Market Midday: Stocks Fall, 7% Mortgage Rates Are Back, Gas Prices Surge • 9/10/26

0:00See NBC Business News Update Market Midday. I'm Jessica Ettinger. A sea of red on Wall Street this afternoon. The major average is on pace for their fourth losing day in a row. Investors may be looking at a Terra trade. There are reasonable alternatives to stocks. Bond yields pushing higher. The Dow is down 338 points this afternoon. More than a half percent. Amgen shares leading at lower. They're down 2 percent. The S &P 500 index dropping 41 points. The Nasdaq dropping 144 points, about a half a percent for both the S &P and the Nasdaq. U.S. crude oil topping$100 a barrel. The yield on the 10-year Treasury topping 4.9 percent today.

0:48Breaking news on mortgage rates, 7 percent is here again for a 30-year fixed home loan. The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage just crossed 7 to 7.07 percent, according to Mortgage News Daily. It's the first time we've seen a seven handle since May of 2025. This comes as a surge in oil prices caused another jump in bond yields. Mortgage rates loosely follow the yield, of course, on the 10-year Treasury. And more now from CNBC's Diana Olick on data. The sluggish real estate market got even more sluggish in August. Existing home sales were down, but prices weren't. Existing home sales in August fell 2%, the slowest in over a year.

1:29There were 1.62 million homes for sale at the end of August. That's up 3.2 % from July and up 5.9 % from the year before. That's the highest level in over a decade. Now, despite higher supply, prices continue to rise. The median price of a home sold in August was$429 ,100. That's up 1.6 % year over year. Homes are sitting longer, 31 days compared with 29 in July. Drivers facing prices at the pump that popped again overnight. $4.27 now, up a nickel since yesterday for the national average for a gallon of regular according to AAA. It's a big surge as oil prices have risen for eight straight days, the longest streak of increases for oil in about three years.

2:17High gas prices, yes, but no consumer alarm bells yet. The U.S. is a consumer economy with consumer spending making up about two-thirds of U.S. economic growth. Some big bank CEOs telling CNBC that so far U.S. consumers are actually doing fine with high inflation and high gas prices. Here's Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf on credit card use. People are paying with plastic, but they seem to be making payments. We think about credit on the consumer side. Delinquencies are actually improving from very, very healthy levels already. We don't expect that to continue. It's not going to go on forever. But the health of the consumer from a credit perspective is really strong.

2:56They're spending. A similar picture of the U.S. consumer from Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan on CNBC. They're borrowing. They're using the lines. The credit quality is good. They figured out in a world where a lot of things are changing, they figured out a path forward pretty much. They still worry about gas prices and how it affects product prices. But everything we see is fine. Inflation rose at the wholesale level in August, as expected, four-tenths of a percent from July. Year over year, the producer price index sitting at 5.4 percent. We get the latest on consumer price inflation tomorrow morning with the CPI, the Consumer Price Index.

3:36Netflix airing the first international NFL game of the season tonight from Melbourne, Australia. The 49ers and Rams. Jessica Edinger, CNBC. Hey, Fidelity. Can I get a second opinion on stocks in the Fidelity app?

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