The Mortgage Bankers Association’s Mortgage Credit Availability Index increased by 0.6 percent to 125.4 in March.
Mortgage Credit Availability Index
A decline in the MCAI indicates that lending standards are tightening, while increases in the index are indicative of loosening credit. The index was benchmarked to 100 in March 2012.
Broken down by loan type, the Conventional MCAI increased 0.8 percent, while the Government MCAI increased by 0.4 percent. Of the component indices of the Conventional MCAI, the Jumbo MCAI increased by 1.5 percent and the Conforming MCAI rose by 0.2 percent.
“Credit availability inched higher in March, driven by the ongoing economic and job market recovery,” said Joel Kan, MBA associate vice president of economic and industry forecasting. “This has increased the amount of low credit score and high LTV products. All the market segments covered by our sub-indexes increased over the month, notably government and jumbo indexes. The government index,
Will the Fed Save Us. Again?
Posted March 8, 2021
You gotta love the timing of this stock market correction that has been wreaking something akin to havoc on stock prices the last couple of weeks. By now, you’ve heard the whole “bond yields rise, stocks especially tech stocks sell off.”
And the yield on the 10-year bond has indeed ramped higher, currently up to a whopping 1.6%! The strategist types are scared of 1.7%. Apparently, that is the breaking point. They say that if the 10-year Treasury goes higher than that, all hell will break loose.
I don’t know about that. This whole decline “feels” orchestrated by the Big Money trading algorithms. And since those algorithms power 75% or so of all trading, they can push prices in whatever direction the programmers want.