Our US focus page zooms in on the US housing market. The left-hand chart plots the evolution of 30-year mortgage rates, which have accelerated sharply in recent months. While this could lead to a softening in new home sales and housing starts, the better news for the US housing market is that a relatively low proportion of households are on floating rate mortgages. This suggests that the impact of higher mortgage rates will take some time to feed through to the economy.