We want mortgage rates to move lower - especially with the stock market plummeting like it has been.  When is that going to happen and what’s TARP got to do with it?

TARP stands for Troubled Assets Relief Program and is managed by the Office of Financial Stability.  It is the program that will utilize the $700 billion dollar rescue plan to remove “toxic waste” from the books of many companies.

To keep this simple, we will only address this from one perspective and that is what the affect of TARP is on mortgage rates.  Bottomline, the markets have been trading heavily on emotion for the past few weeks and positive news about the bailout such as the actual deployment of TARP, should cause investors to start purchasing mortgage backed securities.  As well, as other investors are able to get rid of their TOXIC assets by selling them to the government, the hope is that lending will again flow more freely.  This is how it should work in principal, and hopefully the news that the government will start buying some of these troubled assets will spark an interest in mortgage backed securities and rates will come down a bit. We could all use lower mortgage interest rates, right?

Find the best mortgage rates in this unpredictable market.