Stocks rise amid big bank earnings, inflation data

Reasonable quarter out of JPMorgan (JPM) this morning. Read more from our banking reporter David Hollerith.

I hopped on JPM’s earnings media call and asked CFO Jeremy Barnum his views on housing post Fed rate cut. All in all, it didn’t sound like a housing boom was taking shape with lower rates — but activity has picked up.

Here’s what Barnum told me (emphasis ours):

“What we did see, as you kind of would expect, is a pickup in mortgage applications and a tiny bit of increase in refinancings there, which, again, you would also expect. But it’s worth noting, when it comes to mortgages, that all of the sequential and year-on-year changes are coming off a very low base, and it remains the case that the vast majority of the stock of outstanding mortgages right now in this country are below 6% with a lot of them still even below 5%.

So it would take a really big rally in the long end of the yield curve to see a significant pickup in refinancing. The house view on home prices, you know, I think generally you’ve got a tension there between possibly a slightly weakening economy that should create a little bit more supply, there’s a little bit more construction, but there’s generally a housing shortage in this country. So the housing market seems to me is still a little bit stuck, I would say.”