Interest Rates continue to improve

Interest rates moved down again a bit this week.The following are excerpts from the newsletter on interest rates published by HSH Associates :

“The drumbeat of mediocre economic news continues, and interest rates have settled, with fixed rate mortgages sliding to a place near their lowest levels of 2013.

Overall, it seems to us that the economy is neither growing much nor declining much, but rather treading water at a moderate pace, probably a GDP of somewhere between 2 percent and 3 percent at the moment. That would be a fine level if we were closer to full employment or didn’t have yawning debts and deficits to manage, but we do, and stronger growth for a fair period of time will be required to more fully engage all the folks who lost jobs in the downturn.

Including China’s rate of growth sliding below 8 percent, we are in a slow growth period here and abroad. Interest rates will have a tough time getting any upward traction in such a climate, although we could have flares higher from time to time, as we did earlier this year. It may be a long slog, too, with at least one Federal Reserve official predicting perhaps five to ten years of financial instability ahead, with the Fed continuing unusually low interest rates as policy.

Let us all hope we are back to whatever will pass for “normal” long before then.

In the more immediate future, a fairly busy week of new data is due. Mortgage rates seem content to wander at about these levels, with an equal chance of rising or falling a couple of basis points. “

The following are interest rate quotes from Al Hermann of American California Financial: