The 30-year came in at 6.68% this morning, one basis point above yesterday's 6.67% and inside a band it has not left in three weeks. The move is nothing; the context is not. July's FOMC minutes landed yesterday afternoon and showed a 9-3 vote to hold the funds rate at 3.50–3.75%, with Cleveland's Hammack, Minneapolis' Kashkari, and Dallas' Logan each preferring a quarter-point increase — the most dissents at a single meeting since September 2016. The minutes also record that many participants, not just the three who voted against, judged further tightening would likely be necessary if inflation does not decline. Fannie Mae's ESR group moved in the same direction on the same day, sharply raising its rate forecast through mid-2027 and abandoning a July outlook that had rates averaging 6.4% through the rest of this year. The tape barely reacted, which is the point: the market had already priced a Fed that is not cutting, and the minutes confirmed rather than surprised.
What's on deck: core PCE on Aug. 28 is now the only print between here and the September meeting with real power to move pricing, precisely because the minutes made the hawkish case conditional on inflation. New home sales land Aug. 23–26, Case-Shiller Aug. 25, and jobless claims Aug. 27 — none of them are likely to reset the range on their own. Then the FOMC meets Sept. 15–16 with a Summary of Economic Projections attached. Given three dissenting votes in July, the dot plot at that meeting is the highest-leverage scheduled event of the quarter, and it is where a hawkish shift would become visible rather than inferred. Absent a soft PCE, the base case for the next three weeks is more of the same range.
On the range: 6.68% sits below the 30-day average of 6.74% and seven basis points off the 30-day low of 6.61%, which reads well until you widen out. Against the 90-day window it is 21 basis points above the 6.47% low, 14 below the 6.82% high, and four basis points above the 6.64% 90-day average. Week over week the 30-year is down two basis points; month over month it is up twelve. That is a market that has stabilized in the high 6.6s, not one that is coming down, and any conversation that implies otherwise will not survive the borrower opening a rate site on their phone.
Today's opening is in product spread rather than direction. The 15-year is at 6.03%, sixty-five basis points under the 30-year and within five of its own 30-day low — the widest practical case for a term switch in weeks for a borrower with the payment capacity. FHA sits at 6.43% and VA at 6.47% against conventional's 6.68%, a 21-to-25-basis-point note-rate advantage that has to be netted against mortgage insurance and the funding fee before it means anything, but is worth actually running rather than assuming conventional wins. Jumbo at 6.75% is only seven basis points over conventional, unusually tight, which makes the high-balance borrower who has been waiting for a better entry the most under-served segment on the board right now. Do this today: pull every borrower in your pipeline above the $832,750 baseline conforming limit and re-price them jumbo against high-balance conforming wherever the county limit allows it — at a seven-basis-point spread the structure that wins is not the one that won three months ago.