Mortgage rates drop yet again By Holden Lewis R Long-term mortgage rates have fallen for the fourth week in a row. The benchmark 30-year fixed-rate mortgage fell 7 basis points to 6.82 percent, according to the Bankrate.com national survey of large lenders. A basis point is one-hundredth of 1 percentage point. The mortgages in this week's survey had an average total of 0.49 discount and origination points. In the last few months, long-term mortgage rates have tended to move up and down in a narrow range from week to week, like a boat bobbing in a gentle sea. The last time rates dropped four weeks hard money loans washington mutual mortgage rates in a row, the sea was storm-tossed: That four-week slide began Sept. 12. There's no shocking incident to attribute to this four- week drop in mortgage rates. Economists give several explanations. Among them are what we might call the overreaction theory and the turmoil theory. Many economists believe that investors overreacted early this year to signs that the economy was recovering. According to this explanation, investors bid up the prices of stocks and pulled money out of bonds, sending bond yields and interest rates higher. Then, economists explain, investors overreacted to their earlier overreaction, pushing bond yields and interest rates down too far. Continued below "Just as tax debt washington mutual mortgage rates bond traders had overestimated the economy's power early this month, they may now be underestimating its strength," a panel of Bank of America economists wrote Monday. If you believe that explanation, you probably believe that you can gauge a relationship between the stock market and the bond market, and a relationship between short-term rates and long-term rates. That might be true sometimes, but not when the economy and world politics are in turmoil, says Kenneth Thomas, a lecturer in finance at Wharton. "Experience has shown that there are no hard and fast rules," Thomas says, "especially in relatively new economic times with a lot of uncertainty, debt consolidated loans washington mutual mortgage rates when the economy is facing new challenges." Thomas says you can't separate the economy from politics. When you add last year's recession to this year's muted recovery to the Sept. 11 attacks to today's violence in the Middle East, there's too much economic and political uncertainty to pinpoint the cause of changes in interest rates. Usually short-term and long-term rates move roughly in tandem, but that hasn't been the case lately, Thomas says, adding that the disconnect between short-term and long-term rates often happens around recessions. While it's impossible to predict changes in interest rates with accuracy, it's easy to predict what will happen in neighborhoods washington mutual mortgage rates washington mutual mortgage rates where housing