Stop blaming mortgage rates. A 29-year-old tax law is trapping you in your home

The housing market is stagnant, and while people are staring at interest rates as the culprit, there’s a second culprit: a capital gains tax bill Washington wrote in 1997 and has left alone since. Congress has a chance to fix that with a bill that would index capital gains taxation on home sales for inflation.…

Mortgage rates finally eased a tiny bit, but it was enough to bring some demand back to a very beleaguered mortgage market.