Tag Archives: Interest rates

Peer-to-peer lending, or crowdlending to unrelated people done outside of financial institutions has seen robust growth in recent years, especially among homeowners.

So now that the rates are higher, mortgage industry professionals are now wondering how this change will be impact their business moving forward into the new year. Several executives sat down with MReport to give their thoughts on if the housing market will thrive, stall, or completely shatter in the near future.

On Wednesday, December 16, the Federal Open Market Committee (the policy-making arm of the Federal Reserve) will wrap its eighth and final meeting of 2015. Nearly everyone from economists, analysts, and even the policymakers themselves are predicting the FOMC to announce the Fed’s first federal funds rate hike in nine years.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency announced Tuesday that interest rates on conventional purchase-money mortgages fell even further below 4 percent in October.

The elusive interest rate hike that the mortgage industry has anticipated for quite some time may finally happen in December 2015. Minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee's October meeting showed that most of the members appear to be on-board for a December rate increase.

U.S. banks' can expect their long-term business strategies to continue to be affected by the "lower-for-longer" interest rate environment that Fed officials have placed the industry in.

As the Federal Open Market Committee reconvened Wednesday, results from their October 27th and 28th meeting placed yet another hold on the rate hike, leaving the federal funds rate at the current 0 to 1/4 percent target range.

Federal Reserve Board Governor Lael Brainard warned against visceral reactions, such as pushes in the marketplace for an increase in interest rates, given the economy’s fragile growth, while speaking at the 57th National Association for Business Economics Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

Employment gains, wage growth, and continued low mortgage rates are pushing home prices up both year-over-year and month-over-month.

The Federal Reserve decided on Thursday to keep the federal funds target rate at zero to 1/4 percent, where it has been for nine years, at the September meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee.