Mortgage Market Forecast: Key Drivers and Regulatory Implications

On the second part of a two-part roundtable, our panel gives its 2025 preview for the housing and mortgage landscape, the US Treasury yield curve and currency markets.

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Vishy Tirupattur: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I am Vishy Tirupattur, Morgan Stanley's Chief Fixed Income Strategist. This is part two of our special roundtable discussion on what's ahead for the global economy and markets in 2025.

Today we will cover what is ahead for government bonds, currencies, and housing. I'm joined by Matt Hornbach, our Chief Macro Strategist; James Lord, Global Head of Currency and Emerging Market Strategy; Jay Bacow, our co-head of Securitized Product Strategy; and Jim Egan, the other co-head of Securitized Product Strategy.

It's Tuesday, November 19th, at 10am in New York.

Matt, I'd like to go to you first. 2024 was a fascinating year for government bond yields globally. We started with a deeply inverted US yield curve at the beginning of the year, and we are ending the year with a much steeper curve – with much of that inversion gone. We have seen both meaningful sell offs and rallies over the course of the year as markets negotiated hard landing, soft landing, and no landing scenarios.

With the election behind us and a significant change of policy ahead of us, how do you see the outlook for global government bond yields in 2025?

Matt Hornbach: With the US election outcome known, global rate markets can march to the beat of its consequences. Central banks around the world continue to lower policy rates in our economist baseline projection, with much lower policy rates taking hold in their hard landing scenario versus higher rates in their scenarios for re-acceleration.

This skew towards more dovish outcomes alongside the baseline for lower policy rates than captured in current market prices ultimately leads to lower government bond yields and steeper yield curves across most of the G10 through next year. Summarizing the regions, we expect treasury yields to move lower over the forecast horizon, helped by 75 [basis points] worth of Fed rate cuts, more than markets currently price.

We forecast 10-year Treasury yields reaching 3 and 3.75 per cent by the middle of next year and ending the year just above 3.5 per cent.

Our economists are forecasting a pause in the easing cycle in the second half of the year from the Fed. That would leave the Fed funds rate still above the median longer run dot.

The rationale for the pause involves Fed uncertainty over the ultimate effects of tariffs and immigration reform on growth and inflation.

We also see the treasury curve bull steepening throughout the forecast horizon with most of the steepening in the first half of the year, when most of the fall in yields occur.

Finally, on break even inflation rates, we see five- and 10-year break evens tightening slightly by the middle of 2025 as inflation risks cool. However, as the Trump administration starts implementing tariffs, break evens widen in our forecast with the five- and 10-year maturities reaching 2.55 per cent and 2.4 per cent respectively by the end of next year.

As such, we think real yields will lead the bulk of the decline in nominal yields in our forecasting with the 10-year real yield around 1.45 per cent by the middle of next year; and ending the year at 1.15 per cent.

Vishy Tirupattur: That's very helpful, Matt. James, clearly the incoming administration has policy choices, and their sequencing and severity will have major implications for the strength of the dollar that has rallied substantially in the last few months. Against this backdrop, how do you assess 2025 to be? What differences do you expect to see between DM and EM currency markets?

James Lord: The incoming administration's proposed policies could have far-reaching impacts on currency markets, some of which are already being reflected in the price of the dollar today. We had argued ahead of the election that a Republican sweep was probably the most bullish dollar outcome, and we are now seeing that being reflected.

We do think the dollar rally continues for a little bit longer as markets price in a higher likelihood of tariffs being implemented against trading partners and there being a risk of additional deficit expansion in 2025. However, we don't really see that dollar strength persisting for long throughout 2025.

So, I think that is – compared to the current debate, compared to the current market pricing – a negative dollar catalyst that should get priced into markets.

And to your question, Vishy, that there will be differences with EM and also within EM as well. Probably the most notable one is the renminbi. We have the renminbi as the weakest currency within all of our forecasts for 2025, really reflecting the impact of tariffs.

We expect tariffs against China to be more consequential than against other countries, thus requiring a bigger adjustment on the FX side. We see dollar China, or dollar renminbi ending next year at 7.6. So that represents a very sharp divergence versus dollar yen and the broader DXY moves – and is a consequence of tariffs.

And that does imply that the Fed's broad dollar index only has a pretty modest decline next year, despite the bigger move in the DXY. The rest of Asia will likely follow dollar China more closely than dollar yen, in our view, causing AXJ currencies to generally underperform; versus CMEA and Latin America, which on the whole do a bit better.

Vishy Tirupattur: Jay, in contrast to corporate credit, mortgage spreads are at or about their long-term average levels. How do you expect 2025 to pan out for mortgages? What are the key drivers of your expectations, and which potential policy changes you are most focused on?

Jay Bacow: As you point out, mortgage spreads do look wide to corporate spreads, but there are good reasons for that. We all know that the Fed is reducing their holdings of mortgages, and they're the largest holder of mortgages in the world.

We don't expect Fed balance sheet reduction of mortgages to change, even if they do NQT, as is our forecast in the first quarter of 2025. When they NQT, we expect mortgage runoff to continue to go into treasuries. What we do expect to change next year is that bank demand function will shift. We are working under the assumption that the Basel III endgame either stalls under the next administration or gets released in a way that is capital neutral. And that's going to free up excess capital for banks and reduce regulatory uncertainty for them in how they deploy the cash in their portfolios.

The one thing that we've been waiting for is this clarity around regulations. When that changes, we think that's going to be a positive, but it's not just banks returning to the market.

We think that there's going to be tailwinds from overseas investors that are going to be hedging out their FX risks as the Fed cuts rates, and the Bank of Japan hikes, so we expect more demand from Japanese life insurance companies.

A steeper yield curve is going to be good for REIT demand. And these buyers, banks, overseas REITs, they typically buy CUSIPs, and that's going to help not just from a demand side, but it's going to help funding on mortgages improve as well. And all of those things are going to take mortgage spreads tighter, and that's why we are bullish.

I also want to mention agency CMBS for a moment. The technical pressure there is even better than in single family mortgages. The supply story is still constrained, but there is no Fed QT in multifamily. And then also the capital that's going to be available for banks from the deregulation will allow them – in combination with the portfolio layer hedging – to add agency CMBS in a way that they haven't really been adding in the last few years. So that could take spreads tighter as well.

Now, Vishy, you also mentioned policy changes. We think discussions around GSE reform are likely to become more prevalent under the new administration.

And we think that given that improved capitalization, depending on the path of their earnings and any plans to raise capital, we could see an attempt to exit conservatorship during this administration.

But we will simply state our view that any plan that results in a meaningful change to the capital treatment – or credit risk – to the investors of conventional mortgages is going to be too destabilizing for the housing finance markets to implement. And so, we don't think that path could go forward.

Vishy Tirupattur: Thanks, Jay. Jim, it was a challenging year for the housing market with historically high levels of unaffordability and continued headwinds of limited supply. How do you see 2025 to be for the US housing market? And going beyond housing, what is your outlook for the opportunity set in securitized credit for 2025?

James Egan: For the housing market, the 2025 narrative is going to be one about absolute level versus the direction and rate of change. For instance, Vishy, you mentioned affordability. Mortgage rates have increased significantly since the beginning of September, but it's also true that they're down roughly a hundred basis points from the fourth quarter of 2023 and we're forecasting pretty healthy decreases in the 10-year Treasury throughout 2025. So, we expect affordability to improve over the coming year. Supply? It remains near historic lows, but it's been increasing year to date.

So similar to the affordability narrative, it's more challenged than it's been in decades; but it's also less challenged than it was a year ago.

So, what does all this mean for the housing market as we look through 2025? Despite the improvements in affordability, sales volumes have been pretty stagnant this year. Total volumes – so existing plus new volumes – are actually down about 3 per cent year to date. And look, that isn't unusual. It typically takes about a year for sales volumes to pick up when you see this kind of significant affordability improvement that we've witnessed over the past year, even with the recent backup in mortgage rates.

And that means we think we're kind of entering that sweet spot for increased sales now. We've seen purchase applications turn positive year over year. We've seen pending home sales turn positive year over year. That's the first time both of those things have happened since 2021. But when we think about how much sales 2025, we think it's going to be a little bit more curtailed. There are a whole host of reasons for that – but one of them the lock in effect has been a very popular talking point in the housing market this year. If we look at just the difference between the effective mortgage rate on the outstanding universe and where you can take out a mortgage rate today, the universe is still over 200 basis points out of the money.

To the upside, you're not going to get 10 per cent growth there, but you're going to get more than 5 per cent growth in new home sales. And what I really want to emphasize here is – yes, mortgage rates have increased recently. We expect them to come down in 2025; but even if they don't, we don't think there's a lot of room for downside to existing home sales from here.

There's some level of housing activity that has to happen, regardless of where mortgage rates or affordability are. We think we're there. Turnover measured as the number of transactions – existing transactions – as a share of the outstanding housing market is lower now than it was during the great financial crisis. It's as low as it's been in a little bit over 40 years. We just don't think it can fall that much further from here.

But as we go through 2025, we do think it dips negative. We have a negative 2 per cent HPA call next year, not significantly down. We don't think there's a lot of room to the downside given the healthy foundation, the low supply, the strong credit standards in the housing market. But there is a little bit of negativity next year before home prices reaccelerate.

This leaves us generically constructive on securitized products across the board. Given how much of the capital structure has flattened this year, we think CLO AAAs actually offer the best value amongst the debt tranches there. We think non-QM triple AAAs and agency MBS is going to tighten. They look cheap to IG corporates. Consumer ABS, we also think still looks pretty cheap to IG corporates. Even in the CMBS pace, we think there's opportunities. CMBS has really outperformed this year as rates have come down. Now our bull bear spread differentials are much wider in CMBS than they are elsewhere, but in our base case, conduit BBB minuses still offer attractive value.

That being said, if we're going to go down the capital structure, our favorite expression in the securitized credit space is US CLO equity.

Vishy Tirupattur: Thank you, Jay and Jim, and also Matt and James.

We'll close it out here. As a reminder, if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.