Portland Mortgage Market Update — October 18, 2024

Sorry for the delay on today's update! This morning was my daughters LAST jogathon of elementary school (sniff)

Rates held pretty steady this week… until yesterday. A retail sales report yesterday blew through expectations, showing an increase of 0.7% vs the 0.3% that was expected. Bonds fell through a floor of resistance that had been propping them up for the previous week and mortgage rates suffered as a result. We are currently hovering in the mid to high 6's for a 30 yr fixed.

Is the Fed behind the curve? The European Central Bank cut rates this week by 25 basis points for the third time this year, bringing their bank rate down to 3.25%. Since we have only cut 50 basis points, and have had some stronger economic data, there is some rumbling that our Fed is behind the curve and doing too little, too late. Also sending up flares is an industrial production report that released yesterday showing that production fell 0.3% (vs the -.02% expected) which shows that factories are being underutilized and could cause deflation.

Next week is pretty quiet as far as market moving news. Unless there is some major headlines out of the middle east or otherwise expect rates to be pretty steady. The jobs report the following week is much more market moving.