In early April, amid the most volatile portion of the market’s reaction to the tariff announcement, mortgage rates were officially over 7% for a single day. By the middle of the following week, they were well on their way lower, ultimately ending the month just over 6.8%. Since then, it’s been tough sledding for bonds and the rate market. Almost every day in the month of May has been a bad one.  Even if the size of the rate increases have been reasonably small, they’re starting to add up.  Now today, the average lender is back on the doorstep of 7% for top tier conventional 30yr fixed mortgage rates.  A second wave of weakness in the bond market this afternoon is resulting in many lenders announcing mid-day increases.  With that, today’s index ended up at 6.99%–all this despite an absence of any standout individual motivations in today’s news. Tomorrow brings a slew of important economic reports.  If they come in stronger than expected, rates could face additional upward pressure.  If they’re weaker, markets may dismiss them as stale data that was overly influenced by tariff-related uncertainty that has since improved. 

As Roy Cohn once instructed a young Donald Trump, much can be accomplished by attacking first and dealing with the consequences later. I get opinions from both sides: “Rob, when are you going to wise up? Yesterday’s Commentary discussed a lopsided pro-Trump view of the recent tariff activity, and how the changes may impact mortgage rates. But China made no concessions. By now, most of us are familiar with this pattern: Trump makes big claims about what his tariffs can get, only for him to later back down without the other country giving up anything meaningful. It happened with Mexico, Canada, and most of Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ levies. Despite his claims, the United States seems to need other countries’ trade as much as they need ours, diminishing Trump’s negotiating position. Meanwhile, our financial markets are jacked around, and our potential borrowers are afraid to pull the trigger. Your readers should keep that in mind.” (Today’s podcast can be found here and Sponsored by TRUE and its Mortgage Operations Service (MOS) AI background worker, which transforms borrower documents into instant, trustworthy data for real-time decisioning. TRUE helps lenders accelerate decisions, cut costs, and deliver superior borrower experience, all without a $100M tech budget. Hear an interview with Hometap’s Josh Gaffney on the evolving regulatory landscape for Home Equity Investments (HEIs), highlighting state-by-state approaches, industry-led initiatives, and what an ideal regulatory framework could look like as the market matures.)

It’s a potentially frustrating time for bond watchers. The rules have already changed in a big way to accommodate the new wild card presented by tariff policy, and it seems like there have been far more “fine tuning” tweaks to those rules than normal. Bonds will always move based on a combination of factors. Some are obvious and basic.
Others are exceptionally esoteric. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a return of a more basic pattern with a measurable de-escalation in the trade war helping stocks and hurting bonds (yes, there was a moment in April where escalation also hurt bonds, but that’s one of those esoteric examples that no longer applies). For the moment, the stock lever (the ultra basic, conventional wisdom notion of buying/selling bonds and doing the opposite with stocks) has been reasonably consistent.

It is not incorrect to view this as a loose barometer of market optimism/fear regarding trade policy.  Data can and will still matter, but as seen with yesterday’s CPI, some of the data will be taken with a grain of salt until we have a better sense of finalized trade policy and the global market’s reaction.  Also, one should not assume that the correlation in the chart is some sort of reliable rule–especially over short time horizons.  
As for today, it is largely a placeholder in terms of data. Tomorrow is the active day of the week. 

The increase in purchase mortgage rate lock volume provides support for those looking for a strong Spring market this year, Optimal Blue found.

Numbers jumped after the expiration of a moratorium at the end of 2024, but rates of foreclosure rose across all loan types, the Mortgage Bankers Association said.

Some policies the industry group is calling for the Office of Management and Budget to definitively rescind have already been pulled back to some degree.

Lower is acquiring a top-five ranked real estate portal to create an “end-to-end homeownership platform” to rival Rocket Mortgage.

The company is positioning its Tinman platform as a serious industry competitor and suggests it’s eying product costs of around $1,500 per loan.

Bonds End Almost Perfectly Flat

There are two kinds of rate/bond watchers today: those who tuned in late in the day to see bonds  almost perfectly unchanged and those who were tuned in through the mild volatility this morning.  The former group would simply shrug and go back to whatever it was they were doing while the latter might be frustrated to see bonds losing ground on a morning where inflation came in lower than expected. For the frustrated crowd, this was the plan for today–the asymmetric risk discussed yesterday.  A decent result was never likely to help bonds.  The subsequent weakness was driven by other factors, not CPI (risk-on trading and a series of tariff headlines from China).  Even then, unchanged is unchanged. 

Econ Data / Events

Monthly Core CPI

0.237 vs 0.3 f’cast, 0.1 prev

Annual Core CPI

2.8 vs 2.8 f’cast, 2.8 prev

Market Movement Recap

08:48 AM MBS up about an eighth and 10yr down 2.4bps at 4.446

09:58 AM Losing ground in the NYSE session.  10yr up 0.4bps at 4.474.  MBS back to unchanged.

12:09 PM New lows.  MBS down 3 ticks (.09) and 10yr up 2.4bps at 4.492

04:49 PM Decent late bounce.  10yr roughly unchanged at 4.47.  MBS down 1 tick (.03) 

Tuesday brought the release of an economic report that has frequently been responsible for big swings in mortgage rates. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the earlier of the two big inflation reports from the US government, and inflation is a big deal for interest rates.  In general, higher inflation coincides with higher rates and vice versa. But today’s CPI data was likely to be taken with a grain of salt due to the to-be-determined impacts of tariffs and trade deals on the price of imported goods and materials. In other words, if inflation came in lower than expected, it wouldn’t matter as much as normal because. The only real risk was that inflation would come in higher than expectations, thus suggesting that any tariff-related impact would be hitting an already elevated price trend. Thankfully, today’s report was slightly lower than expected, even though it moved up from last month’s levels. As expected, that didn’t do anything to help rates. In fact, the average lender is just a hair higher than yesterday owing to market movement that happened later in the day.