by Calculated Risk on 9/20/2012 09:01:00 PM

First, from Freddie Mac: Mortgage Rates Back To Record Lows

Freddie Mac today released the results of its Primary Mortgage Market Survey® (PMMS®), showing fixed mortgage rates at or near their all-time record lows helping to keep homebuyer affordability high. The average 30-year fixed rate mortgage matched its all-time record low at 3.49 percent, and the average 15-year fixed fell to a new all-time record low at 2.77 percent.

And from David Wessel at the WSJ: Depression Lessons: Should Fed Stand Down to Compel Congressional Action?

As [economist James] Tobin put it in the American Economic Review in June 1965: “The monetary authorities should have tried harder to promote expansion in 1933-36 and 1937-40 — nothing would have been lost and something might have been gained. Throughout the period the authorities were too little concerned with deflationary risks immediately at hand and too much concerned to forestall the hypothetical future dangers of excess liquidity.”

... Friedman and co-author Anna Schwartz quote at length from a December 1935 technical memo from Fed files that made the case for tightening the credit spigot. ... The subsequent tightening by the Fed was, Friedman and Schwartz concluded, a mistake followed by “a failure to recognize that the action had misfired.”

Friday:
• At 10:00 AM ET, the BLS will release the Regional and State Employment and Unemployment (Monthly) report for August 2012.

Earlier: The Trillion Dollar Bear