Are interest rates cheating in the economic detection catagory?

What's to think about present day rate figuring?

This is really an email to my fellow Loan Officers and other economic guru's in hopes that they might share their thoughts, so everyone might benefit from the responses...if there are any.  It appears that watching the different economic indicators that typically have warned us or dictated what the rates were going to do are not "playing by the rules" right now.  Anybody else feel that way?

It seems like some of the indicators from economic research like the Consumer Confidence reports and all the other indicators we see do what we Loan Officers want them to do, and they continue to report lower, and sometimes much lower than the forecasters expect and yet we see rates increase.  It is happening more and more often now.  I know that yes, we see two or three reports a day and some have more bearing on rates than others and all that, but I've seen a good number of days where all reports in one day perform like a refinancer or Loan Officer might hope, and rates STILL worsen.

I've been saying partly in joking, our economy runs on 80% hard facts and 20% placebo...Americans have had the attitude, "ohhhhhhh, we are America, the Jolly Red White and Blue Giant...the economy will turn around."  With that in mind, I have always thought, if the investors on Wall Street were robots and only invested with buying and selling as indicators told them and they didn't use any human decision at all, would we be worse off?  Is placebo, or positive thinking keeping us a float at any measure?  I know some of you are going to think that the whole Wall Street commission scandal thing where Obama scolded those folks might have an effect to the fact that we wouldn't have had to pay commissions to robots and therefore that money would not have been blown...not my thinking or direction.

That being said, it feels like maybe Wall Street is losing some of that positive thinking and mortgage rates are catching some momentum going in the wrong direction.  One day up a little, and the next day down a little...2 days up a little and one day down a little.  That up and down track record of late has kept us at or below 5% on the 30 yr for quite some time now, but differently than economist have expected, WHO THINKS RATES ARE GOING TO START MOVING UP FASTER THAN EXPECTED AT THIS POINT?