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Attention Zing! readers… as you know, we check in with our friend Freddie Mac each Thursday to see how mortgage rates are doing. And every week lately we’ve been saying we’re near record lows… Well, this week is different because we’re not just NEAR record lows. WE’RE BELOW them. That’s big. That means a new bar of low-ness has been established.

Freddie Mac’s weekly Primary Mortgage Market Survey® (PMMS), showed  record shattering lows with the 30-year and 15-year trending to new lows, and the 5-year ARM staying steady at it’s record low from last week. If rates were athletes, they’d all be getting gold medals for this week’s Rate Olympics.

According to this week’s PMMS, lenders across the nation averaged 30-year fixed rates of 4.12 percent with 0.7 points – down from the already-low rate of 4.22 percent. The 15-year fixed averaged 3.33 percent at 0.6 points, down from 3.39 last week. The average on a 5-year ARM was 2.96 percent with 0.6 points – sitting steady at it’s new hard to-believe 2 percent holding pattern.

Why are rates so low? Well, let’s see what our buddy Frank Nothaft, vice president and chief economist of Freddie Mac, has to say:

“Market concerns over Eurozone sovereign debt default and a weak U.S. employment report for August placed downward pressure on Treasury bond yields and allowed fixed mortgage rates to hit new lows this week. On net, the economy added no new jobs last month and was the weakest reading since September 2010. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate remained at 9.1 percent, marking its 31st consecutive month of being above 8 percent, the longest such stretch in 70 years.”

It’s also worth noting that the Federal Reserve (otherwise know as “The Fed”) had some pretty glum things to report yesterday in their regional economic review. The gist being that near-term economic outlook is increasingly uncertain.

In layman’s terms, what all this shakes out to is that the economy is pretty sluggish. And we all know what’s bad for the economy is good for mortgage rates and those of you looking to refinance or buy a new home.

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