Portland Mortgage Market Update — June 19, 2026

It was a new Fed week! The FOMC met this week and left rates unchanged, but that was about the only thing that stayed the same. Incoming Fed Chair Kevin Warsh held his first press conference and two things were made abundantly clear:

1. He is serious about reacting aggressively as policy requires 2. He won't telegraph his decisions

To emphasize the first point, he addressed the datapoints that the Fed has traditionally relied upon and their rampant inaccuracies. He is instituting multiple "task forces" to develop more current, accurate reports that the Fed will use for its decision making (which will be a welcome relief and should be in place before the end of the year). To emphasize the second point, he stripped down the post-meeting statement/press release. What previously could run on two or three pages, the new Fed statement is little more than a couple of paragraphs. Also, the Fed released a dot-plot chart where he refused to vote on where he anticipates rates going, further emphasizing that the new Fed is more focused on the here and now than what may come in the future.

Speaking of the dot-plot chart, the median projection for the fed funds rate by year end jumped from 3.4% in March to 3.8%, meaning most Fed members are anticipating a rate hike at some point. Again, take this with a grain of salt but based on that chart rates have a better chance to go up than they do to go down. The market did not do well with this information with pretty much everything tanking except treasury yields, and mortgage rates suffered as a result.

But we tried to correct things on Thursday on reports of the US and Iran coming to terms on a peace deal that basically says "Strait of Hormuz open for business, we will figure everything else out later." However, this already appears to be a shaky truce as Israel and Lebanon traded missile strikes earlier today and talks between US and Iran have been called off. The market is closed today for Juneteenth but today's developments would surely have been detrimental to mortgage rates. Hopefully some sort of more permanent resolution can get ironed out over the weekend before market opens on Monday