented and resulted in this complete change to our nation, our lives and our future.
The good news is that we will get through this. The bad news is that until then we will have some challenging times. It was the perfect storm really: Here the industry was at the peak of success; pipelines were chock full of loans; refinances and purchases were booming as we were headed into this spring market. Our biggest challenges were in keeping our operations teams in place and trying to control our business volumes in order to simply meet the massive demand flowing in.
Remarkable really, this was mostly the case through the first two weeks of March. Since then this apocalyptic-like scenario left everyone with dropped jaws, anxiety and questioning the future. To put this in perspective, the pace of change over just a few weeks and the breadth and depth of its impact cannot be compared to anything this nation has ever experienced before.
And while there were lessons learned from the last Great Recession, the things we are learning from this experience will be invaluable as the extent of this crisis is unparalleled to anything this nation has ever experienced before.
So let’s take a look at where we are, interventions and the implications, and looking ahead.