After posting a decent recovery from 9-month highs yesterday, it looked like mortgage rates were destined to bounce back toward slightly higher levels today. In fact, when lenders released their initial rates this morning, the average 30yr fixed rate was indeed moderately higher. But shortly after 1pm ET, news broke regarding additional progress in the […]

Lots of folks were leaving the MBA’s National Secondary yesterday, and many comments and questions were heard. “Did you hear that Jerry Seinfeld is doing a show at the MBA National in October?” (True) “Ginnie Mae began ratcheting up its cybersecurity efforts in 2024. Why aren’t others?” (Good question; I’m sure they are at some

Bonds spent most of the overnight session moving sideways to slightly stronger, but everything changed at 6:20am. That’s when news broke regarding a statement from Iran’s Khamenei saying that Uranium should not leave the country. Given that this is a sticking point for peace negotiations, the response in bonds/oil/etc was immediate and clear. Yields rose

Full Reversal And Then Some Bonds more than made up from Tuesday’s rout with a massive rally on Wednesday. Unlike Tuesday’s move, which was driven by bond-market-specific selling pressure on the part of one account’s massive liquidations, Wednesday’s rally was broad-based and driven by war-related headlines. Specifically, newswires suggested the U.S. and Iran are now

Wednesday brought some much-needed relief for the mortgage market after rates surged to new 9 month highs of 6.75% yesterday. Whereas that rate spike was decoupled from the prevailing narrative of war-related headlines, today’s recovery was quite the opposite. Newswires came out shortly after 10am ET that suggested the U.S. and Iran are nearing a

Here in New York, as over a thousand of us head to airports (hopefully avoiding manholes… tragic), the mood has been pragmatic. Not overly optimistic, not somber, just realistic. No one is arguing that the war hasn’t driven up worldwide oil prices, impacting inflation and borrower psychology, impacting lending. The Mortgage Bankers Association now predicts

Tuesday’s massive wave of bond-specific weakness still has the analytical community scratching its collective head. Our contacts are either saying nothing or telling us they’re just as perplexed. So far this morning, there hasn’t been any sort of repeat performance.  Lower oil prices have helped bonds find their footing, but the move has relied on breaking

Whales Making Waves in Treasury Futures Nerd alert: there’s no way to discuss what happened in the bond market today without getting a bit nerdy. Reason being, there was an absolute deluge of block trades in Treasury futures (over $20bln–the biggest day we can remember for outright block trades). There are a few different possibilities for

It was another rough day for the bond market and, thus, for interest rates. Investors aggressively sold bonds in the first 2 hours of trading, taking 10yr Treasury yields to the highest level in more than a year. Mortgage-specific bonds have been doing better versus Treasuries in recent months thanks to increased purchase demand from

One of the discussion topics here in New York at the MBA conference is, just like every other conference, artificial intelligence, and one of the questions is, “Who’s accountable if something goes wrong?” Any one of us in capital markets will tell you that, in the case of Freddie, Fannie, investors, and so on, lenders