 Nicole Friedman started reporting on housing for the Wall Street Journal in 2020. It was a wild time on the beat, pandemic-fueled frenzy buying, bidding wars, itty-bitty interest rates. And now? That has all changed. And what really changed was that mortgage rates went up rapidly in 2022. We've raised interest rates by a total of five percentage points in order to attain a stance of monetary policy that is sufficiently restrictive to return inflation to 2% over time.