Interest Rates remain low

Mortgage interest rates for buying a home on the Palos Verdes Peninsula decreased slightly this week. The following are excerpts from the newsletter on interest rates published by HSH Associates :

“A measurable decline in mortgage rates to close March held on this week, but it appears that underlying pressures are kicking mortgage rates back up at least a bit. In the current climate, the fact of the matter is, if the economic news isn’t universally dire it will be difficult for interest rates to stay at present levels, let alone decline.

Although Freddie Mac noted that 30-year FRMs did edge higher this week, the increase fell short of our expectations. Given that the yields on the influential 10-year Treasury rebounded pretty smartly off last week’s lows (as did secondary market quotes for fixed-rate mortgages), a larger bump in rates should have been seen. However it may be, at least for a short while, that lenders are absorbing some of this increase in order to take advantage of a sudden surge in refinance activity. From one perspective, it’s perhaps better to make more loans at a smaller margin than to make fewer at larger, but this sort of phenomena generally doesn’t last for long.

The U.S. economy is showing remarkable resilience, and there is every reason to believe that the current expansion will become the longest on record later this year. Interest rates are still at historically very mild levels, regardless of the bleating of the White House that they should be lower, and mortgage rates are far closer to historic lows than they were just a few months ago. With the Fed making soothing sounds about policy, and the drag from a sluggish global economy amid few concerns about inflation keeping market-based interest rates anchored we should be in a pretty neutral interest-rate environment for a fair period of time.

That said, if the data isn’t dire or increasingly dire it will be hard to see rates decline or even hold at rock-bottom levels. To the degree that the data is warmer, firmer or better (insert your choice of adjective here) interest rates and mortgage rates will tend to rise a bit. At the moment, we’d need an abundance of such positive data just to retrace some of the 2019 decline for mortgage rates, and while we still think that it will generally come, it will take a while to accumulate.

This week’s solid slate of data is just one plank, but one that is good enough to push rates off of recent bottoms. By our reckoning, we should have seen a bigger bump this week, but it didn’t show, making it more likely that a more outsized rise may come next week. Based on where the underlying pressure was at the end of the week, we think we’ll see a 7-8 basis point increase in the average conforming 30-year FRM that Freddie Mac will report next Thursday morning. It wouldn’t even surprise us at all if it was a little to the upside of that. Still, spring homebuyers are being greeted by favorable conditions”

The following are interest rate quotes from Allen Bond of Wells Fargo Bank:

Conforming

Jumbo

Information displayed is accurate as of 4/5/2019 12:37:14 PM (CT) and is subject to change without notice.