Macroeconomics
Housing & Credit Stress
Credit spreads, bank credit, and supply — blended into a composite stress gauge.
Regime:
Tightening
Stress Composite
0.66
Mortgage rate: 6.16%
HY OAS Level
2.76%
5y percentile: 6%
Housing Supply
7.9 months
Credit & Delinquency
+0.8% YoY credit
Delinquency: 1.33%
Housing & Credit Stress Composite
High Yield OAS Percentile Ribbon
Commercial Bank Credit
Months' Supply vs New Home Sales
Methodology
How we build the housing & credit stress signal
Mortgage, delinquency, bank credit, and housing inventory data are updated straight from FRED. We resample mixed-frequency series to month-start values so the composite stress gauge is meaningful.
Key FRED inputs
- Mortgage rates — National 30-year fixed mortgage rate benchmark (weekly).
- High-yield spreads — Option-adjusted spreads for speculative-grade bonds as a credit stress proxy.
- Loan delinquencies — Consumer loan delinquency data from bank call reports.
- Months' supply — Inventory of new homes relative to the current sales pace.
- Commercial bank credit — Weekly level of loans and leases outstanding.
- New home sales — Seasonally adjusted annual rate of new single-family home sales.
Regime vocabulary
- Benign
- Composite z-score < 0.3 after resampling and 60-month normalization — funding and housing supply look healthy.
- Tightening
- Composite between 0.3 and 0.7 — stress is building as spreads widen, delinquencies tick up, or inventory rises.
- Stressed
- Composite ≥ 0.7 — multiple inputs have moved more than 0.7 standard deviations above their 5-year trend.
Additional context
- HY OAS, mortgage rates, and bank credit update weekly, so the stress gauge can move before the monthly housing reports arrive.
- Bank credit YoY in the summary card is calculated as a 12-month percent change on the seasonally-adjusted series.