Interest Rates Unchanged

Interest rates stayed about the same this week .The following are excerpts from the newsletter on interest rates published by HSH Associates :

“We’ve noted in recent weeks that economic news and data from September has been relatively solid, and that continues to be the case. However, there doesn’t appear to be all that much upward momentum which bled into October, but rather a steady pattern, if what little data there is so far is any indication.

Perhaps the most important report out this week was the employment report for October. Forecasters called for perhaps 125,000 new hires to have occurred during the month, but an upward surprise was seen as 171,000 new jobs were filled during the month. There were also upward revisions to August and September to the tune of 84,000 additional jobs, so the news was fair all around. While the gains in jobs were of course welcome — and sizable, relative to figures from earlier this year — they are still modest gains at best, barely sufficient to keep pace with the regular expansion of the working-age population. The nation’s official rate of unemployment rose by a single tick to 7.9% as the size of the nation’s workforce expanded by two tenths of a percentage point.

With Fannie, Freddie and FHA guidelines dictating lending conditions for the vast majority of the market, there is not much private lending outside of Jumbos where lenders have much to say about how a loan is written. Until there is a more robust private market — and no one knows when that will be, given Dodd-Frank and new lending and accounting rules — we shouldn’t expect to see much by way of easing happening here.

With a tight election coming on Tuesday, it’s hard to know what will happen to mortgage rates and markets in coming days. Most probably, rates will continue to hang around these levels, kept there by the Fed’s steadying hand. “

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