Tag Archives: Interest rates

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.

"In determining how long to maintain this target range, the Committee will assess progress—both realized and expected—toward its objectives of maximum employment and 2 percent inflation," the Fed said in a statement.

As the Federal Reserve prepares to convene for their September 17th meeting, many wonder how a possible rate increase will affect the housing market.

The recent stock market fluctuations and seasonal trend changes may have homebuyers perplexed, but there is a silver lining, according to Realtor.com's First Look report for August 2015.

As the housing market strengthens, many economists believe that it could withstand an interest rate hike by the Federal Reserve this year, pending stabilization among home prices.

Monday's stock market performance brought about some anxiety among big U.S. businesses and other stakeholders while the Dow Jones dropped by 1,000 points and spent the rest of the day fighting its way back toward the break-even point.

Interest rates on conventional purchase-money mortgages and home loan amounts increased from May to June, according to Federal Housing Finance Agency indices of new mortgage contracts.

Greek citizens delivered a surprising response to Europe’s leaders on Sunday, when a majority of voters rejected a deal offered by the country’s creditors. In this historic turn of events, the Interior Ministry reported that with more than 90 percent of the vote tallied, 61 percent of the voters said no to bailout terms offered by the country's international creditors, while 39 percent voted yes to these terms. Media outlets and industry experts gauged the connection that the Greece crisis can have on the U.S. mortgage industry finding that much of the issue rests with interest rates.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) listed interest rate, underwriting, strategic, compliance, and cybersecurity as the top supervisory concerns in the Semiannual Risk Perspective for Spring 2015 released Tuesday. Based on data that covers risks to banks and federal savings associations through the end of 2014, the report, which focuses on issues that post threats to the safety and soundness of OCC-regulated institutions, noted an overall decline in revenues in profitability for all OCC-supervised institutions. The four main areas of data presented in the report are operating environment, bank condition, key risk issues, and regulatory actions.