Dawn Rivera’s Fremont & East Bay Real Estate Blog

After a recent spike seen in mortgage rates, some consumers are wondering whether they’ve missed their chance to refinance into an ultra-low rate. Fear not: While the conforming 30-year fixed-rate mortgage hit a daily average of 5.81% last Thursday 06/18/09, it averaged 5.53% on Tuesday06/23/09, and it’s possible that rates could continue to fall. Predicting interest rates is like predicting who is going to win the World Series in January,I feel the recent spike is somewhat of an aberration, I expect rates will continue to drift down.

Why the recent run-up in rates? Over the past month or two, the economic skies have brightened somewhat, and the threat of trillion-dollar budget deficits for the foreseeable future, the potential for significant inflation, and few clues as to how the government might extricate itself from intrusions into markets created a landscape that was not appealing to investors.

Now, rates are retreating partly because inflation doesn’t seem as immediate as investors feared. In my opinion, nothing fundamentally has changed in the economy over recent weeks to warrant the rate rise, yet he expects volatility through the remainder of the year as investors debate the economy’s health. Realistically, I think that the rates will drift under 5% again. It may take a month, may take two months.

It’s also important, however, to realize that extremely low rates likely won’t be around forever. Luckily, we have seen rates drop some this week, which should help many consumers breathe a little easier. But the fact remains, the government’s plan of purchasing mortgage-backed securities cannot go on indefinitely, and when it ends, we will most certainly see a spike in rates. The hope is that the Fed can keep rates low long enough to kick-start a housing recovery. Whether that will work remains to be seen.

Employers laid off 663,000 employees in March, this make 5 consecutive months of huge job losses, upping the total U.S. jobs lost in this recession to above 5 million and the unemployment rate is up four-tenths of a percentage point to 8.5%, according to the Labor Department.

Although the March job losses were high they were in line, with what economic forecasts had suggested.  This thankfully, provided some relief, that things aren’t worse than expected. That, and the fact that February job losses weren’t revised downwards, as previous months had been, suggests that layoffs may be flattening out.

Since jobs are a “lagging indicator,” the struggling U.S. economy will continue to shed them even after a turnaround has begun. Many economists think that the unemployment rate could top 10% this year, even if the condition of the economy begins to improve, as some indicators are starting to suggest.

Since December 2007, when the recession began, 5.1 million jobs have been lost, with almost two-thirds (3.3 million) of the jobs being lost in the last five months.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “In March, job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors.”

Manufacturers trimmed another 161,000 jobs in March; factory employment has fallen by 1 million over the past six months, the BLS said.

Both residential and commercial construction remains in the dumps, and builders axed another 126,000 jobs in March. The new twist is that commercial construction is beginning to suffer just as residential construction was hit last year.

“Unlike previous periods in this economic cycle, the bulk of job losses for the first quarter of 2009 were in the nonresidential sector as opposed to the residential sector,” according to Anirban Basu, the chief economist for Associated Builders and Contractors, an industry group. “This suggests that the residential construction sector is much closer to its bottom than is the nonresidential construction sector, which is a relative newcomer to the ongoing downturn.”

The government’s economic-stimulus spending should begin to ease some of the pain in the construction sector by encouraging infrastructure projects by late this year.