The Fed reiterated its expectation that the benchmark fed
funds rate would remain “exceptionally low,” as it has since
December 2008, for “an extended period,” despite growing
concerns among policy makers that the stance was too
constraining.

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Real estate has been a minefield the last three plus years as the gory remains of the real estate bubble bursting came home to roost. The federal government has done all it can to try to stabilize the market, and it seems to have worked. Those stabilizing efforts are in the process of ending and now we wait to see what will happen with the housing market.

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Is it time to rush out and buy a house before mortgage rates go up? As the Federal Reserve winds down its intervention in the mortgage market, rates on home loans are generally expected to rise at least modestly during the rest of this year from today’s unusually low levels. Some analysts believe mortgage rates [...]

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Mortgage interest rates change as often as two to three times in one day. Securing the lowest rate possible is every borrower’s goal. However, it’s impossible to time the finance market, just as it’s impossible to predict exactly when the housing market will peak or slide.

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The economic recovery needs to be firmly rooted before the central bank reverses course and begins to raise interest rates, a Fed official said Friday.

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Image via Wikipedia U.S. home loan rates could rise by as much as three-quarters of a percentage point in the spring as the Federal Reserve ends its mortgage bonds purchase program, a top Fed policymaker said in an interview published on Saturday. “You maybe would have thought you would have seen rates move up more [...]

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Rules finalized by the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve will require lenders to alert loan applicants when a problem with their credit files might trigger excessive costs.

For mortgage applicants and home buyers, it’s been a six-year wait, but the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve finally have come out with consumer credit protection rules first required by Congress in 2003.

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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said that the central bank’s low interest rates didn’t cause the last decade’s housing bubble and that better regulation would have been more effective in limiting the boom.

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