Now that mortgage rates have seen an intermediate bottom, what is the prediction for the future trends? Is the mortgage rate forecast clear or cloudy for current home owners?
Giving an accurate mortgage rates forecast is something that was not very difficult over the last eight months. You could pretty much say that rates were going down and you would have been correct. The question that many home owners and future home buyers are asking now is "is this going to continue or are interest rates headed higher?" Many market mavens and financial pundits are forecasting that rates are going to head much higher because the ten year treasury yield has been in an uptrend for five months and rates have yet to recognize this.
There is little doubt that there is a strong correlation between overall rates and treasury yields. With that being said, things are much different today as the government is playing a HUGE part in where rates are headed. Over the last two months the Federal Reserve Bank has been buying Mortgage Backed Securities in a hope to put a ceiling of 5% for rates. The problem with this tactic is that this is not free market capitalism at work; this is almost a socialistic view of things. There is no way that the government should attempting to influence interest rates.
The biggest problem that Ben Bernanke and President Obama are going to run into is the fact that free markets will always work themselves out. They can try as hard as they want to play their hand but eventually they are going to run out of bullets and rates will end up where they should have been in the first place. Until the government takes their hand out of the pot, it is very tough to make a mortgage rates forecast.
