The big story remains the stock market which has been led downward the past several days by the shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac due to a media frenzy about their hypothetical collapse.  The stock market is flat today and the bond market has been down from the high's of yesterday.  Our rate sheets are essentially flat.   In today's economic news, initial jobless claims for the week ended 7/5 were down 58,000 which was  much lower than the 14,000 projected decline.  A lower than # than expected means that the report was stronger than expected as less people were filing new unemployment claims.  This is slightly mortgage market unfriendly as the mortgage market tends to improve on negative economic news which signal that rates will need to stay low for long and tends to deteriorate on stronger economic news.  In other news that is relevant for mortgage rates the price of oil is up today on jitters about the missle testing by Iran.