There has been a flight to quality in the bond market that is now expanding into top quality mortgages. That explains the few ticks down in conforming rates. During the chaos over the past few weeks anything that had the word mortgage was shunned, thats why you had yields on the 10 yr note falling while the conforming rates were going up. Subprime and now Alt-A are basically gone and the rates on jumbo’s are rising. I have been reading the mortgage broker forums and those guys are still scrambling, the programs they were using are dropping like flies. As far as the increase in mortgage applications, yes given the current crisis multiple applications are filed trying to find the last vestiges of cheap money. There is a huge short squeeze going on today in HB’s and lenders, I guess CNBC is giving some headlines to help fuel it. Nothing has changed, we are still in a credit crunch. There will be a big hedge fund or lender that will going belly up or a series of them in the near future. All is not clear.
