The 30-year mortgage rate shot up the day after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates.

Hours after the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday by 25 basis points, mortgage rates ticked up 9 basis points.

The Fed announced Wednesday that it would trim its key policy rate by a quarter of a percentage point, bringing it to the range of 4% to 4.25%. Around the time of the announcement, Mortgage News Daily, a website that posts daily updates on rates, crashed - possibly the result of people flocking to the site to see how mortgage rates reacted. The company told MarketWatch it was looking into why the site was down that afternoon.

Mortgage News Daily later reported that the 30-year rate went up by 9 basis points (0.09%) to 6.22% on Wednesday. On Thursday, it reported that the 30-year rate had gone up by 15 more basis points, to 6.37%.

In contrast, a report by Freddie Mac measuring weekly averages for the 30-year rate found that mortgage rates fell to the lowest level in 12 months on Thursday. That’s because Freddie Mac’s report gathered information prior to and after the Fed’s decision was announced. The weekly report doesn’t survey lenders, but is based on actual mortgage applications to lenders across the country that are sent to Freddie Mac.

Mortgage rates aren’t tied to the Fed’s interest-rate moves. Instead, they typically fall in advance of a Fed rate cut, as MarketWatch has reported, because bond investors are trying to anticipate where the central bank will go. Mortgage rates are priced off the 10-year Treasury note BX:TMUBMUSD10Y by adding a spread.

Hence, the 10-year Treasury yield is a better gauge of how mortgage rates will move - and the 10-year yield was trending higher Thursday.

Mortgage rates have decoupled from the Fed’s benchmark / targets, basically, because fiscal policy and the overall economic outlook are so bad that traditional monetary policy is no longer effective.

This is generally what economists would call ‘a bad sign’.

Myself, I would go so far as ‘a very bad sign.’

My condolences to anyone who confused their local new/used home salesperson with a qualified economist, if they told you, and you believed, something like 'Fed rate cuts will lower mortgage rates!"

    • Laser@feddit.org
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      3 minutes ago

      Just reminded me of this copypasta:

      Don’t even ask the question. The answer is yes, it’s priced in. Think Amazon will beat the next earnings? That’s already been priced in. You work at the drive thru for Mickey D’s and found out that the burgers are made of human meat? Priced in. You think insiders don’t already know that? The market is an all powerful, all encompassing being that knows the very inner workings of your subconscious before you were even born. Your very existence was priced in decades ago when the market was valuing Standard Oil’s expected future earnings based on population growth that would lead to your birth, what age you would get a car, how many times you would drive your car every week, how many times you take the bus/train, etc. Anything you can think of has already been priced in, even the things you aren’t thinking of. You have no original thoughts. Your consciousness is just an illusion, a product of the omniscent market. Free will is a myth. The market sees all, knows all and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the market has already priced in the heat death of the universe). So please, before you make a post on wsb asking whether AAPL has priced in earpods 11 sales or whatever, know that it has already been priced in and don’t ask such a dumb fucking question again.