The foundation for the housing market remains healthy in 2022, with responsible lending standards and a tight supply environment, but, as the year continues, affordability challenges and a more hawkish Fed will likely slow appreciation and dampen housing activity.----- Transcript -----James Egan Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm James Egan, co-head of U.S. Securitized Products Research here at Morgan Stanley, Jay Bacow And I'm Jay Bacow, the other co-head of U.S. Securitized Products Research. James Egan And on this edition of the podcast, we'll be talking about the 2022 outlook for the U.S. housing market. It's Thursday, January 20th at 10:00 a.m. in New York. James Egan All right, Jay. Now, since we published the outlook for 2022, the market has already priced in a much more hawkish Fed and Fed board members really haven't been pushing back. We've now priced in 100 basis points of hikes in 2022 in addition to quantitative tightening. How does this change how you're thinking about the mortgage market? Jay Bacow When we went into the year, we thought that mortgage spreads looked pretty tight and thought they were going to go wider, and that was in a world where we just thought the Fed was going to be tapering and stop buying mortgages, but still reinvesting. Now that they're pricing in that the Fed is going to be hiking rates and normalizing their balance sheet, mortgage spreads have widened about 20 basis points this year, but we think they have further room to go. This is because a normalizing Fed is going to mean that the supply to the market in conjunction with the net issuance is going to be the highest that the private market has ever had to digest. So, we think that could push spreads about 10 or 15 basis points wider, which is going to weigh on mortgage rates, but mortgage rates have already been going up. They are about 3/8 of a point higher just over the last month. And when we forecast mortgage spreads and interest rates to go higher over the next year, we think this could end up with about a full point rise in mortgage rates this year. Jay Bacow So, Jim, a point move higher in mortgage rates. What does that do to affordability? James Egan The short answer is they don't help affordability. For people who've been listening to our podcast before, affordability largely has three main components: home prices, mortgage rates and incomes. And so, if we're talking about mortgage rates, a full 100 basis points higher, that's going to be bad for affordability. But look, this just reinforces what we're thinking about affordability with respect to the housing market as we look ahead to 2022. In our outlook, we described affordability as the chief headwind to home prices and housing activity this year. Looking back to the end of 2021, home prices were climbing at a record pace of growth. And one of the good things about this climb is we think it's been healthier than the prior times that HPA even approached these levels. We got to almost 20% year over year growth because of the fact that we had an historically tight supply environment, and we had a lot of demand, and that demand was not being stimulated by easing lending standards. Lending standards themselves remained very responsible. James Egan But just because the foundation of the housing market today is healthy, and we believe it is, that doesn't mean it can't be too expensive. As home prices were climbing, mortgage rates continued to fall to record lows, and that really acted as a release valve with respect to affordability in the market. That release valve has already been turned off. Mortgage rates climbed throughout 2021. We expected them to climb in 2022. Yes, we now see them climbing faster than we anticipated, but that release Valve, as I mentioned, was already turned off. Affordability was already a substantial headwind in our call. Jay Bacow All right, Jim. So, we've talked about affordability. Can you remind us where do home prices currently stand? Haven't