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Real Estate Investing Information

Dec 24

Interest Rate Hikes Are Coming

WASHINGTON - APRIL 17: Federal Reserve Chairm...

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You thought this year was tough for the real estate market, prepare for 2010. Saying positive things will only go so far in helping the real estate sector. Reality will soon set in and with that will come even more opportunities for real estate investors.

Interest rates will most likely start to creep back up as the article below describes. With higher interest rates come more buyers looking for creative financing. Prepare now for what is coming and you will be in a position to build a real estate empire.

Why Interest Rates Will Rise In 2010

Interest rates, artifically suppressed by the Federal Reserve and China, are about to start rising, and will continue rising for a generation.

On Christmas Eve 2009, I wish I could parrot the “happy-happy” Party Line that interest rates and mortgage rates will stay low for essentially ever, but that would require lying. The truth is the drivers of super-low interest rates are diminishing, and the forces of higher rates can no longer be restrained.

There have two primary drivers of super-low interest rates: The Federal Reserve and the Chinese buying Treasury bonds.

The Fed has created massive artificial demand for more U.S. debt in two ways; by direct purchase of bonds being auctioned (During the first 2 months of the new fiscal year, the Federal Reserve grew its balance sheet by about $65 billion, in effect purchasing about 22% of the federal government’s new debt) and by secretly buying Treasury bonds from “primary dealers” (banks) a few days after the auction.

This way, it appears for propaganda purposes that some private parties are actually buying T-bills to hold, when in fact they are only temporary proxies for cloaked Fed purchases.

The entire “package” of Fed buying of Treasury debt to keep interest rates low runs in the hundreds of billions–The Fed’s balance sheet ballooned to $2.24 trillion in assets as of last week, up 142 percent from the beginning of 2008. The Fed purchased outright $300 billion of longer-term Treasury securities, $1.2 trillion toxic-garbage mortgage backed securities no sane investor would touch, and hundreds of billions more in Treasury debt via proxy buyers. –more