At the time I am writing this mortgage interest rates are exactly where they were last Friday.
Europe is still grappling with its debt problems after 2 years of trying to solve it. At the moment European leaders seem to be on track to a solution to their debt crisis, but the crisis is not over yet. Germany is still showing resistance to the current plan of buying up bad debt from struggling Euro zone countries.
In the US we had some noteworthy events this week in regards to mortgage interest rates. Yesterday the weekly jobless claims report came out and claims dropped 23k versus the 13k forecasted. Anytime we have better than expected job numbers it is generally bad news for rates, as it shows the economy is on track to a recovery.
Today the third quarter advanced gross domestic product (GDP) report came out. The advanced GDP report is an early report that aims to forecast how the actual report will look like. The GDP report is a measurement of all goods and services produced within the US. The third quarter advance GDP report was slightly better than expected and showed that our economy grew at a pace of 2%. The fact that our economy is growing would generally be bad news for interest rates, but since this was only an advanced report it did not have that big of an impact on rates.
Tags: Europe debt crisis, GDP, jobless claims, market preview, mortgage rates outlook