How can I predict interest rates? Is the mortgage rate going to go up/down in the near future?
you can’t predict interest rates. At least, we can’t. Many people try, and some are right some of the time. But they’re also wrong some of the time, and it’s hard to tell whether their next prediction is in the right or the wrong group. You can find some interest rate forecasts on the Economic Forecasts page of the ERIE Web site. Watching the actions of the Federal Reserve System (http://www.federalreserve.gov/) may give a clue as to what will happen, since the Fed can increase or decrease the money supply, which affects interest rates. But the Fed doesn’t really set interest rates, they influence them, and there are many other economic actors which influence them too, such as domestic borrowers and lenders, banks and other financial institutions, foreign borrowers and lenders, the government, etc. It’s quite complicated! (Life’s just not as simple as we’d like it to be sometimes, is it?) It may help to know that interest rates tend to be “pro-cyclical”; in other words, they tend to go
