If You're Struggling to Understand This Week's Mortgage Rate Spike, This is For You

We received some anonymous feedback regarding recent rate commentary that serves as a good reminder that not everyone may be picking up what we're putting down, or worse yet, picking up things that we never put down in the first place.   We spend a lot of time talking about how the bond market prices in the impact of Fed rate cuts on the occasions where those rate cuts are expected with a high probability--as was the case with yesterday's cut.  Specifically, Tuesday's rate commentary said: " The market is already well aware that the Fed is cutting rates tomorrow and those expectations are already 100% reflected in the mortgage rates that are available today." The hiking/cutting of the Fed Funds rate is the only variable under consideration in that comment.  The following paragraph said:  "If rates rise or fall tomorrow, it would be due to other components of the Fed announcement, such as the Fed's quarterly rate outlook survey (officially, the dot plot in the Summary of Economic Projections, released concurrently with the rate announcement at every other Fed meeting) or the press conference with Fed Chair Powell that begins 30 minutes after the rate announcement." This brings us to the point because, indeed, it was definitely all that "other stuff" that caused rates to surge higher yesterday. Those who want to dig into that in detail can read the full coverage here.