What Does History Tell Us About Mortgage Rates?
In most financial markets history does, in fact, repeat itself. In most industrialized stock markets history has repeated itself over and over. Bull and bear markets seem to coincide with specific events that relate very closely to past events. The problem with comparing this to the mortgage industry is that there are no hard facts about the distant past. Mortgage rate survey data has only been collected since 1971 and the entire housing industry has drastically changed over the last 80 years. When looking at historical mortgage rates, it is quite obvious that the current long term trend is down. During the last major recessionary period of the early 1980s mortgage rates peaked at 17.5%. Since that time, rates have steadily declined to their current levels of today; around 4.8%. There have been upticks along the way, but the overall trend is down. At one point, there is going to be a bottom in mortgage rates which leads to a steady increase. It is highly unlikely that rates will ever g
