Wednesday's bond market has opened in negative territory again following much stronger than expected economic data. The stock markets have reacted favorably with the Dow up 154 points and the Nasdaq up 25 points. The bond market is currently down 6/32, but we will likely see little change in this morning's mortgage rates due to strength late yesterday.

The Commerce Department said this morning that new orders for big-ticket products rose 3.4% last month. This was a huge variance from the decline of 2.4% that was expected, indicating that demand for durable goods was much stronger than thought. This was the first increase in seven months, but this data can be quite volatile from month to month and cannot be relied upon as a strong indication that manufacturing activity is rebounding on a broad scale.

The second report of the day was February's New Home Sales figures. As with Monday's Existing Home Sales, this report showed an unexpected increase in sales. Fortunately, this data is not considered to be of high importance to the markets or mortgage rates.

Tomorrow's only monthly or quarterly news is the final revision to the 4th Quarter GDP. This is the second and final revision to January's preliminary reading and is expected to show a downward revision of 0.4% to the reading that was posted last month. Analysts are now more concerned with next month's preliminary reading of the 1st quarter than data from three to six months ago, so I don't expect this report to affect mortgage rates much.

The Labor Department will also give us last week's unemployment claim figures. They are expected to say that 650,000 new claims for benefits were filed. A larger number would be favorable for bonds, but unless this release varies greatly forecasts its impact on rates will be minimal.

                             Mel