Mortgage Interest Rates Update Aug 22 2016

John Thomas August 20, 2016 Tags: Delaware Mortgage Rates, Delaware mortgages, Mortgage Interest Rates

Mortgage Interest Rates Update August 22 2016

Mortgage Interest Rates weekly update for the Week of August 22, 2016 by John R. Thomas with Primary Residential Mortgage, Inc. in Newark, Delaware. John Thomas is the Branch Manager, a Loan Officer and the author of the best selling book, Your Guide to Buying Your First Home in Delaware. Call 302-703-0727 for a Rate Quote or Apply Online for Rate Quote

Mortgage Interest Rate – Lock or Float?

Mortgage Interest Rates ended the week about where they started after rallying mid week to sell off on Friday. If you look at the mortgage bond chart below, you can see mortgage bonds have been trading in a tight sideways patter since the beginning of August trading between the blue lines on the chart. The bond closed Friday below the 50 day moving average which and the technical pattern are signalling a sell signal. If bonds continue to sell off this week then we will see mortgage interest rates continue to move higher, so we are recommending LOCKING Your Mortgage Interest Rate to start the week.

In Economic News, the Federal Reserve is talking again of hiking its short term interest rate, the Fed Funds Rate. This has both stocks and bonds concerned as a rate hike would be bad for stocks and in the short term bonds. The next Fed Meeting is September and will be the Feds last chance to increase interest rates prior to the elections.

Weekly Initial Jobless Claims were released on Thursday and showed 262,000 claims for the week which was down 4,000 claims from the previous week and slightly better than expectations of 265,000 claims. This week was also the sample week for the August Jobs Report so this hints that we might see another strong jobs report for August 2016. A strong jobs report could potentially be bad for mortgage interest rates.

Consumer Price Index (CPI) for July 2016 was released last week which is a measure of inflation at the retail level showed that inflation was flat as it came in at only 0.8% year over year.

Oil Prices gushed higher this past week up $4 per barrel so this will be seen at the pump as higher gasoline prices.

In Housing News, New Home Builders Housing Starts for July 2016 were released and showed an increase of 2.1 percent over June 2016 to 1.211 million units on annualized basis. This was the best reading in five months and shows more consumers are on their way to home ownership.