Your mortgage rate is set in the bond market, by the price investors will pay for mortgage-backed securities. When you take a 30-year loan, it gets pooled with thousands of others into a mortgage-backed security (MBS) that investors buy for the stream of payments. The price those investors pay determines the rate you're offered. The Fed only controls short-term rates; the long end, where mortgages live, belongs to the bond market. MBS investors are always comparing against the 10-year US Treasury, the safest benchmark available. An MBS has to yield more than the Treasury to compensate for its added risks, mainly that borrowers prepay when they refinance, and that gap is the spread. Because investors rotate between Treasuries and MBS based on risk-adjusted yield, the two move together: when the 10-year falls, mortgage rates generally follow it down, and when it rises, mortgage rates rise too. The MBS market also makes mortgage lending far more liquid than the old model, where a bank held your loan on its own books and a loan committee set the terms. Selling loans to investors worldwide is a big reason money is more available than in the pre-MBS era decades ago. It also means the fastest read on where rates are heading is the bond market itself, and the Mortgage News Daily rate table, right here on our site, tracks that daily.