“An eye for an eye, Tooth for a tooth. Vote for me and I’ll set you free! Rap on, brother, rap on. Well, the only person talking about loving thy brother is the preacher. And it seems nobody’s interested in learning, but the teacher. Segregation, demonstration, integration, determination, aggravation, humiliation, obligation to our nation.” So sang The Temptations in “Ball of Confusion” from 1970. (Yes, 54 years ago.) Politics aside, some in our industry were confused when rates went up instead of down after the last Federal Reserve meeting, but face it, there has been a lot of positive economic news recently that has kept long term rates higher. The Fed can only control so much: Extreme weather across southern Asia has sent the price of black tea sharply upward, with the benchmark auction price of tea in northern India coming in up 30 percent year over year. Beyond heavy rains in June that hurt the harvest, a fungus has been afflicting India’s tea plantations. Harvests in Sri Lanka are likewise down, and the export markets are going to suffer the most: Japan, for instance, gets 60 percent of its black tea imports from India and Sri Lanka. (Today’s podcast can be found here, and this week’s is sponsored by nCino, makers of the nCino Mortgage Suite for the modern mortgage lender. nCino Mortgage Suite’s three core products, nCino Mortgage, nCino Incentive Compensation, and nCino Mortgage Analytics, unite the people, systems, and stages of the mortgage process. Hear an interview with nCino’s Ben Miller on a topic that’s dominating industry conversations right now: artificial intelligence and machine learning.)