Mortgage rates can respond to changes in inflation, employment, Federal Reserve policy, Treasury yields, and expectations about future economic growth. These factors do not determine mortgage rates by themselves, but they can influence the broader bond market and the pricing lenders offer.
For homebuyers and homeowners, the important question is not simply whether economic news is “good” or “bad.” The key is how new information changes expectations for inflation, interest rates, and the economy. Those changes can contribute to mortgage rate movement and affect purchasing power, refinance opportunities, and monthly payment estimates.
Use the market updates below as supporting information, then consider your specific loan type, credit profile, property, and financing goals when evaluating current mortgage options.
Real Estate & Financial Market Updates
Norfolk County home prices rose 4.6% to $787,365 in August 2026 with nearly half of homes selling above asking, even as inventory climbed 19%
The post Norfolk County, MA Housing Market Update: August 2026 appeared first on Redfin | Real Estate Tips for Home Buying, Selling & More.
Middlesex County home prices rose 2.1% to $847,165 in August 2026, as listings surged and homes sold in a median of 23 days.
The post Middlesex County, MA Housing Market Update: August 2026 appeared first on Redfin | Real Estate Tips for Home Buying, Selling & More.
Hampden County home prices held nearly flat at $358,799 in August 2026, down just 0.1% year over year, as homes sold surged 11% and over 62% of sales closed above asking.
The post Hampden County, MA Housing Market Update: August 2026 appeared first on Redfin | Real Estate Tips for Home Buying, Selling & More.
Travis County home prices fell to $497,336 in August 2026, down 5.3% YoY, as supply swelled to 6.5 months and buyers gained leverage.
The post Travis County, TX Housing Market Update: August 2026 appeared first on Redfin | Real Estate Tips for Home Buying, Selling & More.
After two days of heady discussions with academics and policymakers from around the world in high-altitude Jackson Hole, Wyoming, I’m now decompressing back at Street Level. The main theme of this year’s Kansas City Fed symposium was financial innovation in the payments space—a fast-evolving topic with major implications for consumers and central bankers alike. In this post, I’ll share some general takeaways from those Jackson Hole talks and highlight related New York Fed research on payments and financial intermediation.
The dollar’s share of global official foreign exchange reserves fell from 64 percent in 2015 to 56 percent in 2025. This downward trajectory is sometimes read as evidence that the dollar’s role in international financial markets is eroding. However, aggregate statistics obscure the composition of changes occurring at the country level. In this post, we show that the aggregate decline is not a systematic global shift away from dollar assets. Rather, the aggregate decline reflects the actions of a handful of large reserve holders, changing either their currency preferences or the size of their reserve portfolio. From the perspective of the cross section of countries holding dollar assets, the dollar’s status in official portfolios is largely intact.
The ongoing advancement and adoption of artificial intelligence continues to raise concerns about widespread job losses. Over the past three years, our regional business surveys have asked firms about their AI adoption and its effects on their workforces. This year, we found that AI use among regional businesses has continued to rise sharply, with more than 60 percent of service firms and about half of manufacturers now using AI—a notable increase from 40 percent and 26 percent, respectively, reported in 2025. Despite this rapid adoption, regional firms’ investments in AI are generally modest, usage tends to be concentrated among a small share of workers within firms, and layoffs have remained uncommon. And, while some firms have scaled back hiring due to AI, others have added workers to help them use it. Retraining employees in response to AI remains the primary way firms are adjusting their workforces.
Stock market participation in the U.S. has changed dramatically over the past four decades. In the mid-1980s, fewer than 30 percent of households held equity. By the early 2000s, more than half of U.S. households owned equity, either directly or through mutual funds, 401(k)s, and IRAs. As participation widened, the way stock market fluctuations passed through to household spending may have changed, with potential implications for how the broader economy behaves. An argument can be made that the rise in equity market participation has dampened the response of output to interest rate changes as stock market fluctuations are now spread across a larger share of households, moderating movements in consumer spending, asset prices, and investment spending.
A long-standing body of research, inspired by Bernanke and Kuttner (2005), has documented the effects of Fed interest rate surprises on stock markets. While stock markets provide valuable information about the investor risk premium and dividend growth expectations, researchers have only recently developed more comprehensive tools to estimate the term structure of equity risk premia and dividend growth expectations across a broad range of maturities. In this post, we investigate the impact of monetary policy surprises (or shocks) on short- and long-term estimates of risk premia and growth expectations through the lens of the Giglio, Kelly, and Kozak (2024) model.
