Mortgage Rates back to 3% – again

The 30-year Fixed Rate Mortgage ticked back up to 3% this week. I re-read Are Mortgage Rates headed Up or Down? which I published in June and I still think it summarises the situation quite well. Hence I have included the link rather than repeating the arguments.

The proximate cause  for the increase in mortgage rates this week was the increase in the yield on the US Treasury 10-year Note. The increase started last week (after the Freddie Mac weekly survey, which is collected from Monday-Wednesday) when the Federal Reserve (Fed) confirmed that, if current trends continue, it will start to reduce its purchases of both Treasuries and Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) soon and aim to end purchases by the middle of 2022.

At the same time, we saw a rate increase in Norway – the first in Europe- following earlier increases in Brazil and South Korea. And while the Fed continues to state that it will not consider actual rate increases (I am not sure why they refer to it as “lift off”- sounds like rocket-speed increases which it will not be) until after the end of the bond purchases, investors noticed a shift in the number of members forecasting a rate increase in 2022 rather than 2023.

And inflation continues to run hot. The Fed thinks this is transitory, but many others fear that it will be sustained forcing the Fed to raise rates sooner than it currently anticipates.

The Numbers (more…)