Assignment task:
Interests rates are rising and fast. This is having an effect on many things of course, as its intended to do. Mortgage rates are up over 6%, potentially over 7%, from around just 3% or less at the start of the year. This means a large increase in the expected mortgage for a given home loan. It also means as I had posted with respect to Bonds that they have decreased in value- with record low rates as of just a year ago I had always said a bond of maturity beyond a year is economic insanity. In fact I just read that the UK pension fund had leveraged 4:1 in their bond purchases since rates were 2% and they needed a 10% return so now as rates have risen their are becoming insolvent. That means that they have borrowed heavily, think having $2 of your own and borrowing $8 of others' money to turn a 2% return into a 10% return (ignoring fees and interest). But now the value of those bonds are down big. Bonds in general are down around 20% this year. That would potentially mean they have lost 20% of the bond values or 100% of their own stake and left only with the debt portion, the $8 of others having lost their personal $2. They got bailed out of course
So, the questions to answer here are:
Do you think that home sales have increased or decreased today vs the beginning of the year and why would you expect that to be occurring.
You can quite easily estimate a mortgage rate using a variety of different websites. So try find a house that looks interesting to you in the area, Western WA, and see what the difference in monthly payment would be at 3% if you closed in say February to today at 6%. Does this surprise you? What effect do you think it would have? Do you think this would affect the price?