No Change in Mortgage Rates (Yet) I have just received the following telegram from my generous daddy. It says, ‘Dear Jack: Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide. –John F. Kennedy Almost a month after The Federal Reserve completed its massive, $1.2 trillion...Read More
The Dog That Didn’t Bark? So, the Federal Reserve finished its massive, $1.25 trillion purchase of mortgage securities almost three weeks ago. Have mortgage rates spiked upwards since then? Nope, they’re basically unchanged. What could that mean? Other investors — supplying fresh capital — have taken their place (the “supply explanation”); a weak economy is...Read More
Fed Rate Bump Today’s leading financial stories are: a) the Federal Reserve’s apparently surprise decision to raise interest rates on short-term bank borrowing; and b) the market’s reaction to same (playing out now). My take? The action itself is relatively trivial: hiking rates on some arcane, overnight interest rate from .5% to .75% (yes, that’s...Read More
The Fed’s “Mortgage Shopping Spree” Drowned out in all the health care reform discussion is a quiet — but big — drop in mortgage rates. As of this morning, rates on 30-year mortgages are being quoted at 5%. That’s a big improvement over just six weeks ago, when rates were in the mid-5’s — and...Read More
The Fed and Interest Rates If you follow markets — stocks, housing, you name it — two things catch your attention: too volatile, and too calm. The former is usually associated with rapidly changing, “macro” events that the markets are struggling to make sense of; the latter, somebody’s got their “hand on the scale” (at...Read More
Back to 5%? The good news on mortgage interest rates? After a steep climb the last two months or so, to around 5.5% on 30-year mortgages, they’ve now fallen back closer to 5%. The bad news? The reason is that the latest batch of economic news — unemployment, economic activity, the housing market — shows...Read More
