Source: The Wall Street Journal —
The pressure is finally coming off mortgage rates.
Amid the market’s huge reaction last week to the better-than-feared inflation print, and what it could signal about the direction of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, a widely tracked daily measure of the national 30-year fixed mortgage rate plunged. Bankrate.com’s overnight average decreased by 0.33 percentage point from Wednesday to Thursday, falling back under 7% to 6.91%.
This is certainly good news for people thinking of buying a home. But these days, mortgage rates aren’t just high. They are very high, even relative to how much interest rates overall have risen. So the real question is whether they will start to reverse that trend and drop faster as benchmark yields fall. There are good reasons to think that could be the case, though it isn’t yet a sure thing.
Benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury yields also plunged on Thursday, falling by 0.31 points to 3.84%, according to FactSet figures.
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