Up and down. Up and down. Up and down. It's been a veritable roller coaster over the past two weeks for mortgage rates, mostly because traders can't find the answer to the most important question facing mortgage markets:
Are we in the midst of inflation, or not?
Everytime we see strong data in one sector of the economy (i.e. jobs), there is weak data to offset it somewhere else.
Yesterday's tame Consumer Price Index, for example, showed that maybe prices aren't increasing as fast as expected.
So, what's an ordinary Joe to make of it all?
If you're rate shopping, it may be better to just lock in your rate today and hope that rates don't drop. Rates have been so erratic that waiting even one extra day can cause your mortgage rate to jump by as much as 0.250%.
We've seen that twice in the past three weeks.
Mortgage rates take the elevator up, but they take the stairs down. So, any softening of rates happens at a much slower pace than an increase.
