The bond markets got a little ahead of themselves, causing yields to rise too quickly over the past few weeks. This week saw a bit of a correction and mortgage rates fell for the first time in eight weeks. Continued volatility in financial markets, however, will keep rates teetering up and down for some time to come.
Expecting job growth on the order of about 150,000 in December, financial markets were taken aback, to say the least, when those figures came in at only a thousand new jobs.
Every once in a while the bond market does believe Greenspan.
It is something that we are paying attention to very closely.
This has been a long, sustained rise.
Last Friday's unexpectedly weak employment report caused interest rates on long-term Treasury bonds and, by extension mortgage rates, to fall as investors worried about the health of the U.S. economy.
The onset of 2005 bodes well for the housing industry. Long-term mortgage rates are currently below six percent.
The 30-year [fixed-rate mortgage] came in under 6 percent for the last 22 weeks of this year. As a matter of fact, mortgage rates in 2004 averaged around 5.84 percent, the second lowest annual rate ever recorded in the history of Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey.
Acceleration in U.S. growth and rising energy costs will likely translate into higher long-term [interest] rates.
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