Mortgage bonds closed up 19 basis points today following a Fed meeting where they kept their low rate stance. Mortgage lender rate sheets didn’t decrease commensurately as lenders held the line ahead of a 10yr Treasury note auction Wednesday and a 30yr T-Bond auction Thursday. Lenders do this because longer-dated Treasury auctions compete with mortgage [...]

The Federal Open Market Committee voted today to keep the overnight bank-to-bank Fed Funds Rate steady at 0-0.25% and the overnight Fed-to-bank discount rate at .75%, citing subdued inflation that’s likely to continue for “some time.” For the fourth straight meeting in 2010, Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig dissented on the belief that modest [...]

The FOMC just announced the results from their third meeting of 2010, and all members except for Thomas Hoenig voted to leave overnight bank-to-bank Fed Funds Rates unchanged at the target 0-.25% range—the rationale for this is in their unchanged language on inflation: “inflation is likely to be subdued for some time.” As for long-term [...]

Reshuffling Of Fed Members Is the economy really in good enough shape for the Fed to start selling their $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed securities? I don’t think so, but maybe the press doesn’t have enough else to talk about, so the Fed possibly lightning up on their balance sheet has been receiving some publicity. Federal [...]

The Fed just made it’s announcement following today’s FOMC meeting. All FOMC members except for Thomas Hoenig voted to leave the overnight bank-to-bank Fed Funds Rate the same at 0.25%. There was no reference to the Fed-to-bank Discount Rate, which is currently at 0.75% following a surprise 0.25% hike last month. As usual, the press [...]

Putin’s Russian Mortgage Stimulus Any weapons race with Russia doesn’t receive the publicity it did 30 years ago. But whatever you call someone who originates loans in Russia (brokers?) received some good news last week, when Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced that the government will help to lower the mortgage rates investing more than [...]

The Fed held the overnight bank-to-bank Fed Funds Rate at a range of 0-0.25% and more definitively announced that they expect to wind down their mortgage bond purchases by March 31. They still said they will make a final decision on MBS buys according to market conditions, but they did say they’d wind down purchases [...]

Here’s Bloomberg’s latest count on the Senate vote on whether to re-confirm Ben Bernanke for another term. His existing term expires Sunday, January 31, so a vote is expected before then. If Bernanke wasn’t confirmed by Sunday Fed vice chairman and voting FOMC member Donald Kohn is a likely person to serve as interim chairman. [...]

Below are our excerpts of key elements from Fed minutes from their last FOMC meeting on December 15-16. The excerpts cover the following: Fed’s view on whether economic recovery will last, support for tame inflation even with volatile energy prices, bank standards to remain tight because of commercial real estate strains, and jobless rate likely [...]

The Fed kept the overnight bank-to-bank Fed Funds Rate target at 0-.25% and Fed-to-bank Discount Rate at .5%. They changed their language ever so slightly about the economy from “likely to remain weak for some time” to “likely to remain weak for a time” and following that by saying they expect fiscal and monetary stimulus [...]