Acceleration in U.S. growth and rising energy costs will likely translate into higher long-term [interest] rates.

Last Friday's unexpectedly weak employment report caused interest rates on long-term Treasury bonds and, by extension mortgage rates, to fall as investors worried about the health of the U.S. economy.

Expecting job growth on the order of about 150,000 in December, financial markets were taken aback, to say the least, when those figures came in at only a thousand new jobs.

The 30-year [fixed-rate mortgage] came in under 6 percent for the last 22 weeks of this year. As a matter of fact, mortgage rates in 2004 averaged around 5.84 percent, the second lowest annual rate ever recorded in the history of Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey.

Lower figures for the recently released producer-price index and consumer- price index, and lower but still strong gross domestic product, combined with the seasonal slowdown in the housing market led to another decline in mortgage rates this week.

It is something that we are paying attention to very closely.