Market News

As of July, consumer prices for food at home were 26% higher than they were at the end of 2019.

The gold spot price settled at $2,500.05 a troy ounce at an auction on Monday morning. It was the first time in the market's over 100-year history that this price exceeded $2,500.

Sonder Holdings, a global brand of premium apartment-style accommodations, announced that it has entered into a long-term strategic licensing agreement with Marriott International.

Now, 8.5% of U.S. homes have an estimated value of $1 million or more, a record high. That is up from 7.6% a year ago and more than double the 4% recorded before the pandemic.

The average rate on the standard 30-year fixed mortgage dropped below 6.5% last week in the sharpest decline of the year. That was more than a percentage point lower than its peak last year of nearly 8%.

The National Association of Realtors, or NAR, reached a landmark legal settlement and in August most of its roughly 1.5 million members will be subject to the new rules. Two main changes are happening now. First, listings in local databases called multiple-listing services will no longer show whether a seller is offering to pay a buyer’s agent, or how much. Second, buyers will be required to sign agreements specifying how much their agents will be paid. Buyers will do this before they start touring homes with agents.

Investors this year added an average of $556 million a week into U.S.-based derivative-income exchange-traded funds, which sell options contracts on stocks held in the fund to juice returns. Net flows into those products plunged to about $117 million last week.

Hotels and airlines expect Americans to partake in less leisure travel and pare down the trips they take in the months ahead.

The average rate on the standard 30-year fixed mortgage fell around a quarter percentage point to 6.47%, a low not seen since May 2023 and the sharpest weekly decline in around nine months.

More than $40 billion of office loans were in distress at the end of the second quarter, which is around three times the value of distressed apartment loans. But the pool of apartment mortgages that could get into difficulty in the future is larger—$56.9 billion are at risk of distress, compared with $50.9 billion for offices.