Mortgage rates haven't budged in over a month. Demand dropped anyway. This is what passes for a financial story now.
The mortgage market discovered the one thing worse than rates going up. Rates doing absolutely nothing. Borrowers had weeks to lock in and refinance and buy that dream home in a subdivision named after the forest they bulldozed to build it. They chose to wait instead. For what? A quarter point? Divine intervention? The heat death of the universe?
Rates stuck in a narrow range sounds like technical analysis until you remember technical analysis is astrology for people who wear Patagonia vests. The range could be 6.5% to 6.7%. Could be 7.2% to 7.4%. Doesn't matter. Nobody's pulling the trigger either way. They're convinced if they wait just one more week, Jerome Powell will personally call them with a coupon code.
Here's what actually happened. Rates flatlined. Demand fell. Two unrelated facts got jammed into a headline implying causation because mortgage lenders needed something to tell their shareholders besides "we're still f*cked."
The real story is that Americans with enough credit score to qualify for a mortgage took one look at a thirty-year commitment and said no thanks, I'll just keep renting this one-bedroom with the broken dishwasher and a neighbor who practices drums at 11 PM. Can't blame them. Signing up for three decades of debt because the interest rate held steady feels like proposing marriage because your girlfriend stopped getting worse.
Mortgage brokers are now refreshing rate sheets like crypto traders checking Coinbase at 3 AM, hoping for any movement that might trick someone into action. Spoiler: it won't.
Photo by Artful Homes on Unsplash
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