From the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal:

Rising interest rates threaten to dim prospects for a housing recovery and choke off a refinance wave that was a major plank of the Obama administration’s economic-stimulus efforts.

On Wednesday, rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages climbed to 5.79%, up from 5% two weeks ago, according to HSH Associates. That jump will cut roughly in half the number of borrowers with an incentive to refinance, according to FTN Financial.

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Yesterday’s actions by the Federal Reserve sent mortgage rates down to levels unseen since February of this year. According to HSH, the conforming 30-year fixed rate dropped to 5.77% from 6.06% on Monday, the largest single-day drop since September 8 of this year when the Fed announced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be put into conservatorship.

From the front page of the Wall Street Journal:

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Try going on the “debt diet.” Wall Street Journal columnist Karen Blumenthal has devised several debt-cutting strategies that ironically mirror popular dieting techniques. Much like dieting, trimming your debt depends largely on the individual and the strategy employed.

The Jenny Craig approach (”prepared meals give your eating habits a fresh start”): otherwise known as the balance-transfer approach, consider transferring credit-card debt to another card with a 0% or other low interest-rate. “You’ll need a good or better credit score to qualify for the limited offers now available, and like the Jenny Craig program, there are costs and rules…”

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For the purposes of a follow up to a story we published on October 30, be sure to read this post from Calculated Risk and the accompanying Wall Street Journal article “Homeowners Wait as Relief Plan Drags.”

The FDIC’s plan to stem foreclosures is designed to convince lenders to rework certain mortgages with the guarantee that the government will cover part or most of any loss sustained from the restructured loan. The plan is expected to benefit between two and three million homeowners. Between $40-$50 billion would be utilized from the Treasury’s $700 billion rescue plan.

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HSH Associates is featured twice in today’s Wall Street Journal — once on the front page in a story titled “Fed Steps Up Assault on Slump,” and the other on page A3 titled “Mortgage Plan Isn’t Cutting Rates.”

Whenever new or important news is announced in the financial world, especially when there’s a shift in mortgage rates, news outlets from around the country, even the globe, turn to HSH to find out exactly how the news will influence consumers and the economy.

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From the Wall Street Journal:

A new wave of fear seized investors and trading floors around the world Friday, resulting in an across-the-board drop in stocks.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was recently down 222.85 points, or 2.6%, at 8468.40. The S&P 500 slipped 2.7% to 883.66. All its sectors traded lower, led by energy, off 5.6%, and technology, off 3.8%. Health care, a traditional investor haven, saw more modest losses and was down 1.7%.

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Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money, feels the negative sentiment on Wall Street is completely overblown. Referencing an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Cramer said articles like this one dictate when an abundance of bad news turns good. According to Cramer, when these types of negative stories begin to pervade the market, a positive turnaround is close by. Here’s why:

1) The housing index increased to 131 from a 52-week low of under 94, great news for the market! Recovery in many, if not every sector of the economy rides on the success of the housing market.

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Since last week, HSH Associates has been featured in seven major news publications including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN Money, as well as international news publications The Australian and the Tehran Times.

You can read all the articles that feature HSH’s expert commentary and mortgage information by clicking here.

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