The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) says the effects of higher home prices and tight inventories appear to be weighing on home buying decisions. Rose Quint writes in NAHB’s Eye on Housing blog that the share of adults who said they planned to buy a home over the next year […]

MBS Flip Script After Treasury Auction; Bonds Refuse to Chase Stocks It was a fairly sloppy day of gains for the bond market with Treasuries noticeably lower in yield early and MBS underperforming.  The script was flipped in the afternoon as a strong 2yr […]

Freddie Mac’s first quarterly forecast for 2022 cites the need for improvement in the nation’s employment picture. Even though the December report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the unemployment rate down 0.3 percentage points from the prior month at 3.9 percent, Freddie Mac’s […]

Anyone who’s seen 1968’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” remembers the talking computer HAL (whose name was cleverly derived from subtracting one letter from IBM). We need more acronyms, right?! Here’s one I hadn’t heard: BNPL. The buy now, pay later industry is an increasingly important driver […]

Bonds are off to stronger start for a 4th straight trading session.  As such, they're following the same pattern as the rally attempt 2 weeks ago (which ultimately failed), but there's certainly a bigger sense of urgency behind this week's version.  Are bonds still consolidating ahead of the Fed […]

The bond market returned from a 3 day weekend to find yields surging higher on Tuesday.  That pushed mortgage rates to fresh 2 year highs and added emphasis to what has already been the sharpest rate spike since late 2016.   Why are rates rising so quickly? Mortgage rates are based on […]

Another Green Day But MBS Underperform Bonds rallied today with 10yr yields dropping more than 6bps by the 3pm CME close.  That's the type of improvement that normally makes for a nice day of mortgage market improvement, but today, mortgage rates were just […]

While new home sales have been performing well over the last few months, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) expects a stumble in December. Its Builder Application Survey (BAS) data for the month shows mortgage applications for new home purchases decreasing 5.0 percent compared to November and […]

In its first look at December’s loan performance data, Black Knight notes that 2021 ended with the foreclosure inventory at an all-time low and the national delinquency rate “just a hair off the near-record low” reached just before the onset of the pandemic. That delinquency rate, the […]

Bonds are off to an even stronger start on Friday, largely in response to a big risk-off move that rifled through markets in the last 90 minutes of trade yesterday and carried over to early trading in Asia.  "Risk-off" implies stock prices and bond yields moving lower together, and that's a […]