Mortgage Rates

[Bryan Paul]

Hi All,I am looking to pull an FHA loan and I've noticed the rates have jumped after the election. Can anyone provide any advice on whether they will keep rallying or this was just a knee jerk reaction that will soon fizzle out?

[Chris Mason]

Hi @Bryan Paul,

To echo what @Upen Patel said, basically my entire office was dead wrong in our prediction for how Trump would impact rates on the morning following the election.

To paraphrase a line from Wolf of Wall Street, "No one has any clue in the world where mortgage rates will go, least of all mortgage brokers."

Even the conventional wisdom about the Federal funds rate impacting mortgage rates was proven dead wrong less than a year ago -- December 2015, when the Fed raised rates, mortgage rates actually went down.

All of the "rules of thumb" about "if X does this, mortgage rates will do Y" are wrong quite often, probably more than 1/3 of the time.