Is a soft landing in sight? What the Fed funds rate and mortgage rates are hinting at

Is it time to put the tray tables up? It's starting to look a lot like a soft landing, or the long-sought destination of the Fed's interest rate increases.

If Fed chief Jerome Powell has mentioned the Fed's dual mandate once, he's mentioned it thousand times since the Fed's policymaking committee started raising short-term interest rates early in 2022. The Fed left its key short-term interest rate unchanged again Wednesday.

Dual mandate? Yes, that's Fed-speak for holding inflation steady while keeping as many Americans employed as possible.

Often the process of slowing the economy to bring inflation under control also results in job losses and recessions. If inflation slows to the Fed's preferred 2% without tipping into a recession, we'll have a soft landing.

Through months of higher interest rates, inflation falls while unemployment holds steady

The Fed was facing one of its trickiest tasks in four decades as inflation topped 9.1% in June 2022.

But even with the Fed's rapid set of interest rate increases to slow inflation, unemployment is essentially unchanged, more people have jobs and the economy has continued to grow – 5.2% in the third quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Housing suffers through higher mortgage rates

The news isn't sunny throughout the economy, though, especially in the housing industry.

The number of existing homes sold has fallen nearly every month since early 2022 when the Fed announced its plans to raise interest rates in an effort to tame 40-year high inflation. The Fed's actions directly affect short-term interest rates, but they also influence expectations about longer-term interest rates, which, in turn, have increased what we pay for new mortgages.

October's existing homes sales dropped to levels last seen during the fallout of the Great Recession. At the same time, prices remain stubbornly high amid the highest mortgage rates in 23 years. The National Association of Realtors will report November's sales on Dec. 20.

Just as mortgage rates followed the Fed's rapid rate increases, they've started to slide in recent weeks as a consensus grows that the Fed's policymaking committee may be done or nearly done raising rates. Few investors who bet on the movements of interest rates expect the Fed to make policy changes at their next meetings in December and January, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.

How higher mortgage rates raised monthly costs across the country

We looked at 10 locations across the country to compare the monthly costs that potential homeowners faced in October 2021 vs. October 2023, based on Realtor.com median list prices. Des Moines, Iowa, (below) is typical of what we found in nearly all 10 cities: Would-be homeowners' buying power has been cut in half during the last two years based on a 7.5% interest rate and 20% down. We use the NAR bar for affordability: Allocating 25% of household income toward principal and interest. Read about the nine other markets here.