At the time I am writing this mortgage interest rates are exactly where they were last Friday.
Due to Hurricane Sandy the markets were only open for a few hours on Monday and closed Tuesday. The rest of the week was somewhat quiet, mainly due to the upcoming election next week. Investor’s don’t want to make any big moves ahead of the election.
The most significant event this week that affected mortgage rates was the unemployment report that came out today. The report was good with unemployment at 7.9% and better than expected job growth. Normally this would be bad for interest rates, but we saw only a small initial reaction to the report and through the day rates actually improved. Once again I believe the reason for the muted reaction was because of the election next week.
Looking forward at potential market movers we have the election next week. After the election we have the “Fiscal Cliff” at the end of the year. The Fiscal cliff is when the terms of the 2011 Budget control act will go into effect unless congress does something about it. This would be bad news for everyone because then all of the Bush tax cuts would expire since Congress can’t agree on which to keep and which to let expire. Any event that has to do with how much money investors will have to pay in taxes tends to really stir up the markets.
Tags: employment report, Fiscal cliff, market preview, mortgage rates outlook