U.S. used home sales fell to a 14-year low in September as high mortgage rates and high home prices kept homebuyers cautious.

The National Association of Realtors expects that existing home sales will grow by 9% in 2024.

As we all know, in order to curb high inflation, the Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates like crazy for nearly a year and a half, and interest rates are now at their highest level in 22 years.。Due to the linkage of the financial world, the upward movement of benchmark interest rates has brought a series of chain reactions such as the Treasury market and the real estate market, 10-year U.S. bond yields have soared to historical highs, incidentally, even the U.S. 30-year mortgage rates are slowly rising。Interest rates are the same everywhere, when interest rates are low, everyone wants to get a few houses to fry, when interest rates are high, no one wants to carry a heavy mortgage to do the pick-up man.。In an environment of high interest rates, real estate companies can't sell their houses, banks can't lend them out, and no one has a source of money to make.。So, the U.S. real estate and banking industries recently jointly wrote to Federal Reserve Chairman Powell, hoping that the lovely Fed chairman would stop raising interest rates!In the letter, the two industries gave the Fed two demands: first, to stop raising interest rates, which we all understand.。Second, stop selling your mortgage securities on your own initiative, and what does that mean?？In fact, this so-called mortgage security is a group of mortgages bundled together to form a portfolio that is sold on the open market, or MBS for short.。Since MBS is backed by a large string of home mortgages, MBS is also often seen as a relatively high-quality asset, and the Fed has a large amount of MBS in its hands.。When the Fed wants to tighten monetary policy, the Fed sells MBS in the market and returns some of its money to cool the economy。That's why the two industries are proposing in the letter that they want the Fed to stop selling MBS, which would be a major blow to both the U.S. financial and real estate markets.。

Three major real estate industry lobbying groups called on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell not to raise interest rates further and pledged not to sell mortgage bonds unless real estate financing stabilizes.。The National Association of Realtors, the Mortgage Bankers Association and the National Association of Home Builders wrote in a letter to Powell on Monday: "We urge the Fed to take these simple steps to ensure that the real estate industry does not have the hard landing the Fed has been trying to avoid.。The three groups said "continued market uncertainty about the Fed's interest rate path" had led to a widening premium on 30-year mortgage rates over the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, saying the spread had now reached an "all-time high."。They said: "This has exacerbated housing affordability and caused additional disruption to the property market, which is already struggling to adapt to a significant pullback in mortgage origination and home sales.。"

Recently, mortgage rates in the U.S. have hit a new high in more than 20 years, and the cost of borrowing for Americans is rising rapidly, according to a statement from Freddie Mac, the U.S. housing finance agency。According to data released by Freddie Mac, as of August 17, the average interest rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage in the United States was 7.09%, the highest level since April 2002。Behind the steep rise in U.S. mortgage rates is the recent surge in U.S. 10-year Treasury yields, and generally speaking, the two changes into a positive relationship, that is, the higher the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield, the higher the U.S. mortgage rates will follow.。The principle behind it is also very simple, because the United States as one of the most developed countries in the world, U.S. Treasury bonds are also considered to be the core safety assets, that is, the so-called "risk-free assets," on this basis, the yield of U.S. debt can be regarded as a basic cost of funds, the rest of the cost of funds need to be priced on this basis, including the U.S. mortgage interest rates, and because of this, the U.S. benchmarkGlobal Asset Anchor。Battered by high mortgage rates, the U.S. housing market has shown clear signs of cooling, and to add insult to injury, the U.S. has also experienced a shortage of listings。According to Black Knight Inc, the affordability of housing for the American people has been depressed to its lowest point since 1984 as recent climbing borrowing costs and severe inventory shortages have pushed up home prices。At the same time, these problems have gradually spread to the second-hand housing market in the United States, where recent sales of second-hand housing have fallen as a lack of listings, rising costs and concerns about the economy have hampered many potential buyers.。