Mortgage market conditions presented over the past two years have muted the effectiveness of the monetary policy tightening by saving $600 billion for homeowners, accounting for about 2% of personal consumption spending since 2022, according to a report by two Swiss Re Institute senior economists. 

“A dollar not spent on mortgage payments is a dollar free to spend elsewhere. This helps explain why recent policy tightening did not, initially, appear to slow the economy,” Mahir Rasheed and James Finucane wrote in the report, which was published on Monday. 

In 2020 and 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal details ⇒