Mortgage Rates Drop After Fed Announcement

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The pace of the spike in mortgage rates over the past several days has been nothing but staggering

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especially considering it began when rates were already near their highest levels in more than a decade.

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From an average level of 5.55% for a top tier 30yr fixed quote on Thursday, the average lender was up to 6.28% by yesterday afternoon.

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The drama began with last Friday's Consumer Price Index (CPI), a key inflation report that showed prices rising faster than expected.

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Inflation is biggest concern for the Fed at the moment, and the biggest reason for their increasingly aggressive efforts to push rates higher in 2022.

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CPI alone wouldn't have been worth the drama we witnessed, however. The frenzy of the past few days was compounded by the fact that

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the financial market knew there was a Fed announcement coming up on Wednesday AND that the Fed was in its regularly-scheduled "blackout period."

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In other words, markets were flying blind as to what the Fed's response might be to the CPI data, and imaginations ran wild.

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