Mortgage Rates Today, Nov. 21, 2024: Rates Calm for Now. Storm Later?

In brief

Mortgage rates climbed sharply in the run-up to Nov. 5's election. But, since then, they've been eerily quiet, with the inevitable daily ups and downs almost perfectly canceling each other out.

They rose partly because investors were nervous about some of President-elect Donald Trump's campaign-trail promises. Now that they're counting down the days to the time he sits behind the Resolute desk, they're hoping many of those promises will fall by the wayside once he's in office.

One such promise was to lower mortgage rates to below 3%, reports Bloomberg. And, last week, AP ran a story under the headline, "Trump’s economic agenda for his second term is clouding the outlook for mortgage rates."

The AP article included a quote: "'Trump’s fiscal policies can be expected to lead to rising and more unpredictable mortgage rates through the end of this year and into 2025,' said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist with Bright MLS, who no longer forecasts the average rate on a 30-year home loan to dip below 6% next year."

One way in which Trump could try to push mortgage rates lower is to follow through on his idea of taking control of the Federal Reserve. He could then set general interest rates where he wanted, which would normally influence mortgage rates.

But many investors value the Fed's independence and transparent attempts to match rates to the needs of the economy. And any attempt to seize political control and fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell would likely cause outrage in markets and could trigger mortgage rate rises.

Of course, all this is speculation, though based on Trump statements and economic analyses that are widely shared.

We'll have to wait to see how things turn out in reality. And that's what the market that largely determines mortgage rates appears to be doing now: Waiting to see.

Coming up

Mortgage rates today

We're due three economic reports today, with market expectations provided by MarketWatch:

• Initial jobless claims for the week ending Nov. 16 — Markets expect 220,000 new claims, up from 217,000 the previous week
• October existing home sales — Markets expect 3.91 million, up from September's 3.84 million
• October leading economic indicators — Markets expect a small improvement to -0.4% from September's -0.5%

Mortgage rates tend to rise on good economic news and fall on bad. So, we'd like to see higher-than-expected numbers for the unemployment data and lower-than-expected ones for the other two.

But don't get too excited. Even if they all come in on our side, today's reports are typically too weak to have much effect on those rates.

Three senior Fed officials have speaking engagements today. And markets will hope they talk up the chances of a cut to general interest rates next month.

Overnight, investors were split on the likelihood of that with 55.7% expecting a cut and 44.3% not expecting one, according to the CME FedWatch tool. A week ago, those same numbers were 72.2% and 27.8% respectively.

Tomorrow

There are three reports tomorrow, too. These often affect mortgage rates but typically in only limited and temporary ways.

The first two are November purchasing managers' indexes (PMIs) from S&P Global. These are "flashes," meaning they're preliminary figures and subject to change later.

PMIs can be influential because they measure activity in organizations' purchasing departments. And that's a pretty good gauge of future economic activity.

Here are market expectations reported by MarketWatch:

• November PMI for the services sector — No expectation. 54.1 in October
• November PMI for the manufacturing sector — Markets expecting 48.8, up from October's 48.5
• November consumer sentiment — Markets expecting 73.5, up from October's 73.0

For these to exert downward pressure on mortgage rates, we need to see lower-than-expected numbers across the board.

Fed Gov. Michelle Bowman is the only top central bank official with a speaking engagement tomorrow.