Tom Vanderwell's (tvanderwell) Blog

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The Treasury Department is contemplating a proposal that would cut mortgage rates for new loans for homes, according to the Wall Street Journal. The plan would employ Fannie Mae to offer mortgages with rates as low as 4.5%, roughly 1% lower than current rates. The measu...

Mortgage Rates have been updated. Reactions and Recommendations: Reactions - volatility continues to plague the markets and the overall economic news (like I’ve discussed earlier) remains quite negative.   The stock market seems to be doing an every other day bi-polar switching between negative a...

Mortgage Rates have been updated. Reactions and Recommendations: The stock market is staging a bit of a rally today.   Why?  Because Ford said they expect to make a profit in 2011.  Once again, like last week, the market is reacting to emotion and, in this case, saying, “Oh good, the auto industr...

Mortgage Rates have been updated. Recommendations: Due to the extreme volatility in the market and the negative potential from the variety of economic reports and speeches being made by Fed Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Paulson and while I do feel there is the potential rates could drop lower, ...

Black Friday Mortgage Rates have been updated. They have dropped a bit since Wednesday.   Why?  A couple of things: 1. The stock market is opening softer today. 2. The “ripple” effects of the government’s move to buy mortgages from Fannie and Freddie. Recommendations: Lock all loans.   Volatility...

Sorry for the delay in getting this out.  The Land America bankruptcy has been taking up a fair amount of time with explaining and discussing the ramifications. Mortgage Rates have been updated.   They are basically the same as yesterday. Recommendations and reactions: There were a number of econ...

Mortgage Rates have been updated. They have dropped because Secretary of the Treasury Paulson has decided to start buying mortgage backed securities.   The idea is that they will increase the likelihood that rates will drop further. Will they drop? Will anyone else want to buy mortgage backed sec...

Okay, here's a quick summary of the day: 3 Banks got taken over by the FDIC.   The biggest one was Downey Federal, a huge "Option Arm" lender. While Citibank didn't go under or get bought out, but their stock was 50% lower tonight than it was Monday morning. The stock market staged a late day ral...

Mortgage Rates have been updated. Like I said earlier this morning when I took a “Look at Things” rates have inched up again today. Recommendations and reactions: The stock market is rebounding this morning on news that Citibank is discussing the idea of selling itself due to the problems it’s fa...

Okay, let’s face the fact that the jobs reports and the reports from Ford and General Motors that came out yesterday were ugly.   Not just ugly, downright nasty. In normal economic times, that sort of bad economic news would send people fleeing stocks and going into the bond market.   That would ...