The rise in weekly mortgage applications made the headlines at USA Today. It's not clear that this is exactly headline news. The increase reported for the week was 3.0 percent. This followed a sharp 19.2 percent drop the previous week. Weekly data are always going to be erratic, but the mortgage application data provide even more room for error than most, since banks are changing their lending standards week by week. As a result, many more mortgages are being denied now than a year ago and probably even than a week ago. This means that the same number of applications corresponds to fewer actual mortgages. So, a bit of caution should be used in presenting these data.
--Dean Baker
