Market Close: Stocks Gain as Crude Falls to $101, Yields Dip • 9/17/26

0:01CNBC Business News Update Market Close. I'm Jessica Ettinger. Wall Street will open Friday morning after a winning Thursday for the major averages. Oil prices ticked lower, so did Treasury yields. Investors taking the Fed's increase in interest rates in stride this week. The Dow was up 317 points, a half percent. NVIDIA shares leading the Dow higher on Thursday. They were up two and a half percent. Cisco shares up two percent. The S &P 500 index was up 85 points. That was more than 1%. The Nasdaq adding 439 points. It was up more than 1.5%. I mean, often you get a little bit of a rethink the day after a Fed reaction.

0:44Got an extra little push by, you know, oil coming in. That allowed for a nice little rally in bonds, too. So Treasury yields coming a little bit out of the danger zone, above 5 % for 10 years. CNBC's Mike Santoli. U.S. crude oil pulled back on reports that Saudi Arabia is offering ship-to-ship transfers to move oil globally. WTI, West Texas Intermediate, down to$101 a barrel on Thursday. But U.S. drivers feeling a big jump in pain at the pump with gas prices eyeing$4.50 a gallon on Thursday. The national average for a gallon of regular hit$4.44. Kepler's Matt Smith with CNBC's Becky Quick on what some call opposite land.

1:26Normally, gas prices go down in the fall. People are kind of bewildered when they see what's happening when they fill up their tank. Yeah, absolutely. And particularly with gasoline, it's a seasonal time of year when it typically drops right. We're through the summer driving season. But in terms of oil prices here, we're up like about$30 from early last month. And so that is working its way into prices of the pump and with diesel, too. And yes, diesel fuel at another record high on Thursday, up nine cents a gallon in one day to$6.40 a gallon. It's an inflation driver. How long before you anticipate that that really works its way through the system?

2:05Diesel prices in particular. It's already doing so, right? Because$6.40 for a gallon, like over 90 % of our groceries move around the U.S. on 18 wheelers. It's agriculture, it's construction, it's manufacturing. You go in the grocery store, you can already see that prices are rising. That's only going to continue as that cost gets passed through. The U.S. economy is a consumer economy. Capital wealth's Kevin Simpson tells CNBC it's only a matter of time until American consumers just can't do these high prices anymore. Well, it's like Econ 101. You can raise prices only so much before sales go down.

2:40But when you have$6 diesel, that just percolates through the entire system. You can pass it through, but it's only to a certain extent until you pull back a little bit as a consumer. Treasury yields did ease a tick on Thursday. Mortgage rates, though, still close to 7.2 percent, the highest in a year and a half. Not good for people who need a reason to sell what they have and go into a new mortgage. Now, with rates going up, people who may have thought about selling, who have locked in a 3 percent, are less inclined to do so because they really don't want to give up their rate. I mean, they don't want to spend more money.

3:16And so that makes complete sense. That's Brown-Harris Stevens CEO, Bess Friedman on CNBC. On Friday's watch list, the Apple iPhone 18 goes on sale. The S &P Dow Jones indexes undergo a quarterly rebalance, effective after market close Friday afternoon. New in theaters, Columbia's horror film Resident Evil. Jessica Edinger, CNBC. Introducing Fidelity Trader Plus. With customizable tools and charts you can access across all your devices. Try our most powerful trading platform yet at fidelity.com slash trader plus. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC.

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