Bond Carnage hits Mortgage Rates. But This Time, it’s Real

The ‘risk free’ bonds have bloodied investors.
The carnage in bonds has consequences. The average interest rate of the a conforming 30-year fixed mortgage as of Friday was quoted at 4.125% for top credit scores. That’s up about 0.5 percentage point from just before the election, according to Mortgage News Daily. It put the month ‘on a short list of 4 worst months in more than a decade.’
One of the other three months on that short list occurred at the end of 2010 and two ‘back to back amid the 2013 Taper Tantrum,’ when the Fed let it slip that it might taper QE Infinity out of existence.
Investors were not amused. From the day after the election through November 16, they yanked $8.2 billion out of bond funds, the largest weekly outflow since Taper-Tantrum June.
The 10-year Treasury yield today jumped to 2.36% in late trading the highest since December 2015, up 66 basis point since the election, and up one full percentage point since July!
The 10-year yield is at a critical juncture. In terms of reality, the first thing that might happen is a rate increase by the Fed in December, after a year of flip-flopping. A slew of post-election pronouncements by Fed heads – including Yellen’s ‘relatively soon’ – have pushed the odds of a rate hike to 98%.

This post was published at Wolf Street by Wolf Richter ‘ November 19, 2016.