Jessie Holshouser

           Our first speaker for the class session of March 7,2015 was Jessie Holshouser, Jessie gave a great lecture on how capital markets have been behaving since 1972 up until present day.  Jessie grew up in a navy family, his dad being an engineer graduated from Princeton, Jessie felt he had to follow in his dad footsteps and become and engineer himself. He decided to go to Georgia tech where he enrolled as engineer; he quickly figured out that he was not happy with the path he chooses. Jessie quickly drops his engineering career and moves to Florida. Once Jessie arrives in Florida he decides to enter the banking business in 1972 applying to various savings and loans branches. When he finally landed a job in a savings and loans, Jessie met a lot of people in construction industry and still holds a relationship with them. One point Jessie made that stuck with me was how he recommended to find a job were people are willing to teach you and pay you, I agree with him because entering the job market so young and inexperienced, work experience is what is going to get you to the next level, and by entering a job were they are willing to teach you is of great benefit to you personal growth as a professional.

            Jessie went on to explain how lending has drastically changed over the years. When Jessie started working on savings and loans, lending was very simple very straight forward and institutions did not complicate themselves as much as we see now. Loans were standard usually 80% LTV and working hours were shot 9 to 4. Banks were not involved only insurance companies and interest rates were regulated so in order to compete savings and loans had to compete by building big branches to get the attention of the costumers, and usually gave gifts away. Things have drastically changed since then and lenders have become more rigorous when it comes to lending, because of the crash in 2007-2008 lending now a days is really difficult to come around lenders are very aware on who to lend out to and are protecting there backs much more rigorously. This is largely due to the CMB market that was created so lenders could lend out more loans, which eventually caused the market to crash. Interest rate was another really interesting topic that Jessie talked about. We all know interest rates are artificially low at the moment and the FED will eventually have to raise them, the question that nobody can answer is when will they raise them. Jessie has a pessimist point of view, he thinks that anytime soon we will see markets crash because of how low interest rates are, which is very interesting because our next speaker which comes from a developing background rather than a capital markets background had a much more optimistic view on the market.

            This was a great presentation by Mr. Jessie Holshouser; his vast knowledge on capital markets really enlightened me and gave me a lot of knowledge on the subject.