Market Close: Stocks Mixed, 30-Year Mortgages Hit 7.2%, Gas Nears $4.50 • 9/18/26

0:00CNBC Business News Update. I'm Jessica Ettinger. Wall Street opens Monday morning after a mixed Friday for stocks and a mixed week as well, with only the Nasdaq notching a winning week on Friday. The Dow was down 95 points, led lower by shares of IBM. They were down 3 percent. Disney dropped 2 percent. The S &P 500 index was in the green, up 12. The Nasdaq was up 104 points on Friday. The index is kind of surviving, if not thriving. You know, we're flattish basically on the week. And I think that a lot of that is because just enough of the big names have managed to get revived and support the index.

0:42You know, pretty good 5 percent two-day rally in semiconductors. But of course, they're still, as a group, 20 percent off their highs. It's the kind of market we have. It's kind of day-to-day. One thing or the other is working and it hasn't been able to really get up much of a head of steam. That's CNBC's Mike Santoli. It was a week when the Fed raised interest rates, and by Friday afternoon, the yield on the 10-year Treasury was back up over 5%. Mortgage rates ticked higher. Two would-be homebuyers out looking over the weekend, facing the highest mortgage rates in about a year and a half. We've crossed a very real psychological threshold of 7%.

1:15The pressure on the first-time homebuyer at any decision point is affecting everything. That's EXP Realty CEO Leo Pereja on CNBC. The average rate on a 30-year fixed home loan sitting at 7.2 percent, according to Mortgage News Daily. Back in February, before the U.S. sent missiles into Iran, it was in the fives. It had dropped to 5.99 percent. Serious concerns about AI safety and the debate rages about rogue agents wiping out humanity, perhaps triggering nuclear weapons or creating bioweapons or worse, and humans unable to stop this. Microsoft published a code of conduct to help govern its AI models.

1:57Its key message is that people matter more than AI. CNBC asked Microsoft CEO of AI, Mustafa Suleiman, about liability and what happens when an AI model causes damage. I just got an email a couple weeks ago from the manufacturer of my car. There was a defect with it. I took it back. They repaired it at no cost. That's how it works. I don't know why there's even an issue. Manufacturers are responsible for the quality and the safety of the products they create. We've got an incredible track record as a society of doing that for 100 years. Broadly speaking, airlines are incredibly safe. Cars are incredibly safe.

2:42They enable us to eat healthy food that doesn't poison us. And we shouldn't be reinventing the wheel here. It's another weekend of pain at the pump for American drivers, even with U.S. crude oil trading under$100 a barrel by Friday afternoon. The national average for a gallon of regular near$4.50. A dozen states higher than that. Diesel with a fresh record high on Friday, according to AAA. The market is proving that it has zero tolerance for any refinery problems. There was a refinery problem at the ExxonMobil plant in Joliet, Illinois. and there was a problem at the Valero Refinery in Port Arthur, Texas.

3:21And subsequently, we've seen prices in Chicago, for example, go up by 40 or 50 or 60 cents a gallon. So that's pretty daunting. It's pretty challenging going forward. That's Gulf Oil's Chief Energy Advisor Tom Kloza on CNBC. On the coming week's watch list, earnings are coming from Costco, Olive Garden, Parent Darden restaurants, home builder KB Home, AutoZone and General Mills. We get newly built home sales numbers. We get the latest on consumer sentiment as consumers watch prices at the pump. And the U.N. General Assembly is on in New York. Jessica Edinger, CNBC. Some of the most important design choices are the ones that go unnoticed.

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