Eight members of the Federal Open Markets Committee (i.e.: FOMC, or, The Fed) will be out speaking over the next 36 hours about their personal opinions of all things finance.  The early bird, Raphael Bostic, this morning reiterated that the Committee is still planning to keep rates paused where they are until the data dictate otherwise.  In other words, higher for longer is still the mantra.

Fannie Mae, Wells Fargo, and NAR all revised their 2024 interest rate forecasts over the weekend. Fannie pins ending the year at 6.4%, rather than the 5.9% prediction at the year’s inception. Wells jumped from 6.05% to 6.5% (which could have easily been a typo), and NAR has also bumped their earlier 6.3% prognostication to 6.5%.  Not super great news, but it’s nice to be able to set more accurate expectations.

The Conference Board, which has been publishing the NICB index now for over 100 years, projects that U.S. GDP will slow to under 1% in the second and third quarters of this year. The Board is a non-profit consisting of over 1,000 super smart people living in over 60 countries, so they’re opinion can be trusted. They publish about a dozen economic reports each month, including Consumer Confidence.  If economic activity drops as thought, the Fed will wish they had commenced cutting rates sooner.