Prepare For Tough Times If Your Job Has Anything To Do With Real Estate Or Mortgages
By Michael Snyder
TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com
September 11th, 2013
If you have a job that involves building homes, buying homes, selling homes or that is in any way related to the mortgage industry, you might want to start searching for alternate employment. Seriously. Interest rates are starting to rise dramatically, and mortgage lenders such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase are all cutting thousands of mortgage-related jobs. Last week, mortgage refinance activity plunged to the lowest level that we have seen since June 2009 and total mortgage activity dropped to the lowest level since October 2008. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning. Mortgage rates closely mirror the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries, the the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries has nearly doubled since early May. But it is still only sitting at about 3 percent right now. As I have written about previously, it has a ton of room to go up before it hits “normal” historical levels, and so do mortgage rates. As I noted the other day, some analysts believe that the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries is going to hit 7 percent eventually. If that happens, mortgage rates will be more than double what they are today. And we have already seen the average rate on a 30 year fixed rate mortgage go from 3.35 percent in May to 4.57 percent last week. If interest rates continue to rise we could be heading for a “housing Armageddon” that will make the last housing crash look like a Sunday picnic.
The mini-housing bubble that we have been enjoying for the last couple of years is coming to an abrupt end. It doesn’t matter what the mainstream media is telling you about a “sustainable” housing recovery. Just look at how the big mortgage lenders are behaving. They know the gig is up. According to Bloomberg, Bank of America has just announced that they will be eliminating 2,100 mortgage-related jobs…
Bank of America Corp., the second-largest U.S. lender, will eliminate about 2,100 jobs and shutter 16 mortgage offices as rising interest rates weaken loan demand, said two people with direct knowledge of the plans.
The Rest…HERE
