For the third week in a row, mortgage markets improved early in the week, only to give back the gains before Friday’s close. Mortgage rates ended last week exactly where they started.  However, if you locked your mortgage rate Tuesday, you got a rate decidedly lower than someone who waited until Friday. Last week, one of the biggest [...]

Mortgage markets were up-and-down last week as rates fell Monday and Tuesday before surging higher from Wednesday through Friday. In some case, after touching all-time lows, conforming mortgage rates added a half-percent in the second half of the week, ruining some homeowners’ chance to refinance. It was the second week in a row that mortgage [...]

Don’t look now but oil prices are climbing. This should worry today’s home buyers and would-be refinancers because some of the same forces that helped to push crude past $50 for the first time in 4 months also cause mortgage rates to rise. March 18, the Federal Reserve committed an additional $1.15 trillion to support the [...]

Mortgage markets scored big gains last week, sparked by the Federal Reserve’s pledge to buy $750 billion more mortgage-backed bonds in 2009.  Conforming mortgage rates fell on the week, overall. But Federal Reserve intervention wasn’t the only good news for rate shoppers last week.  New evidence showed — for the time being, at least — that [...]

The Federal Open Market Committee voted to leave the Fed Funds Rate unchanged today, within the target range of 0.000-0.250 percent.  This doesn’t mean the Fed stood pat, however. On plan to resurrect the economy using “all available tools”, today, the Fed announced a new, $1.5 trillion round of fiscal support for the treasury and [...]