Mortgages locked in at low costs provided US consumers with an extra $600 billion in spending cash since 2022, blunting the impact of the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes, according to analysis by the Swiss Re Institute.

The boost received by homeowners with fixed-rate mortgages amounted to almost 2% of all personal consumption spending, wrote economists Mahir Rasheed and James Finucane at the insurance firm’s research arm.