By an 8-2 vote, the Federal Reserve Board’s Open Market Committee cut both the Fed Funds and Discounts rates by 25 basis points this afternoon. The move lowers the Fed Funds rate to 2.00 and the Discount rate to 2.25. In lock step after the announcement, most the major banks immediately lowered the Prime rate to 5.00.

In their post meeting remarks, the FOMC said that economic activity in the U.S. remains weak and the move in rates should help promote moderate growth over time. In addition, they made a point to stress that the Fed will monitor inflation and price stability closely (as some indicators of inflation continue to rise) and will adjust their stance on interest rates accordingly.

Continue Reading FOMC Cuts Interest Rates Again

Tags: Interest Rates, mortgages

Welcome to Gulf Coast Associates, Realtors® and Metro Mortgage Company’s new Southwest Florida Blog. We hope to provide you with some valuable insights into both the real estate and mortgage markets throughout Florida and beyond.

Up until now, we did all of our blogging over at Real Estate Webmasters. Our Southwest Florida Real Estate blog at REW has been a great success – we’ve had over 100,000 page views over the past few months. At this time in our company’s growth cycle we’d like to expand our web presence by participating in another arena. This is a place where we can share the latest information for our industries with you and open dialogues for education and advice. Having this new blog as part of our own website will give us both that opportunity.

Continue Reading Hello World! Welcome to Our Southwest Florida Blog

Tags: mortgages, real estate