The average 30-year fixed rate mortgage is 6.18% today, a decrease of 0.01% since yesterday. The 15-year fixed mortgage rate stands at 5.32%, down by 0.01%. The 30-year FHA mortgage now averages 5.61%, having stayed the same. Meanwhile, the 30-year jumbo mortgage rate is 6.64%, reflecting a decrease of 0.04%.
The bigger picture
Venezuela
Perhaps we should begin by addressing the weekend's big event: America's military intervention in Venezuela. The action itself was clean and swift, and unlikely to upset markets.
However, the announcement on Saturday that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela up to some unspecified time in the future might raise concerns among some investors. As The New York Times put it yesterday, this "plunged the United States into a risky new era in which it will seek economic and political dominance over a nation of roughly 30 million people."
The Wall Street Journal concurred. "After Maduro Ouster, Trump Takes On the Risks of Governing Venezuela," one of its Sunday headlines read.
"Though [the president] and other U.S. officials he tasked with working on Venezuela’s transition didn’t say it, administering a country of 28 million twice the size of California will be enormously complicated," continued the Journal's article. "Maduro’s allies have already sharply condemned his capture and made moves to reassert control in the wake of the U.S. military operation, casting early doubts on whether the U.S. could govern the country without further military intervention."
However, later on Sunday, The Times reported in a different article, "Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday appeared to pivot away from President Trump’s assertion a day earlier that the United States would 'run' Venezuela, emphasizing instead that the administration would keep a military 'quarantine' in place on the country’s oil exports to exert leverage on the new leadership there."
We won't know until markets open this morning how many investors will trade based on fear of uncertainty and how many are either relaxed about the situation or are celebrating America's new possible access to the world's biggest oil reserves.
Purely from the point of view of mortgage rates, we should hope that the skeptics prevail. The harder markets take the news, the lower those rates are likely to fall.
This week
The rule that bad news for the economy is good news for mortgage rates applies, too, to the economic reports that are scheduled for this week.
By far the most important of these is Friday's official monthly jobs report, formally called the employment situation report. This is almost always the most crucial report each month, occasionally rivaled by inflation data.
However, other reports earlier in the week could also buffet mortgage rates, though probably less decisively. Wednesday, in particular, brings three sets of data, including November's job openings and labor turnover survey (JOLTS) and the ADP employment report, both of which concern the labor market.
The third that day is the December purchasing managers' index (PMI) for the services sector from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM), arguably the most important of all PMIs for any month.
Today
Today's lone economic report is December's PMI from the ISM for the manufacturing sector. While the manufacturing sector is nowadays less economically significant than services, it might still have some impact on mortgage rates. Scroll on down for market expectations for this index and what it might mean for those rates.
Mortgage Rate Trends: Past 90 Days
Purchase Rates
| Loan Type | Rate | APR | Daily Change | Monthly Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30-Year Fixed | 6.18% | 6.21% | -0.01% | -0.05% |
| 15-Year Fixed | 5.32% | 5.37% | -0.01% | -0.06% |
| 30-Year Fixed FHA | 5.61% | 6.83% | +-0% | +0.02% |
| 30-Year Fixed VA | 5.75% | 5.89% | +0.03% | +0.11% |
| 30-Year Fixed USDA | 5.66% | 5.8% | +0.04% | +0.1% |
| 30-Year Fixed Jumbo | 6.64% | 6.65% | -0.04% | +0.16% |
| 5/6 Year ARM | 6.05% | 6.09% | +0.02% | +-0% |
Refinance Rates
| Loan Type | Rate | APR | Daily Change | Monthly Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30-Year Fixed | 6.24% | 6.27% | +0.01% | -0.07% |
| 15-Year Fixed | 5.3% | 5.34% | +0.02% | -0.04% |
| 30-Year Fixed FHA | 5.57% | 6.78% | +0.01% | -0.01% |
| 30-Year Fixed VA | 5.8% | 5.94% | +0.03% | +0.13% |
| 5/6 Year ARM | 6.04% | 6.07% | -0.01% | -0.02% |
What's coming up?
Although economic reports are usually the main drivers of changes to mortgage rates, they're not the only ones. The general mood in markets and economically consequential news can also affect those rates. News items concerning employment, inflation, tariffs and deficit funding are especially influential at the moment.
Mortgage rates today
There is just one economic report on today's MarketWatch economic calendar. Markets are expecting the ISM manufacturing PMI for December to improve very slightly to 48.3% from 48.2% previously.
Typically, mortgage rates rise on news that is better than expected for the economy, and fall when that news is worse than expected. So, we'd like to see a PMI below 48.3% today. However, don't expect big movements in those rates unless the gap between actuals and expectations is wide.
