TEXAS – MarketWatch reports that mortgage rates surged after the credit-rating agency Moody\u2019s downgraded U.S. debt. Moody\u2019s cut the U.S.\u2019s sovereign credit rating from AAA to Aa1. It was the last of the major credit-rating firms to strip the country of its triple-A rating. S&P Global Ratings downgraded U.S. debt in the summer of 2011. The downgrade of debt put upward pressure on bond prices on Monday morning. That pushed the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage up 12 basis points to 7.04%, according to Mortgage News Daily. It later settled at 6.99% later in the day. Moody\u2019s cited an increase in government debt and interest-payment ratios that were significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns as reasons for its decision.<\/p>\n
Mortgage rates tend to move in tandem with Treasury yields. With the 10-year yield going up, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate was going to trend upward as well, Jake Krimmel, a senior economist at Realtor.com, told MarketWatch. (Realtor.com is operated by News Corp subsidiary Move Inc., and MarketWatch publisher Dow Jones is also a subsidiary of News Corp.) Mortgage rates going up is \u201creally not ideal for prospective buyers,\u201d Krimmel added. The housing market, meanwhile, is mired in a crisis of affordability. Elevated mortgage rates and record-high home prices have put homeownership out of reach for many Americans, as demonstrated in the chart below. Home sales plummeted to a 30-year low in 2024. Even though the spring season is typically the busiest time of the year for the residential real-estate market, buying and selling have remained \u201csluggish,\u201d Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, said of home sales through March. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
TEXAS – MarketWatch reports that mortgage rates surged after the credit-rating agency Moody\u2019s downgraded U.S. debt. Moody\u2019s cut the U.S.\u2019s sovereign credit rating from AAA to Aa1. It was the last of the major credit-rating firms to strip the country of its triple-A rating. S&P Global Ratings downgraded U.S. debt in the summer of 2011. … Continue reading Mortgage rates jump above 7% after Moody\u2019s downgrade<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1412999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news-archive-archives"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-09 07:08:49","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1412999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1412999"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1412999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1449077,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1412999\/revisions\/1449077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1412999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1412999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1412999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}