Mortgage Rates: Report and Outlook, Jun 24, 2024 — Watch Out for Friday

Today’s market

One-Liner

The first four days of this week look set to be quiet, just as last week was. But Friday brings the Federal Reserve’s favorite inflation report. And, depending on what it says, that has the potential to move mortgage rates considerably — up or down.

What’s Driving Mortgage Rates?

Not a lot is driving mortgage rates at the moment. They barely moved last week. And the reports scheduled for Monday through Thursday this week rarely affect those rates much or for long unless they contain truly shocking data.

What To Watch Out For This Week

But all that could change on Friday morning with the publication of the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index.

Markets put more weight on the consumer price index, or “CPI”, than this one. But the Fed reckons the PCE price index is the more accurate. And the Fed’s opinion counts.

Indeed, many rank this index as the third most consequential economic report for mortgage rates, not far behind the CPI and jobs report.

Like the CPI, the PCE index has four main components: two flavors of data and two reporting periods. The main index measures all prices in the survey. And the “core” index measures those prices excluding food and energy.

Economists and the Fed prefer core numbers because they avoid the statistical noise caused by volatile food and energy prices, so revealing the underlying trend.

Each of those flavors is measured over two time frames: the reporting month (this time May) and the year-over-year (YOY) figure (in this case, June 2023 to May 2024).

What to expect on Friday

Here’s what MarketWatch says markets are expecting on Friday:

• May PCE index — 0.0%, down from April’s 0.3%

• YOY PCE index — 2.6%, down from April’s 2.7%

• May core PCE — 0.1%, down from April’s 0.2%

• YOY core PCE — 2.6%, down from April’s 2.8%

Markets will already have priced in those expectations to mortgage rates. And if the forecasts are completely correct, those rates may barely move.

But lower-than-expected figures could drag mortgage rates downward, while higher-than-expected ones could push them upward.

Forecasts

Fannie Mae had recently predicted that 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages would average over 7% during the last quarter of this year.

Friday brought good news. Fannie updated its forecasts, and it now expects that average to be 6.7%.

Better yet, it thinks that rate will fall very gradually during each subsequent quarter, reaching 6.3% during the last three months of 2025.

There are good grounds for hoping that mortgage rates will decrease over the long term.

But, absent some unexpected economic bombshell, they’re unlikely to do so quickly. Indeed, we may be in for a positively glacial slide.