Anything Good From Government Shut Down???

Description: cid:image001.png@01CECC01.FBC9E7F0 Good news for west Chatham County: Eligible areas for USDA Rural Housing Programs: The “Continuing Appropriations Act, 2014” (H.R. 2775) was signed into law by the President of the United States. Therefore, barring further Congressional action, current eligible areas for USDA Rural Housing Programs will remain unchanged through January 15, 2014. (H.R. 2775 extends Sec. 731 of H.R. 933 “Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2013”) But when will we be able to get them closed? Several USDA websites/applications were disabled in connection with the recent Federal Government shutdown. This has delayed USDA’s completion of fiscal year-end accounting processes. This process will take several days to complete. The Guaranteed Underwriting System (GUS) will become operational on Monday, October 21, 2013. (This is the automated underwriting system for USDA loans) Other internal USDA systems will not be operational until late next week. For example, USDA will be unable to process lender submitted loan closings until late next week. Once USDA posts the new turns times, I will share those. I would expect it to be somewhere between 4-5 weeks. BOTTOM LINE: Start writing those contracts in west Chatham with 60 day closing dates and we will get them done as soon as possible!!! The Federal Reserve may have to wait until early next year before it sees sufficient strength in the U.S. economy to begin scaling back its bond-buying stimulus, after a destructive Washington budget battle that may take a bite out of growth. Complicating the Fed's task, a 16-day government shutdown choked off the flow of much of the economic data on which it relies and could undermine the quality of the reports covering October. Next Fed rate-setting meeting is Oct 29-30. Highly doubtful they start winding down the stimulus program at the end of the month and many question they will do it at the following meeting in December. This is why you have seen 30 yr mortgage rates improve over the last 2-3 weeks. If there is any positive to come out of the shutdown, cheap mortgage rates are not a bad thing.