The Chicago 77

28 January 2011 – This week presented a huge amount of risk for rate watchers. With a slew of economic data, a Fed meeting, the State of the Union address and some T-bill auctions, there was the potential for rates to hit some new highs. Luckily, this did not occur. From the government we got [...]

21 January 2011 – So this week, I had a bit of writer’s block. I sat and thought about how I can best describe the current level of lunacy and frustration in the mortgage market. Then, like a beam from Heaven it came to me in the memories of my favorite Warner Brother’s cartoons and [...]

14 January 2011 – Never has flat felt so good. For weeks, lenders have been living with the specter of further rate spikes looming like the sword of Damocles. Luckily the thread has held and, although the sword remains, we have lived another week without the aforementioned drop. In this “take what you can get, [...]

If you have not been considering a real estate transaction recently, this may come as news to you, but the price for mortgages is on the rise. The question, however, most often posed by borrowers in these volatile times is whether the salad days of the sub-4.5% mortgage rates are well behind us. The answer [...]

7 January 2011 – The word of the week is jobs. For months, we have heard economists near and far assure us that as go jobs so goes the economy. After all, to buy goods and pay their mortgages, consumers need a steady and predictable source of income, i.e. a job. Now after painful year [...]