Inflation Pressures Are Easing but Rate Cut Forecast Remains Uncertain

The New Year is beginning where the old one ended -- with uncertainty about when – or whether – the Federal Reserve will begin cutting interest rates.

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Responding to concerns that seniors obtaining reverse mortgages are not fully informed about those loans, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has issued new requirements for the counseling sessions that are mandatory for FHA-insured Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECMs), which represent the lion’s share of reverse mortgage originations.

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If financial institutions should have learned anything from the financial crisis, it is that lax underwriting is dangerous. But recent reports suggest that some lenders are in the process of repeating history rather than learning from it, as the pressure to increase earnings leads them to offer loans to marginal borrowers much like those whose defaults drove banks and the country to the financial brink three years ago.

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The financial crisis that drove the economy into a disastrous recession also appears to be challenging conventional wisdom about the primacy of homeownership and the sanctity of policies supporting it.

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Private sector economists, trade associations, and government agencies are generating mounds of economic data, some of it positive, some of it negative, and much of it, in the aggregate, contradictory and confusing. With investors responding viscerally and instantly to every report, the stock market has been whipsawed for weeks. It is easy to understand why, though the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Consumer Confidence Index reached its highest level in two years in June, the Conference Board’s confidence index, released just two weeks later, suggested a collective need for Zoloft.