The evidence is everywhere: Mortgage rates are at a two-year high, applications have fallen for four straight weeks after climbing for more than a year, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says he would have to "push back" if the impact of rising interest rates were jeopardizing the recovery.

As my co-host Jeff Macke and I discusss in the attached video, the question is whether this short-term repulsion is the start of something bigger or simply an understandable reaction to a volatile market.

For those hoping for answers from the bank earnings out this morning, it appears that the jury is still out on that front too. Take JP Morgan's (JPM) second-quarter mortgage originations, for example, which fell 7% from the first quarter yet were still up 12% from a year ago.

As Macke says, even the lenders themselves are at the mercy of the market and loath to guess what the impact will be on housing demand and ultimately, the broader economy.

"In May, the banks had no idea where rates were going, and so they're going to tell us now where they think they're going to go in August," he says, before labeling the highly complex and qualified earnings reports from banks a ''best guess."

When California attorney Sylvia Chi wanted a new pair of glasses, she came across Warby Parker, an upstart online seller that features hip styles and low prices. She had her prescription but Warby Parker needed one more piece of information to make her glasses – the distance between her pupils.

Chi called a Pearle Vision store where she’d bought her last pair but the store refused to give out the measurement. A local LensCrafters told her its pupil measuring machine was broken. Ultimately, Chi had to pay $25 at a local optometry clinic to get her pupillary distance, or PD.

Turns out the giant of the $28 billion U.S. eyewear market, Luxottica (LUX), owns both store chains. And the Italian company, which also owns everything from brands like Oliver Peoples and Ray-Ban to the Sunglasses Hut chain, has cracked down on giving out the PD measurement.

Optometrists “used to do it for free in optical shops and now they’re refusing to provide that service or charging for it,” says Warby Parker co-founder and co-CEO David Gilboa. “A lot of them work in stores owned by Luxottica.”

“The reason Luxottica invested in all the physical retailers was precisely to create a closed system,” says Barry Lynn, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

The company did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

There’s no doubt that optometrists, wary of Internet competition from Warby Parker, Eyeglass.com and others, have become increasingly reluctant to write the pupillary distance on prescriptions. Patients can ask for the measurement but only five states require that optometrists provide it free of charge -- Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, Massachusetts and New Mexico -- according to the American Optometric Association.