Jax Morning Brief — Iran Deal in Limbo, Anthropic Tops a Trillion, JTA Cuts Routes

Jax Morning Brief — US Strikes Iran After Hormuz Helicopter Downing, ICE Bill Passes, CPI at 8:30

Good morning. It's Wednesday, June 10th. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: A short-lived pause in the Middle East shattered yesterday afternoon. An Iranian Shahed drone hit a US Apache helicopter over the Strait of Hormuz, the pilots are safe, and at five o'clock Eastern, US fighter jets launched what Central Command is calling self-defense strikes against Iranian air defense sites. ANDREW: And in Washington, the House passed a seventy billion dollar funding package for ICE and Border Patrol 214 to 212 — ending a 115-day standoff. The May CPI print drops at 8:30 this morning. We'll get to all of it. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: A quick look at the markets. The S and P 500 closed at 7,386.65, down about a quarter percent. The Dow gained 86 points to finish at 50,872. The Nasdaq was the laggard, down nearly a percent, closing at 25,678 — though that was a steep recovery from intraday lows of around three and a half percent after Trump teased the Iran response. The ten-year Treasury yield is sitting near 4.57 percent, the highest in about two weeks, and the thirty-year fixed mortgage rate climbed to 6.68 percent on Mortgage News Daily's daily index — the third-highest reading in nine months. ANDREW: Let's start in the Middle East, because this is now a very different story than the one we ended yesterday with. Iran's so-called suspension of attacks on Israel — the one announced Monday afternoon — held for about 36 hours. Yesterday afternoon, an Iranian Shahed drone struck a US Apache helicopter patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz. Both pilots are safe. President Trump went on Truth Social within the hour saying the US "must respond," and at 5 PM Eastern, Central Command confirmed self-defense strikes against Iranian air defense sites, ground control stations, and surveillance radar near the Strait, using precision munitions from fighter jets. JENNY: So this is the first direct US-Iran kinetic exchange since the spring. What's the scope here — is this contained to the Strait, or is this widening? ANDREW: That's the question this morning. Iran's retaliation overnight, according to Bloomberg and NPR reporting, included strikes on US-aligned positions in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan. That's three more countries pulled into this in a matter of hours. The Pentagon hasn't characterized those attacks publicly yet. What we know is that the Iran-Israel pause we covered yesterday is effectively done, and the framework Trump posted about — "total victory coming, negotiations continuing" — that framework is now gone. Brent crude was already above 94 dollars at the close yesterday. Watch the energy print at the open. JENNY: And the Strait of Hormuz piece matters because? ANDREW: Roughly a fifth of global oil supply moves through Hormuz. Iran cannot close it without inviting overwhelming response, but it can make insurance underwriters nervous, and that alone moves spot crude. If you see Brent push past 100 dollars this morning, that feeds straight into the CPI conversation we'll have in the next beat. JENNY: And there's a mortgage-market angle to all of this, but let's hold that for the next beat. The other big story out of Washington — the House finally passed ICE funding. ANDREW: 214 to 212. Three Republicans voted no, every Democrat voted no. The bill funds Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection through fiscal year 2029 — essentially the rest of Trump's term — at last year's operating budget plus inflation. As we've been tracking, the holdup was the 1.8 billion dollar anti-weaponization fund the White House wanted attached. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told lawmakers DOJ was "not moving forward" with it, Speaker Johnson stripped it out, and that's what cleared the math. Bill goes to Trump's desk today — about ten days past his June 1st deadline, but it gets there. JENNY: And the markets curtain-raiser for the day — CPI. ANDREW: 8:30 Eastern, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases May CPI. The April print came in hot at 3.8 percent year-over-year, and the Cleveland Fed's nowcast has been drifting higher. The May reference window also captures the early-stage Iran energy spike. If the headline number prints above 3.2 percent — which is well within the plausible range — that essentially closes the door on any June rate cut and starts a conversation the Fed has not had this cycle, which is whether the next move could be a hike. Chair Warsh is in pre-FOMC blackout through June 17th, so the market read happens in real time off the print itself. JENNY: Andrew, that's a perfect bridge — let's stay with you on home lending. ANDREW: Right, and this is where the Iran story stops being foreign policy and starts hitting people's closing costs. The thirty-year fixed jumped to 6.68 percent on Mortgage News Daily's daily index as of yesterday — that is the highest reading we've seen since December. The ten-year Treasury, which is what mortgages actually track, is bumping up against 4.60 percent. If the ten-year breaks 4.60 on a hot CPI today, the mortgage daily index is likely heading toward 6.75, possibly 6.80 by the end of the week, and the seven-percent psychological line comes back into play. JENNY: So practical translation for someone trying to close on a house right now — what changes between Monday and today? ANDREW: Today's lock looks meaningfully worse than Monday's. On a 400,000-dollar loan, the move from roughly 6.5 percent two weeks ago to 6.68 today adds about 50 dollars a month — call it 18,000 dollars over the life of the loan. The Mortgage Bankers Association's weekly survey, for the week ending May 29th, showed purchase applications down three percent and refi down two percent. Purchase activity is at its slowest weekly pace since April. Refi applications are at the weakest level since June of last year. The hesitation isn't speculative — it's showing up in the data. JENNY: And the servicing side — you flagged the FHA squeeze last week. ANDREW: It's still grinding. The FHA mortgagee letter from February has tightened loss-mitigation timelines on servicers, and that's showing up in the Q1 foreclosure numbers — about 119,000 filings nationally, up 26 percent year-over-year, the highest first-quarter total in six years. That's not panic territory — we're nowhere near 2010 — but it is the clearest signal yet that the post-COVID forbearance cushion is gone. Default-servicing margins are the canary, and Q2 earnings out in late July will tell us how stressed those operations actually are. ANDREW: Jenny, over to you on AI. JENNY: Thanks Andrew. The story I want to start with is a number that genuinely stopped me — Big Tech's combined AI capex projection for 2026 has now reached 725 billion dollars. Alphabet alone raised its full-year guidance to between 180 and 190 billion. Meta took its range up to 125 to 145 billion. And the question on Wall Street had been: is any of this actually generating returns? ANDREW: And is it? JENNY: Google Cloud's most recent quarter is the strongest data point yet. Revenue grew 63 percent year-over-year to 20 billion dollars — that growth rate more than doubled. Paid monthly active users of Gemini Enterprise were up 40 percent quarter-over-quarter, with new deals at Bosch, Mars, and Merck. And the enterprise cloud backlog hit 462 billion dollars — that's the contracted future revenue — which nearly doubled in a single quarter. That is the first hard evidence that hyperscaler AI spend is converting to bookings at scale. ANDREW: And on the IPO side — Anthropic and OpenAI are both in the queue now. JENNY: They are. Anthropic filed confidentially June 1st, OpenAI filed about a week later. Both are pointed at fall public debuts. Anthropic's last private valuation was 965 billion, OpenAI's was 852 billion in March. Combined with SpaceX, which prices tomorrow night at a 1.77-trillion-dollar valuation, we're looking at three of the largest public offerings in US history landing inside a single quarter. Bloomberg is calling it a stress test of public-market appetite for the AI trade. ANDREW: And there's the AI coding angle — Microsoft and Google trying to catch the frontier labs. JENNY: This is the underappreciated competitive front. CNBC had a piece earlier this month framing it as "absolutely critical" for Microsoft and Google to get into AI coding, which has become Anthropic's and OpenAI's strongest revenue line. Microsoft is reportedly weaving its agent into the Windows 12 taskbar and File Explorer with system-level access. Google is making the same push through Gemini Code Assist. The question is whether the hyperscalers can use distribution to close the model gap — or whether they end up paying Anthropic and OpenAI to power their own products. The IPO disclosures will give us our first real look at that revenue mix. JENNY: And speaking of Jacksonville, let me transition to the local beat. Weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at 86 degrees and partly sunny today, with an overnight low around 73. Standard early-June pattern — no afternoon storms expected. JENNY: City Council last night approved the Yellow Water Road rezoning we've been tracking. The vote cleared both ordinances — 2026-0289 on the land-use change, and 2026-0290 on the PUD zoning. That opens 112.5 acres about a mile north of Normandy Boulevard to a 478-home residential development by Partridge Hill Capital — managed by Andrew Hayman and Morgan McMasters. The Jax Daily Record confirms the PUD allows up to 550 homes total if the developer chooses to scale up. ANDREW: Any meaningful pushback on traffic — that area is already strained. JENNY: Action News Jax reported traffic concerns dominated public comment, but the project moved through 6-to-nothing at LUZ committee on June 2nd, and the full council followed through. Worth noting — this is the second large West Jacksonville approval inside a month. Watch whether the property-tax exemption amendment, which the council auditor projects costs Jacksonville more than 300 million a year by fiscal 29, surfaces in upcoming land-use debates as the city models out lost revenue versus growth. JENNY: Two more locally. The JEA investigative committee heard testimony Monday from Chief Administrative Officer Jody Brooks and former legal counsel Regina Ross. The headline takeaway from News4Jax — Brooks confirmed she has not personally witnessed CEO Vickie Cavey yelling or pounding fists, contradicting the anonymous workplace-culture allegations driving part of the investigation. Brooks did confirm Cavey cried after an employee was injured. Cavey herself testifies June 22nd. ANDREW: That changes the political posture going in to the Cavey hearing. JENNY: It does. And on the Jaguars — mandatory minicamp continues this morning at the Miller Electric Center. Today is the public-practice day, 8:40 to 10:55, free tickets. The story coming out of yesterday's day-one practice is Travis Hunter. He's not taking physical reps yet, still rehabbing the LCL injury from last season, but the team clocked him at 22.6 miles per hour ahead of practice. Head coach Liam Coen said Hunter is still doing mental reps with the corners and receivers. GM target is full participation by training camp in late July. ANDREW: Before we let you go, one thing to watch today: the May CPI print at 8:30 Eastern. The number to focus on is 3.2 percent on the headline. Above that, and the June 16th-17th FOMC meeting changes character — you'll see the ten-year break 4.60, mortgage rates climb toward seven, and rate-cut bets for September move out to December or beyond. Below 3.0, and a lot of the post-Iran energy concern gets discounted. Either way, the print sets the mortgage market for the rest of the month, and SpaceX prices its IPO tomorrow night into whatever rate environment this CPI creates. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Wednesday. Have a great day. ANDREW: We'll see you tomorrow.

Jax Morning Brief — Iran-Israel Pause, SpaceX Gray Market Opens, Mortgage Rates Pop

Good morning. It's Tuesday, June 9th, 2026. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: A fragile pause this morning in the Middle East. Iran says it has suspended its attacks on Israel after a one-night exchange, but the warning labels are doing a lot of work. ANDREW: And the largest IPO in U.S. history starts trading in the gray market today. SpaceX is now 48 hours from its Nasdaq debut, and the first real demand read lands this morning. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: A quick look at the markets. The S and P 500 closed Monday at 7,406, up about three tenths of a percent. The Nasdaq added nine tenths to close at 25,930, a small step back toward Friday's losses. The Dow lagged, off about a tenth of a percent at 50,786. The ten-year Treasury yield is sitting near 4.55 percent, and the thirty-year fixed mortgage rate is tracking at 6.68 percent according to Mortgage News Daily. That's the highest daily print since December. Stocks held up Monday largely because chip names recovered some of Friday's bloodbath after Iran said it was halting attacks. ANDREW: Which is the right place to start. Jenny, I'll take this one and then hand it back to you. ANDREW: Updating the story we led with yesterday. Iran's military said Monday afternoon it had suspended operations against Israel, and Prime Minister Netanyahu confirmed Israel had stopped its strikes on Iran, though he pointedly avoided calling it a ceasefire. This follows the first direct missile exchange since the April truce. Roughly thirty Iranian ballistic missiles fired overnight, an Israeli strike on a petrochemical plant in southwest Iran in response. JENNY: So is this actually a pause, or just a breather while both sides reload? ANDREW: That's the question, and the conditional language tells you everything. Iran said it will resume attacks if Israeli operations in southern Lebanon continue. Netanyahu refused to use the word ceasefire. President Trump posted Monday that the U.S. is close to declaring, quote, total victory, and that final negotiations are proceeding. The market took the pause at face value. Brent crude, which spiked above $98 a barrel intraday Monday, eased back to about $94 by the close. But the underlying framework Trump described over the weekend, a 60-day extension, Hormuz reopening, Iran selling oil freely, is still very much in doubt. The petrochemical strike on the Mahshahr complex is the part nobody is talking about publicly, but it materially raises Iran's domestic political cost of accepting any deal. JENNY: And what does this do to the CPI print on Wednesday? ANDREW: It absolutely puts it back in play. If energy stays elevated through the May data window, headline inflation could come in hotter than the roughly 3 percent consensus. The Cleveland Fed nowcast was already drifting up. We'll get to that in the close. ANDREW: One more on the national desk. The House reconciliation bill is now expected to clear this week, and the centerpiece controversy looks resolved. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told lawmakers the Justice Department is, quote, not moving forward with the proposed $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund. Speaker Mike Johnson told the president directly that the fund made the math impossible. Without it, Johnson has a path to passage on the $69.5 billion ICE and CBP package the Senate sent over last Friday. Trump's June 1 deadline is already gone, but the bill should be on his desk by Friday. JENNY: That's a big climbdown on the DOJ fund piece. ANDREW: It is. Whether the White House revives it through some other vehicle is the open question. Jenny, over to you for AI. JENNY: Thanks, Andrew. The story we've been tracking on SpaceX hits its first real market test today. The gray market opens this morning, which is the first honest read on institutional demand before Wednesday's formal pricing. SpaceX has set a fixed offering price of $135 per share. That values the company at roughly $1.77 trillion, which would make it the seventh-largest U.S. company by market cap on day one, larger than Tesla. The Nasdaq debut is Thursday under the ticker SPCX. ANDREW: A fixed price, not a range. That's unusual for a deal this size. JENNY: It is. Most large IPOs use a range to gauge demand sensitivity. SpaceX skipped that step after weeks of testing-the-waters meetings, basically signaling they already know what the book looks like. And they reserved 30 percent of the float for retail, which is about three times normal. There's a retail event tomorrow for about fifteen hundred investors. The thing to watch on the gray market this morning is whether shares trade meaningfully above or below $135, because that's the first uncensored signal of where institutions actually value this. ANDREW: And if it trades below? That would be a problem at a $1.77 trillion valuation. JENNY: It would. The whole reason for the fixed price approach is to project confidence. A weak gray market would force some uncomfortable conversations between now and Wednesday's close. JENNY: Quick second story on the AI beat. The enterprise services build-out we flagged last month is starting to look like the dominant frame for this cycle. Both Anthropic and OpenAI now have multibillion-dollar joint ventures purpose-built to embed engineers inside customer companies. Anthropic's venture with Blackstone, Hellman and Friedman, and Goldman Sachs raised $1.5 billion. OpenAI's deployment company raised $4 billion led by TPG. The bet on both sides is that the bottleneck in enterprise AI is no longer the model. It's the implementation. ANDREW: Which is interesting, because that's also a bet against the traditional consulting industry. JENNY: Exactly. They are squarely targeting the Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey lane. The pitch is that the consulting firms can write a deck about AI transformation, but they cannot put forward-deployed engineers in your finance team for nine months. That's the gap these joint ventures are trying to fill, and the early customer signal has been heavily weighted toward financial services. Banks, insurers, and private-equity-owned portfolio companies are the named launch partners on the Anthropic side. ANDREW: Which explains the Goldman and Blackstone involvement. They're already distribution channels. JENNY: Exactly right. Andrew, what's happening on the mortgage side? ANDREW: Rates are the story. The Mortgage News Daily index pushed to 6.68 percent Monday, the highest daily print since December. That move is almost entirely a delayed reaction to Friday's hot jobs report. Payrolls came in at 172,000 versus expectations near 85,000. The ten-year Treasury jumped to about 4.55 percent, and lender quotes are now firmly in the high sixes. JENNY: How does that hit borrowers who were trying to close this week? ANDREW: It hits hard. A buyer locking today on a $400,000 loan is looking at a monthly payment roughly $80 to $100 higher than someone who locked two weeks ago. And the MBA's weekly survey out last Wednesday already showed the strain. Purchase applications were at their slowest pace since April. Refinance activity hit its weakest level since last June. The refi window, which had cracked open in May when rates briefly touched 6.4, has essentially slammed shut. JENNY: What about borrowers already in trouble? You mentioned foreclosure data last week. ANDREW: That trend is the harder problem. First-quarter foreclosure filings ran about 119,000, up 26 percent year-over-year, a six-year high according to National Mortgage News. And the FHA's February mortgagee letter is still squeezing servicer margins on the loss-mitigation side. The CFPB pullback under the new administration is shifting more of the consumer-protection burden to state regulators and the FHA itself, and the FHA doesn't have the bandwidth. JENNY: So practical takeaway for someone buying right now? ANDREW: If you have a rate lock that expires this week, extend it if you can. If you're shopping, expect quotes to bounce around with every Treasury auction and every Trump Truth Social post on Iran. Hedge desks at the big lenders widened their spreads overnight, which is why the daily index moved more than the underlying Treasury did. Jenny, speaking of Jacksonville, what's the city looking at today? JENNY: Weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at a high near 87 degrees and partly sunny today, with an east wind around 5 to 14 miles an hour. The June burn ban remains in effect. JENNY: City Council meets tonight, and the big agenda item is the final vote on the Yellow Water Road rezoning. That's the 478-home subdivision on 112 acres in West Jacksonville, just north of Normandy Boulevard. The Land Use and Zoning committee approved it 6-0 last week. The developer is Partridge Hill Capital, and the underlying PUD actually allows for up to 550 homes, though current plans show 478. Worth watching whether anyone surfaces the property-tax amendment in the debate, because more rooftops at the same time the homestead exemption is jumping is a real fiscal puzzle for the city. ANDREW: That homestead piece is a $300 million-a-year hole by FY29 if I'm remembering right. JENNY: That's the Council Auditor's estimate, yes. Roughly 17 percent of general fund revenue at full phase-in. JENNY: Second story. The JEA Special Investigative Committee heard testimony Monday from Chief Administrative Officer Jody Brooks and former JEA legal counsel Regina Ross. The committee met twice, eleven a.m. and one p.m. Brooks was specifically asked about JEA's nonrefundable down payment to GE Vernova for a combined-cycle natural gas turbine at the Northside Generation Station. That decision is tied to the $1.57 billion natural gas plant whose regulatory applications were filed June 4th. CEO Vickie Cavey is scheduled to testify June 22nd, and the parallel state-level investigation by the statewide prosecutor and the Fourth Judicial Circuit State Attorney is still pulling records on the utility's lobbying contracts with Ballard Partners. ANDREW: Is the committee getting closer to recommending charter changes? JENNY: That's the direction this is heading. Workplace culture, water capacity fees, and now generation-asset decisions are all getting woven into the same probe. The statewide prosecutor subpoena is still active. JENNY: Last one. Jaguars mandatory minicamp opens today at Miller Electric Center, runs through Thursday. The big watch is Travis Hunter, who is still working his way back from last season's knee injury. GM James Gladstone has said the plan is for Hunter to be at, quote, full tick by training camp in late July. Expect a limited role this week. Wednesday's session is open to the public from 8:40 to 10:55 a.m. Tickets are free. ANDREW: Good to know. Hunter at full tick by camp would settle a lot of questions about that wide receiver room. JENNY: It would. Andrew, take us out. ANDREW: Before we let you go, one thing to watch tomorrow morning. The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the May Consumer Price Index at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. Consensus is for headline inflation around 3 percent, but the Cleveland Fed nowcast has been drifting higher, and last month's Iran-driven energy spike falls inside the May reference window. A print above 3.2 percent would close the door on any June rate cut and reopen serious conversation about a hike at the June 16-17 FOMC meeting. The ten-year Treasury at 4.55 percent already has some of that priced in. Watch the 4.60 level on the ten-year. If it breaks above that on the print, mortgage rates push toward 7, and the housing market enters a different conversation. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Tuesday. Have a great day. ANDREW: We'll see you tomorrow.

Jax Morning Brief — Iran-Israel Strikes Reignite War Fears, Tech Routed, JEA Testimony Today

Good morning, and welcome back from the weekend. It's Monday, June 8th, 2026. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: Iran launched roughly 20 ballistic missiles at Israel overnight, the first direct strike since April's ceasefire, after Israeli warplanes hit Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut on Sunday. President Trump is demanding both sides stop shooting. ANDREW: And here at home, Wall Street had its worst day of the year Friday. The Nasdaq fell more than four percent on a hot jobs print and a roughly one-trillion-dollar wipeout in chip stocks. We'll walk you through what it all means for rates, mortgages, and the Fed meeting next week. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: A quick look at the markets. The S and P 500 closed Friday at 7,383, down 2.6 percent, the worst session of 2026. The Dow fell 695 points, or 1.3 percent, to 50,866. The Nasdaq dropped 4.2 percent to 25,709, its worst day since April of last year, as semiconductor names took the brunt of the selling. The ten-year Treasury yield jumped to 4.55 percent on Friday's jobs print, and the thirty-year fixed mortgage rate is tracking near 6.5 percent according to Mortgage News Daily. Brent crude is up more than four percent in early trade on the Iran-Israel escalation, sitting just under 97 dollars a barrel. Stock futures are mixed this morning, with the Nasdaq up about half a percent and the Dow slightly negative. ANDREW: Two things shaped your weekend if you were off the grid. One, the Middle East ceasefire is unraveling fast, with Iran, Israel, and Hezbollah all trading fire over 48 hours. Two, Friday's jobs report came in hot, and the market reaction yanked rate-cut hopes off the table. JENNY: That makes the national desk the right place to start. Andrew, over to you. ANDREW: So let's start with what happened in the Middle East over the weekend, because it is genuinely dangerous. The short version is that the ceasefire President Trump brokered on June 1st between Israel and Lebanon is now effectively in tatters. On Sunday afternoon, Israeli aircraft hit Hezbollah's stronghold in Dahiyeh, in Beirut's southern suburbs. Lebanon's national news agency says at least two civilians were killed and more than ten wounded. Then late last night, Iran responded directly, firing at least 20 ballistic missiles into Israel. Most were intercepted, but per NPR's tally across the recent exchanges, 24 people are dead and more than 7,000 have been injured. JENNY: And this is the first time Iran has fired directly on Israel since the April ceasefire, right? How big a step is that? ANDREW: It is a major step. Iran spent April and May letting Hezbollah and the Houthis carry the fight. Direct fire from Iranian territory is what almost dragged the United States into the war back in February. Trump posted on Truth Social late last night demanding both sides, quote, "immediately stop shooting," and then the Israeli air force struck a petrochemical plant in southwest Iran early this morning. So the de-escalation script Trump was running for the past week has flipped into open exchange overnight. JENNY: What does that mean for the nuclear framework deal that was supposed to come this week? ANDREW: That is the second piece. Trump told reporters on Sunday the United States and Iran are, quote, "very close" to signing the framework, and he is pushing for Iran to physically destroy its highly enriched uranium as part of the agreement. But after this weekend's exchange, that timeline is now seriously in doubt. Watch oil here. Brent jumped more than four percent overnight, and a sustained move above 100 dollars a barrel would feed straight into U S gas prices and the inflation print on Wednesday. ANDREW: Closer to home, the House returns to Washington today facing what Axios is calling Speaker Johnson's, quote, "brutal June." The Senate's 69.5 billion dollar ICE and Border Patrol reconciliation bill passed 52 to 47 on Friday. Johnson can lose only two Republican votes, and the so-called anti-weaponization fund for the Justice Department, about 1.8 billion dollars, is the flashpoint. Conservatives want it stripped. If they force changes, the bill heads back to the Senate, and Trump's already-missed June 1st deadline keeps slipping further. ANDREW: And on the data side, Friday's May jobs report blew past expectations. Payrolls came in at roughly 172,000 versus consensus around 85,000. Unemployment held at 4.3 percent. The market reaction tells the story. The ten-year yield jumped back to 4.55 percent, futures pricing for a June rate cut effectively collapsed, and odds of a Fed hike later this year actually moved up. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh is in his pre-meeting blackout window now, and he gave no signal before going dark. JENNY: So basically the Fed gets the worst possible setup heading into next week, a hot jobs print and a fresh geopolitical oil shock. ANDREW: That is exactly right. And we get the May Consumer Price Index on Wednesday morning, which is now the most important data point on the calendar. JENNY: One more on the international side before we move on. The Florida AG's lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman personally, filed June 1st, is still moving forward in the background. Eighty-three pages, six counts including fraud and public nuisance, cites two Florida deaths. We're watching whether California or New York attorneys general follow with their own suits this week. ANDREW: That personal-liability angle against Altman is the part that has every other lab's general counsel taking notes. JENNY: Andrew, stay with us. Let's pivot to what all of this means for the mortgage market. ANDREW: Yeah, the rate story is grim if you were hoping for relief. Freddie Mac's weekly survey on Thursday came in at 6.48 percent, the first weekly decline in six weeks. But that survey was collected before Friday's jobs print. Mortgage News Daily's daily index is tracking near 6.5 percent this morning, and given the ten-year jumped a dozen basis points on Friday alone, the practical lender quote for a 30-year fixed loan today is going to be in the high 6's. JENNY: So if I was about to lock a rate this morning, the situation looks worse than it did at Friday lunch? ANDREW: Materially worse. And the Mortgage Bankers Association data from last week already showed refinance applications down 18 percent week over week. That refi window everyone was watching for in May is effectively closed for now. Purchase applications were flat, which actually sounds resilient, but it is flat at a level that's the weakest in years. ANDREW: On the regulatory side, the FHA's February mortgagee letter on loss mitigation continues to squeeze servicers. National Mortgage News reported first-quarter foreclosure filings hit about 119,000 nationally, up 26 percent year over year, the highest in six years. With the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau pulled back under this administration, the risk is shifting onto FHA and state regulators, and you can see it in default servicer margins. JENNY: Bottom line for a buyer this week? ANDREW: If you have a rate lock that holds through Friday, hold it. If you don't, the most important calendar event for you is the May inflation print on Wednesday morning. A hot reading on top of a hot jobs print pushes the thirty-year toward 6.75 percent. A soft one is the only thing that brings it back. JENNY: Let me take you over to the AI desk, because there is a lot moving this week, starting with the biggest IPO in years. JENNY: SpaceX is in the final stretch of its roadshow. Pricing is set for Wednesday night, with the Nasdaq debut Thursday. The company is going out at a fixed price of 135 dollars a share, which values it at about 1.77 trillion dollars. That would make it roughly the seventh-largest U S company on day one. CNBC is reporting that an event for around 1,500 retail investors is scheduled for Wednesday, with 30 percent of the float earmarked for retail. That is three times the normal mega-cap allocation. ANDREW: A 1.77 trillion dollar valuation with no traded shares yet is a wild data point. Is the institutional book actually there for it? JENNY: The reporting suggests yes. The demand pool for SpaceX exposure has been bottled up for over a decade. The gray market opens tomorrow, which is the first honest read on where institutions actually want to pay. Watch that tomorrow morning. JENNY: On the Anthropic side, Project Glasswing, that's the early-access program for the Mythos vulnerability-finding model, expanded over the weekend. Bloomberg first reported, and TechCrunch and Cybersecurity Dive confirmed, that the EU's cybersecurity agency ENISA has now been granted access, along with about 150 additional organizations across more than 15 countries. New sectors include power, water, healthcare, and communications. Anthropic says Project Glasswing partners have found more than 10,000 critical-severity vulnerabilities since the model launched in April. ANDREW: So when ENISA finds something serious in European critical infrastructure using a United States model, who actually controls the disclosure timeline? JENNY: That is the live question, and it is exactly why this matters. The disclosure-coordination protocol between Anthropic, ENISA, and EU member states is still being negotiated. And the answer there shapes how every U S AI lab partners with foreign governments going forward. JENNY: Quickly on Microsoft. Project Polaris and the MAI-Thinking-1 model launched at Build last week are now in private preview on the company's custom Maia 200 chip. The pitch to enterprise is no OpenAI distillation in the training, which the legal and procurement teams at large banks have been asking for since the spring. ANDREW: Jenny, let's bring it home. What does the morning look like for Jacksonville? JENNY: Weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at a high near 92 degrees today, partly sunny, with a low around 73 overnight. Breezy in the afternoon, no rain expected, so the standard summer heat advisories apply. JENNY: The biggest local story is happening at City Hall at 1 p.m. this afternoon. JEA Chief Administrative Officer Jody Brooks testifies in front of the City Council's Special Investigative Committee. This is the first of the headline-name testimonies, with CEO Vickie Cavey scheduled for June 22nd. Jacksonville Today and the Daily Record have both reported that Brooks has said she does not believe she is a target of the parallel criminal probe, and that the state attorney general and the State Attorney's Office have pulled records on lobbying contracts JEA canceled with Ballard Partners. ANDREW: What's on the line for Brooks today specifically? JENNY: Three pressure points. The workplace-culture allegations, the underpaid water-capacity fees from some of JEA's largest customers, including the unresolved 1986 Mayo Clinic dispute, and the decision to move forward on the 1.57 billion dollar natural gas plant. Brooks confirmed the regulatory applications for that plant were filed on June 4th, so the financial-impact line of questioning is going to be sharp. JENNY: Two quicker stories on the city side. The Jaguars open mandatory minicamp tomorrow morning at Miller Electric Center, running June 9th through the 11th. Travis Hunter is still working back from the knee injury he sustained last season. General Manager James Gladstone said back in April the plan is for Hunter to be at, quote, "full tick" by training camp in late July, so expect a limited role this week. The Wednesday practice is open to the public, 8:40 to 10:55 in the morning, with free tickets. JENNY: And the City Council has a full vote tomorrow on the 478-home rezoning along Yellow Water Road on the Westside, which cleared the land-use committee last week. With the November property-tax amendment hanging over the city budget, expect every housing-pipeline vote between now and the fall to get more scrutiny than usual. ANDREW: Remind me on that property tax amendment, just to anchor for anybody who missed it. JENNY: Sure. The state legislature put it on the November ballot last month. It would raise the homestead exemption from 50,000 dollars to 150,000 in 2027, then to 250,000 by 2028. The City Council Auditor's office calculates Jacksonville loses more than 300 million dollars a year by fiscal 2029, roughly 17 percent of the general fund. Mayor Deegan held a news conference on Thursday calling the amendment, quote, "hastily conceived" and, quote, "short-sighted." Libraries, parks, public health, and homelessness services are the first cuts on the table if it passes. Public safety and pensions are protected. So that is the budget shadow over every new spending vote between now and November. JENNY: One quick last item — News4Jax reported the Pecan Park Flea Market, a 40-year Northside landmark, is closing this fall after selling for 8.5 million dollars. Big number for a vendor community that's been there for four decades. ANDREW: That is a good handoff. Every one of those local stories now sits in the shadow of the Fed and the oil price. ANDREW: Before we let you go, one thing to watch this week. The May Consumer Price Index print, out Wednesday morning at 8:30 Eastern. After Friday's jobs surprise and this weekend's oil shock from the Middle East, this is the single number that decides the path of the ten-year yield, the thirty-year mortgage, and the framing for the Fed's meeting on June 16th and 17th. Headline consensus is around 2.7 percent year over year. A print at or below 2.5 percent gives the bond market room to breathe. Anything 2.9 or higher, and the entire week tilts toward more rate pressure and more equity selling. JENNY: That is your Morning Brief for Monday. Have a great week. ANDREW: We'll see you tomorrow.

Jax Morning Brief — Hot May Jobs Print, Senate Passes ICE Bill, Anthropic Hands Mythos to EU

Good morning. It's Friday, June 5th, 2026. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: This morning's jobs report came in hot — payrolls beat expectations, and the ten-year Treasury is back at four and a half percent. We'll unpack what that means for the Fed and for mortgage rates. ANDREW: And Anthropic just handed the European Union's cybersecurity agency direct access to its most powerful security model. We'll get to what that signals about who's setting the rules for frontier AI. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: A quick look at the markets. The Dow ripped to a fresh record close yesterday, jumping nearly 875 points, up about one point seven percent, to finish at 51,561. The S and P 500 added about four-tenths of a percent to 7,584, also a record. The Nasdaq was the laggard, slipping less than a tenth of a percent to 26,831, as investors rotated out of chip names after Broadcom sold off. The ten-year Treasury yield closed near 4.5 percent, and Freddie Mac's weekly survey put the thirty-year fixed mortgage rate at 6.48 percent yesterday, down from 6.53 the week before — the first weekly dip in six weeks. ANDREW: Let's start with this morning's main event. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the U.S. economy added about 115,000 jobs in May. That's well above the 85,000 economists had been expecting, and it makes May the third straight month of payroll growth. The unemployment rate held at 4.3 percent. Average hourly earnings came in line with forecasts, up about three-tenths of a percent on the month. JENNY: So a beat, but not a runaway. How is the bond market reading it? ANDREW: Hawkishly. The ten-year Treasury yield is right back at the 4.5 percent level it last visited in late May. That's a big deal because, on Wednesday, the same yield was down at 4.43 after the JOLTS surprise was offset by Iran de-escalation hopes. Two days later, the cushion is gone. CME fed funds futures still show roughly 97 percent odds of no change at the June FOMC meeting in two weeks, but the September cut that traders were leaning into has tightened sharply. JENNY: And this is the first jobs print Kevin Warsh is sitting with as Fed chair. ANDREW: It is. Warsh was sworn in May 22nd and has been almost entirely silent in public. The pre-meeting blackout window starts this weekend, so any signal he wanted to send had to land by today. He didn't send one. The market is now reading the silence as endorsement of the no-cut stance, at least for June. ANDREW: To the other story driving Washington this morning — the Senate passed the immigration enforcement reconciliation bill early this morning, 52 to 47, after a nearly 18-hour vote-a-rama. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the only Republican to break ranks. Crucially, the 1.78 billion dollar Justice Department anti-weaponization fund that nearly killed the bill survived every amendment to strip it out, including a Tillis-Collins maneuver that got eleven Republicans on board but still failed. JENNY: That fund had Susan Collins blocking the bill all week. What changed? ANDREW: Leadership ate the fight. Senator Thune kept the floor open through the night and let the amendments lose one by one. The bill now goes to the House, where Speaker Johnson has to thread it past members who want even more for ICE and members who object to the DOJ fund on principle. Roll Call is reporting that House leadership has already left town for the week, so there is no immediate path to the president's desk. ANDREW: Overseas — the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire we talked about Wednesday is hanging by a thread. Israel and Lebanon agreed to renew it on June 3rd, with U.S. mediation and new "pilot zones" for the Lebanese army to police. The next day, Hezbollah publicly rejected the deal and demanded a full Israeli withdrawal first. Within hours, the Israeli air force struck a Lebanese village. The next negotiation round is scheduled for June 22nd in Washington, but as of this morning, an Iranian official is telling reporters there has been "no tangible progress." The Trump-Iran framework, separately, is still unsigned. Jenny, over to you for what's happening in housing. JENNY: Thanks, Andrew. The mortgage market is staring down a problem this morning. Freddie Mac's weekly print yesterday — 6.48 percent on the thirty-year fixed — was the first weekly decline in six weeks, and it was based on data collected before this morning's jobs report. So that 6.48 number is already stale. ANDREW: How fast does the daily index move on a print like this? JENNY: Fast. Mortgage News Daily had the thirty-year fixed at 6.60 percent earlier this week and climbing. With the ten-year back at 4.5 and spreads still wide because lenders are hedging payroll Friday, the daily index is likely to push toward 6.7 or even 6.75 by Monday morning. For a buyer locking a 400,000 dollar loan, every quarter-point higher costs roughly 65 dollars more per month over the life of the loan. ANDREW: And what about demand? Did this week's MBA print show buyers walking away? JENNY: The MBA applications survey on Wednesday was telling. Purchase applications were essentially flat. Refinances dropped about 18 percent week over week — that's not a buyer story, that's a refinance window slamming shut. Refi share is back down near 37 percent. The takeaway is that the spring buying season is grinding on, but the refi pipeline that was building through May has effectively closed. JENNY: One more story on the lending side — the foreclosure data is starting to tell a quieter story underneath all of this. National Mortgage News is reporting first-quarter foreclosure filings hit roughly 119,000, up 26 percent year over year, and the highest in six years. The driver is the new FHA loss mitigation framework — mandatory three-month trial payment plans and limits on home retention options — that's squeezing servicers and pushing more files toward final disposition. ANDREW: So the rate story is the noise, and servicing is the signal. JENNY: Exactly. Let's move on to AI. JENNY: The big AI story this morning is from Anthropic. The company is granting the European Union's cybersecurity agency, ENISA, direct access to its Mythos security model. It's the first EU government agency to get it. Bloomberg, Dark Reading, and TechCrunch all confirmed the deal this week. The agreement followed months of negotiation, with EU officials flying to San Francisco late last month to close the terms. ANDREW: Remind me what Mythos actually does — and why a European agency getting access is the headline. JENNY: Mythos is an autonomous vulnerability-discovery model. Since its launch in April, it has reportedly identified more than 10,000 high or critical severity software flaws across major operating systems and browsers — including zero-days that human reviewers had missed for years. The reason the ENISA deal matters is that it positions Anthropic, an American AI company, as effectively a deputized cyber defender for the European Union — at a moment when Brussels is also finalizing the EU AI Act's compliance schedule. It is unusual access for a foreign vendor. ANDREW: That sounds like a regulatory hedge as much as a security partnership. JENNY: It reads that way. And there's a parallel story — Anthropic is also expanding the program to about 150 new organizations across more than 15 countries, including NATO, Okta, Samsung, and SK Telecom. Separately, the Wall Street Journal and a couple of trade outlets are reporting that Anthropic has embedded staff at the NSA to help deploy Mythos for offensive cyber work. So the same model that's defending European critical infrastructure is also reportedly being used by U.S. signals intelligence. That's a tension Anthropic will have to manage carefully into its IPO filing. ANDREW: Speaking of which — SpaceX kicked off its roadshow yesterday at a fixed price. JENNY: 135 dollars a share. That values SpaceX at about 1.77 trillion dollars, which would put it ahead of Tesla as the seventh-largest U.S. company by market cap. The plan is to sell roughly 555 million shares, raise about 75 billion, and start trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX on June 12th. Final pricing lands June 11th. Inside the amended S-1, the company also confirmed Anthropic is paying 1.25 billion dollars a month — through May 2029 — for access to its Colossus compute clusters. That ends a public dispute Elon Musk had been waging on social media. JENNY: Closer to home — weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at a high near 87 degrees today with a 40 percent chance of afternoon showers and thunderstorms. Northeast wind 10 to 15 miles per hour, low tonight around 74. Recent rainfall is improving local drought conditions, but the city-wide burn ban remains in effect. JENNY: City Hall had two major stories this week. Yesterday, Mayor Donna Deegan held a news conference at City Hall to publicly oppose the property tax overhaul the Florida Legislature put on the November ballot in last week's special session. She called the measure "hastily conceived" and "short-sighted." City Council auditors estimate Jacksonville stands to lose more than 300 million dollars a year by fiscal year 2029 if voters approve it. ANDREW: 300 million is roughly what — 17 percent of the general fund? JENNY: That's right. And Deegan was explicit about what gets cut first — libraries, parks, public health programs, literacy, housing, and homelessness services. Public safety and pensions are constitutionally protected, so the math falls hardest on everything else. Then this morning, in a related twist — the City Council stalled a routine renewal of the Duval County Public Schools half-cent sales tax. The Mayor pushed back hard, saying the council's role on a referendum like that is "ministerial," not substantive. So expect a fight there next week. ANDREW: That JEA investigation testimony — that's coming up Monday, right? JENNY: It is. Chief Administrative Officer Jody Brooks is scheduled to testify before the Special Investigative Committee Monday at 1 PM. Brooks has said in writing she does not believe she's the target of any parallel criminal investigation, but the State Attorney's office and the Florida AG have both pulled records. CEO Vickie Cavey is scheduled to follow on June 22nd. The committee is also looking into JEA's 1.57 billion dollar natural gas plant decision and an unresolved capacity-fee dispute with Mayo Clinic dating back to 1986. JENNY: And the Culinary Institute of America's board meets June 15th and 16th to choose its fourth U.S. campus location. Jacksonville is on the shortlist alongside Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville. City Council approved a 35 million dollar incentive package on an emergency basis last week. If Jacksonville wins, the campus would be a 50,000 square foot anchor inside the new downtown convention hall. That decision lands ten days from today. JENNY: One more local note — the Jaguars are wrapping up OTAs at the Miller Electric Center. Travis Hunter is in every huddle holding the play sheet but still rehabbing from the knee injury that ended his 2025 season early. Trevor Lawrence told reporters this week that Hunter is "the twelfth guy" in every meeting. Mandatory minicamp starts Monday, and Wednesday's practice is open to the public. ANDREW: Before we let you go, one thing to watch next week — Wednesday, June 11th. That's the day SpaceX prices its IPO. The fixed offer is 135 dollars, but Morningstar's published fair value estimate sits at less than half that — about 780 a share equivalent. So the real question is whether the institutional book absorbs 75 billion dollars at this price, or whether demand softens and the company has to walk it back before Friday's debut. Watch the gray market on Tuesday for the first honest read, because if it trades below 135 before the bell on Friday, that becomes the year's most important market story. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Friday. Have a great weekend. ANDREW: We'll see you Monday.

Jax Morning Brief — Microsoft Cuts the OpenAI Cord, JOLTS Shocks, Florida Tax Plan Hits Ballot

Good morning. It's Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: Microsoft used its Build keynote yesterday to formally cut the OpenAI cord, launching its own reasoning model and a new in-house engine that replaces GPT-4 inside GitHub Copilot starting in August. ANDREW: And on the macro side, April job openings came in nearly three quarters of a million higher than economists expected, the Florida legislature sent a property tax cut to the November ballot that could blow a 300 million dollar hole in Jacksonville, and mortgage rates ticked up again. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: A quick look at the markets. All three major indexes pushed deeper into record territory Tuesday. The S and P 500 closed at 7,609, up a tenth of a percent, its first close above 7,600. The Dow added 229 points, or just under half a percent, to 51,307. The Nasdaq eked out a gain of three hundredths of a percent to 27,093. Chip names did most of the work. Marvell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise led the tape. The ten year Treasury yield closed at 4.43 percent, a couple of basis points lower on the day, and the thirty year fixed mortgage rate is tracking at roughly 6.60 percent according to Mortgage News Daily, up another four basis points. JENNY: Andrew, let me jump right to AI because Microsoft Build was the headline yesterday. Satya Nadella used the keynote in San Francisco to announce something the industry has been waiting two years to see. Microsoft launched its first flagship in-house reasoning model. It is called MAI-Thinking-1. And it launched a coding-specific model called Project Polaris that will replace GPT-4 as the default engine inside GitHub Copilot for paying subscribers starting in August. ANDREW: So this is Microsoft formally telling OpenAI it does not need them. JENNY: That is the read. Microsoft says Polaris was trained from scratch on its own data, with no distillation from OpenAI models, and that it runs on Microsoft's custom Maia 200 accelerators inside Azure. Translation, lower latency and lower per inference cost than routing through OpenAI's API. The reasoning model, MAI-Thinking-1, hits 97 percent on the AIME 2025 math benchmark and Microsoft is publicly claiming it matches Claude Opus 4.6 on coding tasks. ANDREW: How should an enterprise buyer think about this? JENNY: A few ways. One, if you are a Copilot customer, your default model is changing in August whether you want it to or not, though Microsoft is offering an optional three month fallback to stay on GPT-4. Two, this is the most concrete evidence yet that the era of one model for everything is over. Microsoft is telling buyers it will route the right model to the right task and bill accordingly. And three, this lands in the same week Anthropic confidentially filed for its IPO and SpaceX moved its roadshow up to tomorrow. Capital is going to flow toward whichever lab can prove durable enterprise revenue, and Microsoft just made that harder for OpenAI specifically. ANDREW: Speaking of SpaceX, the roadshow kicks off Thursday. What is the read going in? JENNY: Mixed. Reuters confirmed yesterday that SpaceX is targeting a 1.75 trillion dollar valuation with a raise of up to 75 billion dollars. That would be the largest IPO in history. But Morningstar published a fair value estimate of 780 billion dollars yesterday, less than half the ask. Cathie Wood's ARK Invest, on the other side, says 1.75 trillion is achievable. The Anthropic compute contract dispute we flagged yesterday is also still unresolved three days from pricing. JENNY: Andrew, over to the national desk. ANDREW: The story of the morning on the macro side is JOLTS. The April Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey dropped at 10 a.m. yesterday, and it came in at 7.6 million open positions. Consensus was 6.9 million. That is a 700,000 beat, and it is the highest reading on job openings since May of 2024. JENNY: What does that do to Fed pricing? ANDREW: It complicates the cut narrative considerably. Coming into yesterday, fed funds futures had roughly a 97 percent probability of no change at the June 16th and 17th meeting. That has not moved much because the meeting is two weeks out, but the September probability of a cut tightened. If you take JOLTS at face value, the labor market is reaccelerating, not cooling. The bond market initially priced it as hawkish, but the ten year actually closed three basis points lower on the day because the headline got partially absorbed by the Iran ceasefire news. The bigger test is Friday. ANDREW: On Iran, Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified before Congress yesterday for the first time since the war began. He told senators the administration's position is that Iran must be prevented from getting a nuclear weapon, full stop. President Trump told ABC's Jonathan Karl Monday that he expects Iran to agree to his terms, quote, within the week. As of this morning, the framework still is not signed, and Iran has not resumed direct communications with US negotiators. JENNY: What about the Lebanon piece? ANDREW: The Trump-brokered partial ceasefire is technically holding, but barely. Hezbollah agreed to halt attacks on Israeli cities, Israel agreed not to strike Beirut's southern suburbs. The Times of Israel reported Netanyahu confirmed the agreement but explicitly said Israeli forces will continue operating in south Lebanon. And in the early hours of Tuesday morning, the IDF intercepted two projectiles fired from Lebanon. So the truce is partial, contested, and the kind of arrangement that can unravel in one news cycle. ANDREW: One more national item. The Senate ICE reconciliation bill is still stuck. Majority Leader John Thune did not bring it to the floor yesterday. Senator Susan Collins remains opposed to the 1.78 billion dollar Justice Department fund inside the package. The Trump June 1st deadline is now in the rearview, and the FISA Section 702 reauthorization deadline is bearing down on June 12th. So a vehicle that was supposed to fund immigration enforcement is now potentially colliding with the surveillance authority renewal. JENNY: Andrew, over to Jacksonville. This is the biggest local story we have covered in weeks. JENNY: Weather wise, Jacksonville is looking at a high of 87 today, low of 72, mostly sunny early with a chance of afternoon storms. Still no meaningful rain so far this week, which means the city wide burn ban Chief Percy Golden put in place Monday is still in effect. JENNY: The headline is the property tax amendment. The Florida House passed it 75 to 26 yesterday. The Senate passed it 30 to 9. It is now headed to the November ballot. To take effect, it needs 60 percent voter approval. According to News4JAX and First Coast News, the plan raises the homestead exemption from 50 thousand to 150 thousand dollars in 2027, then to 250 thousand by 2028, with constitutional language that could push it as high as 500 thousand. ANDREW: And what is the Council Auditor saying the hit looks like for Jacksonville? JENNY: As we reported yesterday, Council Auditor Philip Peterson's initial analysis pegs the loss at more than 300 million dollars a year starting in January 2027, at just the 250 thousand exemption level. That is on a general fund of about 1.8 billion. Mayor Donna Deegan and Republican leaders in Clay and St. Johns counties have all publicly voiced concern. Deegan's specific point is that Jacksonville already runs the lowest city millage of any major Florida metro, and the current rate does not fully cover police and fire. ANDREW: So now this becomes a five month campaign for and against the amendment. JENNY: Exactly. And from a budget planning standpoint, the city has to start modeling its fiscal year 2028 budget assuming a hole. If the amendment passes in November, that hole is real and starts in 14 months. If it fails, you have spent a year planning for revenue you actually have. Either way, this is the dominant local story between now and Election Day. JENNY: Two quicker Jacksonville items. The Jax Daily Record reports the Council's Land Use and Zoning Committee approved rezoning yesterday for a 478 home single-family development in West Jacksonville, on 112 acres along Yellow Water Road. The final Council vote is set for June 9th. And separately, two Council committees advanced the sale of the former JEA headquarters downtown for one million dollars to Jacksonville based Live Oak Contracting. The buyer plans 180 residential units with rooftop amenities and ground-floor uses. Both of those are signals that the downtown and West side housing pipelines are still moving despite the property tax noise above them. JENNY: Andrew, over to mortgage. ANDREW: Rates went the wrong way again Tuesday. According to Mortgage News Daily, the average lender moved the top tier 30 year fixed scenario up about four basis points to roughly 6.60 percent. That is the fourth consecutive session of upward pressure since Friday's brief cooling. The driver yesterday was actually not Treasuries, since the ten year closed three basis points lower. It was spread widening on lender hedging into the data wall this week. JENNY: So even with yields easing, borrowers paid more. ANDREW: Right. And that is what to watch in the spread itself. When mortgage backed security investors get nervous about prepayment volatility or about Fed policy uncertainty, the spread between the ten year and the 30 year fixed widens. That is exactly what happened yesterday. If JOLTS or Friday's payrolls report turns out hot, that spread does not contract, and you can see a 6.75 percent print by Monday even without much movement in the underlying Treasury. ANDREW: On the data side, the Mortgage Bankers Association weekly print drops at seven a.m. Eastern this morning. The last reading, for the week ending May 22nd, had purchase applications down four tenths of a percent and refinance applications down 18 percent. The refi share fell from 41.9 percent to 37.5 percent. The question this morning is whether the purchase index can turn positive despite higher rates. If it does, buyers are accepting the 6.5 to 6.75 percent range as the new normal. If it falls again, the housing market spends the summer flat. JENNY: And on the servicing and regulatory side? ANDREW: Quiet 24 hours on the regulatory front. The FHA loss mitigation rules we covered yesterday are still the dominant story for default servicers. National Mortgage News flagged first quarter foreclosure filings hit 119 thousand, up 26 percent year over year, the highest in six years. Servicers are getting squeezed by the new mandatory three month trial payment plan and the one home retention option per 18 month cap. Watch the next round of default servicer earnings calls for color on margin compression. ANDREW: Before we let you go, one thing to watch this morning. The MBA weekly mortgage applications print drops at seven a.m. Eastern, but the real event is Friday's May employment situation report. Consensus is for payroll gains somewhere between 60 and 100 thousand, with the unemployment rate holding at 4.3 percent. Here is why it matters. JOLTS yesterday said the labor market is reaccelerating. If Friday's payrolls print confirms that with a number above 150 thousand, the Fed cut conversation gets pushed deeper into the fall, the ten year backs up through 4.5 percent, and the 30 year mortgage rate tests 6.75 percent by Monday. If it comes in under 50 thousand, every bit of that flips, and we start hearing the first whispers of a Warsh-era cut at the July meeting. Either way, it is the most consequential data point of the week. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Wednesday. Have a great day. ANDREW: We'll see you tomorrow.