Are mortgage rates and cap note returns in the US not tied to the federal interest rate?
Here, pretty much every note traded publicly will yield x% above RBA (reserve bank) interest rates, and most mortgages will be "variable rate" - ie they'll automatically adjust to be some function dependent on the RBA rate.
You pay a higher rate for a fixed than a variable, but you get a lot more certainty.
Do people just pay the principal and interest for 30 years?
If interest rates go down, you refinance. If interest rates go up, you hold onto that cheap debt as long as you can. It’s a pretty unique product in that one party (the consumer) gets complete flexibility whereas the other (the bank) doesn’t
In several rounds of house buying and/or refinancing, I’ve never even seen an offer in the US that didn't expressly note the absence of an early payment penalty.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/when-are-prepayment-...
Or, you "refinance" your loan for a better interest rate after you have paid down the loan some. For example, I bought a house in 2018 and refinanced in 2020. Since my home price has gone up in those two years, and I had also paid some of the mortgage off, my rate was much better since my loan-to-value ratio was lower (basically the percentage of the market value of the home you are borrowing... the lower that is, the less risk the lender is taking, since they can sell the house to get back more than the cost of the loan, therefore it has a lower interest rate) I was able to save a large amount on my payment (went from paying $4700 a month to $3600), although it did extend the term of my loan for an extra two years. However, I doubt I'll be in the house that long anyway.
I believe the average mortgage duration is ~8 years, which is why the ‘mortgage rate’ tracks the 10 year Treasury rate and not the 30 year Treasury rate.
Or do there tend to be clauses that allow full repayment on transfer of ownership or something like that?
Most of us have variable mortgages with less conditions placed upon them.
A typical value is 5 years.
When I first bought my house interest rates were over 7%, so getting discount on the interest in exchange of the risk of an adjustable rate mortgage made some sense.
Only briefly; the 30 year fixed has been a norm for a very long time, and the expansion of ARMs and more exotic creative financing instruments in the bubble leading up to the 2008 finance crises was itself a short-term aberration; there was also a brief run up in popularity when interest rates spiked in the 1980s (to avoid locking in sky-high rates.)
The socialization-of-losses aspect comes through interest rates. When wealth isn't held but is traded on markets, there's an incentive to hold interest rates artificially low, because that makes asset prices artificially high. High asset prices benefits all asset holders, so you can make people happier than they otherwise would be simply by keeping rates low.
The bank doesn't care what interest rates are going to be next year, because they sell the mortgage now and collect the cash for it. The buyer cares, but the buyer is probably a hedge, pension, or sovereign wealth fund that in theory at least should be able to estimate & offset interest rate risk.
I wish the article went into more detail about exactly who the losers are in this system. I suspect that it's essentially a policy by the U.S. government to increase social stability (in the form of homeownership, stable residence, investment in communities) at the expense of holders of U.S. dollars and dollar-denominated assets (i.e. most of the rest of the world). In other words, it's transferring wealth from non-citizens in exchange for keeping citizens happy, which is a pretty typical government play. It also looks like the system is on the verge of collapsing, in the sense that it pumps up house prices and encourages artificially low interest rates and high inflation, and hence an increasing number of American renters are being caught on the wrong side of the equation.
People who dont qualify. People who misuse it. As is the case with much debt, there is debt given to people who consume it, spend it, lose it and owe it; and there is debt given to people who invest it, accrue with it, and profit from it. Many people may stumble through the process and benefit from it, while the purchasing power of others who cant get it is diluted.
Interest rates are set in a competitive market. At any given point, there's a relatively fixed supply of money being put into what's on offer.
For buyers like pensions, it's simple: get the highest rate they can with acceptable risk and diversification. Keep in mind that not all of a fund's assets should be invested in super-long duration loans. Anyone running a fixed income portfolio understands this is a major source of risk (interest rate risk) as long-dated bonds are one of the most rate-sensitive investments possible. You'd do better with a blend of short, medium, and long-duration debt to ensure you don't end up hosed when rates move the wrong way.
Also keep in mind, many net buyers of this stuff are using it to offset long-term liabilities -- insurance loss payments, pensions, etc. Insurance companies will adjust premiums based on earnings of their investment portfolios.
And finally, keep in mind that interest rates aren't just a video game. There are major "real" drivers of them, economic growth being one--the demand for credit and its supply absolutely shifts over time, and throughout the business cycle. Real economic variables like demographics, home building, population shifts, the number of retired (more savings) vs working (more wage income) people in a population, etc. cause this stuff to move around a lot. If someone gets a higher rate, it's because at the time, there was more demand for credit, it wasn't just someone "losing" or getting "ripped off" that made that trade possible.
One thing to note about securitization and prepenalties:
The risk of prepayment being priced in, but there is the opposite balance of the fact Mortgage Originators (not the borrower) in some circumstances do have a prepayment penalty; this period is typically up to 6 months after closing.
So, they care, but the risk is (like so many in finance) heavily abstracted.
- fallout risk https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fallout-risk.asp
- pipeline risk: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mortgage_pipeline.asp
For the fallout risk an originator can typically model the impact on the value of a mortgage with a conservative low digit basispoint estimate (following past fallout patterns that have been observed for example), for the pipeline risk the originator may do some more exotic price modelling by deriving implied interest rate volatilities from market prices (of interest rate derivatives).
Both risks are relatively speaking minimal given their short horizons and the (current) low volatility of interest rates.
I am impressed with the quality of the website linked to by the author of this thread, great read!
If the consumer doesn't like that they can get a lower cost variable rate mortgage just as easily.
All APR to keep all the payments lower... they lost them all in 08/09.
2006/2007 was when the foreclosures started happening. Interest rates started going up in that timeframe [0], which lines up with the idea that folks couldn't refinance their ARMs into something they could keep paying on; first due to the higher interest rate, and second because the higher interest rate cause their house values to plummet. As these defaults piled up, in late 2007 and early 2008, the banks who later folded realized that their portfolios were not really salvageable.
It is.
> The rate is fixed till the renewable period, typically 5 or fewer years.
Lenders and mortgage brokers will often heavily push loans like that, ARMs with a short initial fixed period, using the (usually slightly) lower initial rate and the prospect of refi before the float as a hook, but full-term fixed-rate mortgages are still more popular.
Categories > Money, Banking, & Finance > Interest Rates > Mortgage Rates
Unless you're not arguing against the last part of the parent comment...
No, it doesn't. That's a chart of the average annual interest rate of 30 year mortgages, not the share of mortgages that are 30 year mortgages.
EDIT: The Mortgage Bankers Association does regular press releases of stats [0], and in them recently ARMs seem to be 3-3.5% of applications.
[0] e.g., https://www.mba.org/2022-press-releases/january/mortgage-app...
What does that have to do with the ratio of fixed rate to adjustable rate mortgages?
But for a bank, the government requires them to maintain a certain reserve amount. This is to handle withdrawals that are greater than planned.[0] The current loan value is an asset to the bank and so counts towards the reserve ratio. If the loan value drops, then they will have to sell some assets (probably some of those same loans) in order to raise some cash. Since they're forced to do this when it's disadvantageous to them, and it's likely that other banks are also trying to unload some loans to meet their reserve requirements, they have to offer those loans at a significant discount. Meaning they get even less for them than the low value they had them for.
[0] This is what killed Wachovia. There was a "silent" run on the bank over the weekend in 2008 by wealthy customers transferring out amounts above the then-FDIC insurance limit of $100k. It wiped out their reserves and the government forced a sale.