Your Economic Update and Mortgage Minute for 7-4-2020

  Economic Updates:

• Federal Reserve continues to come up with ways to stabilize the markets and interest rates. Federal Reserve is now buying corporate bonds this week.  Federal Reserve Chairman also asked Congress to do more to help Main Street and not as much Wall Street – We may see another stimulus bill getting approved!!!
• The stock market had it best gains in June (in history) but it is still down from it’s highs in February by 13%. July starting out strong but there are some concerns about the Health Pandemic slowing things down again.
• Initial Jobless claims report was expecting to drop but instead increased to 1.427 million. We continue to see increases in these number for six straight weeks.  Why is the unemployment rate going down while we see increases in initial jobless claims??
• Unemployment rate dropped from 13.3% to 11.1% - this is a survey taken out to consumers across the country. Based on the numbers that I see weekly the unemployment should be closer to 13.5% (we still have about 19 million people still unemployed).
• New Mortgage Applications – new purchase applications dropped only 1% this week. New refinance applications have also dropped a little but still up 76% year to date.
• Congress has decided to extend the PPP plan for small businesses until August 8^th. They may also extend the $600.00 added to unemployment checks till January – we will see if they decide to extend. The Treasury Department also has another problem – 1.1 million people received checks – many cashed – problem is these people are dead.  This comes out to a little over 1.4 Billion Dollars.
• GDP for the 1^st quarter was revised to a negative 5% for January through March 2020. Some economists are saying that we could see a negative GPR for April through June – some say close to a negative 25%.

Current Interest Rates:

06/19/20 – Interest rates will be volatile this week!! (Based on a 740 FICO / Purchase / 20% down / Single Family / 0 Points) *

If you have any questions or need anything, give us a call!