Portland Mortgage Market Update — November 7, 2025

I guess it was kind of like a jobs week? The record-breaking government shutdown continues and in its wake is a void of government data, but the private sector did bring some important reporting this week. The ADP report dropped on Wednesday that 42,000 jobs were created in October, beating the 24,00 estimate. The market took this and ran with it at the expense of mortgage backed securities, causing rates to rise. However, when you look underneath the hood of the report it also showed there were losses in August and September, so when you look at the totals over the past 3 months there have only been a total of 10,000 new jobs created. Beyond that, it showed that these jobs creations are being buoyed by large companies (500+ employees) is small and medium-sized businesses showed job losses. With the recent layoff announcements from Amazon, Target, UPS, et all it looks like this beat in the employment estimate might be a blip before these larger companies start cutting workers en masse.

Then yesterday's Challenger report painted a different picture. The "Challenger Report" is a monthly report issued by Challenger, Gray & Christmas that tracks job cuts and layoffs in the US. Their company focuses on executive outplacement, so they have a pretty good bead on employment trends particularly among executive employees. This month's report showed 153,000 jobs cut in October, the highest for an October in 22 years. Year to date, there have been 1 MILLION job cut announcements which is the highest 10 months to start the year since 2009, and plans to hire are down 35% from this time last year. This shows a very weak labor market and helped Bonds rally to recover the damage done by the ADP report.

In other bizarro job reporting news, Revelio Labs released their jobs report today. Traditionally behind a paywall, they released today's for free due to the lack of BLS data coming out. Their methodology involves combing online profiles for insights into labor and employment, and with a pretty strong track record they are reporting 9,000 job losses in October (since Revelio includes government jobs it usually differs from ADP which is only private sector). Between these weaker jobs numbers (and an almost record low consumer sentiment report) things are not looking as strong for the economy at large and odds for a December rate cut have increased slightly from last week from around 65% to now a 70% chance.