Mortgage interest rates rise

Rates on 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages rose to 5.73 percent this week from 5.66 percent last week, Freddie Mac reported in its nationwide survey.

Rates on 15-year, fixed-rate mortgages, a popular choice for refinancing, rose to 5.32 percent from 5.25 percent. For one-year adjustable rate mortgages, rates increased to 4.42 percent from 4.39 percent. Rates on five-year hybrid adjustable rate mortgages rose to 5.26 percent from 5.15 percent.

The average rates do not include add-on fees known as points. Thirty-year mortgages and 15-year mortgages each carried an average fee of 0.4 point. One-year ARMS had an average fee of 0.6 point, and five-year ARMS carried a fee of 0.5 point.

Associated Press

Fed releases meeting minutes

The Federal Reserve won't use monetary policy to deflate what some economists say is a "bubble" in the U.S. housing market, the minutes of the Fed's June 29-30 meeting showed. Federal Reserve staff made a special presentation on housing valuations to the interest-rate setting Federal Open Market Committee during the two-day meeting, according to the minutes.

"A strategy of responding more directly to possible mispricing" of assets such as housing "was seen as very unlikely to contribute, on balance, to the achievement of the committee's objectives over time," the minutes of the FOMC meeting showed. The Fed document cited "the unavoidable uncertainties associated with judgments regarding the appropriate level of and likely future movements in asset prices."

Bloomberg News