Mortgage Rates Improve Slightly Before Fed Announcement
Mortgage rates inched lower going into the third week of March as bonds leveled off. Unfortunately, this improvement was not enough to fully reverse the recent upward trend. Rates last Friday were at their highest levels the market had seen since late January, and we’re currently not much better off.
The question right now is whether this downward movement represents a new trend, or a one-time anomaly. Though it is possible that we will continue to see more improvement in the short term, it is also possible that this recent improvement is due to financial markets calming down on the week of the big Federal Reserve statement coming up on Wednesday. Once this announcement is made, we can expect a big reaction from the financial markets. If the economic outlook is positive enough, we could easily see mortgage rates jump significantly higher by the end of the week. If the data is weak, mortgage rates may ease a bit. There’s no way to anticipate in which direction they will move at this point.
