Morgan Stanley swinging the axe at its mortgage ops

Morgan Stanley just announced that it will scale back its U.S. mortgage business and cease all residential mortgage operations at Advantage Home Loans, its U.K. lending arm. The moves will lead to 1,000 layoffs. The company said it plans to continue servicing loans through its Saxon unit and will also continue to offer home loans to its retail brokerage clients.

In other news, the yield on the 2-year Treasury Note is setting a new low for the cycle of 1.87%, off about 4 basis points on the day. For some perspective sake, the modern low for 2-year notes was 1.08% on June 13, 2003.