Portland Mortgage Market Update — February 6, 2026

It was supposed to be jobs week, but the short-lived government shutdown gave the BLS pause in releasing their report. While we are missing the "big" report this week, we did get data from ADP, Revelio, the JOLTS report and the Challenger Job Cut Report. All four of these came in quite a bit worse than what was expected, but the headline was yesterday's Challenger report which measures how many jobs were cut in the month. It showed that in January there were over 108,000 jobs removed from the marketplace, which is triple the amount in December. While there are usually seasonal job cuts after the holidays every year, this is the highest amount reported since 2009! All eyes are now on the BLS jobs report dropping next Wednesday.

Tough week for the market overall, punctuated by a tech sell off that was ignited by an AI company. Anthropic released an update to its AI (Claude) that is designed to automate functions in sales, legal and financial analysis. Previously, companies like SalesForce would provide software to help with these tasks, but with Claude's update, companies that previously paid for SalesForce could potentially just ask Claude to write the program themselves in house. The market saw this as the death of these old-school enterprise software companies and the market tumbled, but even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (who has a HUGE interest in AI since his company provides the bulk of its hardware) dismissed these fears claiming the softwares are essentially "tools" and you wouldn't reinvent the wheel if you didn't have to.

It's a weird time in the market right now. Traditionally there is a balance between stocks and bonds, where if one weakens the other rallies. But recently they are more or less moving in tandem. This is because the market at large is reacting to rapidly shifting policy changes (tariffs, shutdowns, threats of global expansion) and is having difficulty finding its footing. Rather than acting as two separate classes that would work inversely of each other, stocks and bonds are riding things out until they can get some normalcy. After taking a beating all week, mortgage rates saw some respite yesterday with the weakening labor data and there is room for a significant improvement next week if the BLS data comes in reflecting what every other report is indicating.