Like me, I’m sure you are glad the elections are over. The night of the elections, the stock market futures lost 800 points, but on November 9th, rebounded. A strong rebound! In fact, investors ran to the stock market, giving it the biggest its biggest increase in one week since 2014. What does that mean? Well, we could infer a lot of things from this and why it happened, but what’s important to you is that if you are getting a mortgage, rates went up, and went up a lot. When stocks are not in favor or there is worry about the economy, people run to bonds (called a flight to quality),which pushes interest rates down. But when stocks look good or the economy looks like it’s getting better, people take their money out of bonds, presumably into stocks, which makes rates go up.
This was the biggest drop in yield in the bond market in over 18 months (32 basis points), and then the next day, on the 10th, own another 19 basis points. This means rates on a standard 30-year fixed rate went up from 3.25% to 3.625% in less than 48 hours. Now, this is still a really low rate, but that’s a huge jump in payment if you are buying a home or refinancing. Will this be permanent? It remains to be seen, but my experience s that when we have a big swing like this in reaction to an event like an election, 9/11, Brexit results, it always comes back to a norm. Of course, this could be the new norm. This is also why it pays to lock in as soon as you can, and definitely ahead of big news days.