Market Close: Stocks Lower, Gas Prices Rise, Mortgage Rates Near 7.2% • 9/14/26

0:01CNBC Business News Update Market Close Monday. I'm Jessica Ettinger. Wall Street opens Tuesday morning after AI tech leaders warned that the industry needs to slow down for the safety of humanity. Bond yields were higher. Oil was up and the major averages were slightly lower. The Dow falling 152 points. Shares of Caterpillar let it lower down 4 percent. The S &P 500 index down 37 points. That was a half percent. The Nasdaq down 146 points. That was a half percent. Chipmaker shares in the red with Micron, Intel, and Cerebris all down at least five percent. The yield on the 10-year Treasury hit five percent for the first time since 2023.

0:45Traders are bracing for a possible Fed interest rate increase this week. Yardini Research's Ed Yardini tells CNBC the 10-year Treasury at 5 percent? That's not a bad thing. I'm thinking that 4 to 5 percent bond yields on a 10-year is really a vote of confidence in the economy. It shows that the economy is doing fine. At 5 percent, I'm not terribly alarmed. I'd be more concerned if Favre State quickly goes up to 6 percent. Mortgage rates just hit their highest in a year and a half on average for a 30-year fixed home loan, getting closer to 7.2 percent. 7.17 percent, according to Mortgage News Daily.

1:26That is the highest level since January 2025. The timing not great as the Labor Day weekend marked the start of the fall housing market after a pretty slow summer. Affordability is weakening with every push higher on the 30-year fix. That's CNBC's Diana Olick. Americans are paying more at the pump again, 4.32 now for a gallon of regular, according to AAA. Diesel led another new record high. One Point BFG's Peter Buchvar tells CNBC the energy pain is on the horizon. There's no sign that this ends anytime soon. The situation in the Middle East, we thought that there would be a deal back in April.

2:04And here we are in September, approaching October. And now we're getting to some major pain points. Saudi Arabia shut down a pipeline that's been used to bypass the Strait of Hormuz after it was attacked and damaged. That pipeline was carrying about 7 million barrels of oil a day. What we've seen is what happens when you have no safety nets anymore. Our supplies out of reserves are dwindling and the Middle East is still as volatile and now just became significantly more dangerous. Hormuz was essentially effectively not functioning, and the bypass was this pipeline and the Red Sea. The Trump administration did not offer any support to Saudi Arabia when the Houthis did their attack a few days ago.

2:45And now they control both Bab el-Mandab, the other strait, and they've damaged that pipeline that is a bypass. So we're at significantly lower volumes. That's TWG Global's Amos Hochstein on CNBC. Total credit card spending in August was up by 4.5 % year over year in new data from the Bank of America Institute. They look at all their credit card and debit card users. It suggests the U.S. consumer is healthy, but is the spending higher just because prices are higher? Or because people really are buying more? If you break down the spending growth relative to the transaction growth, you get a different story depending on the sector.

3:24In airlines, if you look at their transaction growth, their transaction growth actually was negative. So suggesting that pricing was doing the work in the airline sector. If you look in other places, like in restaurants, like in clothing, there you're seeing the transaction count increase too, suggesting in those categories that it's continued consumption. Bank of America Institute's Liz Everett-Crisburg on CNBC. On Tuesday's watch list, the Fed begins that two-day meeting on interest rates with a decision on Wednesday. We get retail sales numbers for August. Jessica Edinger, CNBC. Introducing Fidelity Trader Plus, the next generation of advanced trading from Fidelity.

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