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As we get closer to Labor Day, volume on Wall Street is dwindling as market players get a head start on their long weekend.

Today could be a difficult day to shop for mortgage rates. Expect volatility.

This is because mortgage rates are based on the price of mortgage bonds and, on Wall Street, bonds trade [...]

Three years to the week after Hurricane Katrina caused $81.2 million in damages, Tropical Storm Gustav is charting a similar Gulf of Mexico path.

Memories of Katrina are making oil traders nervous. The 2005 storm shut down 30 platforms and 9 refineries. And, this week, oil prices are up nearly 4 percent on fears [...]

According to the June 2008 Case-Shiller Home Price Index, home prices in 15 of the 20 largest U.S. real estate markets either improved, or showed growth from the month prior.

This is the fourth straight month in which that happened which means that a national housing recovery may already be underway.

Now, it’s worth stating [...]

When a homeowner buys a new home, he has 3 options of what to do with his current residence:

Sell the home, paying off the mortgage in full
Keep the home as a second/vacation home
Convert the home to an investment property

The most common action plan is the first one — sell the home and pay off the [...]

Momentum carried mortgage markets through a week of low trading volume and few economic releases. Rates were volatile, but ended the week unchanged overall.

Don’t let the word “unchanged” fool you, however.

From day-to-day last week, mortgage rates covered a huge range and it was only coincidence that Friday ended where Monday began.

And it’s [...]

Stories on TV about the national real estate market are misleading to Americans.

This is because there is no such thing as a “national real estate market”.

Consider the latest American Housing Survey. It found that there are 124,377,000 homes in America spread across:

50 states, with
More than 30,000 incorporated cities, and with
An innumerable number [...]

Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI) is an insurance policy paid to a lender in the event that a homeowner defaults on his home loan.

With the growing number of mortgage defaults nationwide, mortgage insurers are finding their balance sheets under attack and their revenues in the red.

So far this year, mortgage insurers have paid out [...]

The Producer Price Index is a business inflation meter and it’s now up 9.8 percent annually.

This is a huge number for PPI and represents the highest year-over-year rate of inflation since 1981.

Normally, blowout inflation like this would be terrible for mortgage rates but mortgage markets are actually improved since Tuesday’s data release.

Usually, a rocketing PPI [...]

Housing Starts measure the number of new housing “units” on which construction has started and in July, Housing Starts fell to its lowest levels since March 1991.

For homeowners, this is a welcome bit of good news because as fewer homes are built, there is less inventory from which home buyers can choose.

With fewer [...]

Mortgage rates overcame a terrible Monday last week, climbing back to unchanged by Friday. And like most weeks this year, rates were volatile.

Most interesting about last week, though, was that there was a ton of news that should have dragged mortgage rates down, but it didn’t seem to happen.

A popular inflation measure reached a [...]