Hello, hello, everyone. Sean Zalmanoff here with your Mortgage Rate Update for the week of April 5th.
Last Friday, Good Friday, it was a big day in the markets. Now, for those of you who are active in the markets, you’re probably wondering, how could it be a big day because the stock market and the bond markets are closed the Friday before Easter? It doesn’t stop the reports from coming out. The first Friday of the month is the jobs number, and it was a blow out number. They were expecting 614,000 new jobs to be created and over 916,000. When you actually look back, so there’s always revisions to the jobs number, there were hundreds of thousands of jobs added from the previous two months. Over a million jobs that had been created, well, in the last several months, but a lot of them were just counted last week.
You’re seeing the stock market on fire today. S&P, Dow and NASDAQ, which have not moved in much correlation recently are all up big. Usually, that comes at the expense of rates. We keep talking about inflation, and that is the archenemy of bonds. Well, the stock market going up and a really hot jobs number, I would think, it didn’t happen today, but I would think that would actually have a negative consequence on rates. But what Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed, has been saying is, and they reiterated it last week as well too, that until the unemployment number reaches 3.5%, the pedal’s on the metal, they’re going to keep buying 120 billion plus dollars a month in mortgage backed securities in treasuries to keep rates down. Right now, although the numbers have been great, the unemployment just ticked down to 6% last Friday with those record setting numbers in employment gains and in revision.
It’s one of these rare occurrences that’s happening. Not always, but this time, it’s a rare occurrence to where the unemployment numbers being strong have created a positive correlation to stock market and in the bond market, which is something we haven’t seen lately. It was actually very interesting. Many of the accountants were predicting that a bad jobs number would actually be better for bonds. Anyway, we won’t have to go into the science of it all. You just need to know that we are on top of it for you, for your clients. Hey, one thing that a lot of people been contacting us about recently. Yeah, rates have gone up a little bit. They’re still really close to all time lows, you know that. We’ve been having some amazing conversations with people who have a little bit of extra equity in their house.
Based upon the time of the year, Christmas, just what last year brought to them. We also have a few more bills or home improvements, now that you’ve been in your house, locked in for the last 12 months, and some things that you want to get done. We have been doing quite a few cash out refinances for people these days to tap into that equity and still lock into these amazing low rates we have. Again, if you’re buying, if you’re selling, if you need to refinance, my team is here for you, and we’d love to earn your business. I’m Sean Zalmanoff, have an amazing week y’all. Peace out, and see you next week. Bye.
