MBSs are simply BONDS. Their prices go up and down based on our old friends Supply and Demand. As with all Bonds,  when   pricies go up the Interest Rate on them goes down, and vise-versa.

So in order to see where Mortgage Interest Rates are going we simply track the prices of the Bonds known as MBS’s.

You can safely ignore the uninformed pundits of the media repeating the ridiculous mantra that Mortgage interes rates are driven by the 10 year Treasury. The MBS’s deal only with Mortgages. The 10 year Treasury is an indicator of the entire U.S. financial system and will often point in the opposite direction to the MBS market.

Now let’s come back to the $1.25 Trillion worth of MBS’s bought by the Federal Reserve as part of the Governments Financial Stimulus program. Having this much money looking to buy MBS’s (DEMAND) has artificially kept the price of them up, and as a result kept Mortgage Interest Rates down. As of the last day of March this program is finished. Now there is a reduced demand for MBS’s and an inevitable inrease in Mortgage Interest Rates.

This will begin to happen right away and continue until the market stabilizes at the level dictated by regular market forces. This will be at a higher rate than we are at now.

For an excellent summary of this process check out the following link 

http://www.mortgagesuccesssource.com/ezine.php?ez=1003

The lesson here is that if you want to become a homeowner it’s time to get serious before these rate increases get too far away from what you can afford.

For anyone wishing to understand what the Federal Reserve actually did, and will continue to do in dealing with our current financial problems, here is a link to a San Francisco Fed web site where you will find a goldmine of facts and commentary. http://www.frbsf.org/econanswers/

It’s a great resource dealing with the process of digging out of the hole and getting back on track.

Maybe one day they will do an equally good job on their failure to prevent all this from happening. As far as I can see they did not have the courage to take away the cookie jar when this Bubble was so obviously getting seriously inflated.

Turns out that Mr. Greenspan really let us down by failing to spell out what was happening, and take the risk of being unpopular with his Political Masters. Like many before him he seemed to buy into the “New Paradigm” myth. Remember that phrase during the run up to the Dot Com bust.