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Mortgage Rates Highest in 9 Months

Mortgage rates were only moderately higher today, but the move was enough to officially bring them to the highest levels since the Spring of 2017.  In other words, most lenders' rate quotes are fairly similar to recently bad days (like last Wednesday), but in terms of outright costs, you'd have to go back 9 months to see anything worse.

There was precious little by way of overt motivations for today's move.  Whereas rates have a longstanding history of responding to economic data and other events that speak to the economy/inflation/etc., many of the recent movements have had more to do with arcane considerations among bond traders than the aforementioned history.   

The timing of today's weakness is unfortunate as rates were just starting to look like they might be reinforcing recent ceilings.  To be fair, in terms of Treasury yields, that's still true as 10yr Notes remain under the 2.60%.  Mortgage rates have simply underperformed 10yr Treasuries since the latter hit 2.60% last week.  

Any time a mortgage rate headline can claim "highest in 9 months," it's a good idea to remain defensive in terms of locking vs floating.  The saving grace is that long-term highs typically precede extended periods of positivity for rates.  It's just a matter of figuring out if these long term highs are high enough to rebalance the scales in the bond market.

This Daily Mortgage Rate Update is provided in partnership with Mortgage News Daily.