
• Tuesday’s mortgage rates should be approximately 0.125 of a discount point higher than yesterday’s early pricing. If you saw an intraday increase Monday afternoon, you should see little change this morning. The bond market is currently up 5/32 (4.54%).
• Stocks are mixed with the Dow up 173 points and the Nasdaq down 46 points.
• The National Association of Realtors announced late this morning that home resales rose 3.2% last month. This was a larger increase than what was expected, but not strong enough to cause concern in the bond market. Since we haven’t seen a reaction to the data, we are labeling it neutral for rates.
• Tomorrow morning brings us the release of the highly influential Consumer Price Index (CPI) for May that measures inflationary pressures at the consumer level of the economy. This data is watched closely and has the potential to lead to significant volatility in the bond market and mortgage pricing because rising inflation makes a bond's future fixed interest payments less valuable to investors today and makes the Fed more likely to raise key short-term rates before they lower them again.
• Forecasts have the overall CPI rising 0.5% for the month while the more important core data that excludes volatile food and energy costs is expected to rise 0.3%. Annual readings are predicted to rise from April's year-over-year rate also. Weaker than expected readings would be very good news for mortgage rates. On the other hand, stronger inflation numbers usually lead to higher mortgage pricing.
• Also tomorrow is the 10-year Note auction that will have results announced at 1:00 PM ET. If investor demand was high for these securities, we may see bonds rally during afternoon trading, possibly leading to an intraday improvement in rates. We should see a stronger reaction to this week’s auctions than other recent sales of short-term notes because these are for long-term securities and mortgage rates are based on long-term debt.
• Visit our Daily Commentary page on our site for detailed explanations on current news that is relevant to mortgage rates.
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