Mortgage Rates Move Slightly Higher, But Still Effectively at 3-Month Lows

Apart from this past Friday, you'd have to go back to September 1st to see lower mortgage rates than today.  It probably makes the best sense to view last Friday as a slightly overdone rally as opposed to viewing today as some sort of ominous shift.

More importantly, it probably doesn't matter which way it's viewed because the incoming economic data has the potential to send rates significantly higher or lower.  We've had our eye on the next 4 days of data for 3 weeks now due to the ate market's preference for two key monthly economic reports.

The first key report is CPI, the consumer price index, which serves as the most widely traded update on inflation. The last release was on November 14th and it sent rates quickly lower.

The other key report is the big jobs report, aka "The Employment Situation" or NFP (an abbreviation of the data's headline component: non-farm payrolls).  That doesn't arrive until Friday, but NFP week brings several supporting actors that often get the volatility rolling in one direction or the other.  The first of these (ISM Non-Manufacturing and the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) will be out tomorrow morning at 10am ET.

In many ways, this entire week of data is in a position to confirm or reject the positive rate momentum seen over the past 3 weeks.

For today, the average lender remains in the low 7% range for a top tier conventional 30yr fixed scenario.