Mortgage rates have surpassed 7%, but buying a new home could net you a lower rate. About a quarter of buyers from home builder PulteGroup locked in rates as low as 5.75% in the first quarter, CEO Ryan Marshall said on the company’s first quarter earnings call last week. “Our company’s ability to offer targeted
Mortgage rates topped 7% this past week for the first time in 2024, according to Freddie Mac . The increase comes at a pivotal time for the U.S. housing market, which saw existing-home sales hit a near-30-year low in 2023 as costs rose. Higher rates could reduce buyer demand, slow price growth, further crimp sales,
Two years on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and global finance firms are still feeling the impact of the fallout, with many still scrambling to untangle their businesses from the region. The outlook for international finance giants in Russia remains on a knife-edge, as the country continues to face a host of challenges. These range
Investors will have to wait until at least July for those widely expected interest-rate cuts, according to one Federal Reserve president’s outlook. Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic said rate cuts probably wouldn’t be suitable until the third quarter given the current strength of the economy. That’s a quarter earlier than he originally predicted, Bostic said,
Indonesia will go the polls on Wednesday to elect a new president to replace Joko Widodo. The vote’s importance should not be underestimated. Covering 17,000 islands across South East Asia and Oceania — including Java and Sumatra — the republic has important geopolitical and global economic clout. With about 280 million inhabitants, encompassing an estimated
Published: Feb. 6, 2024 at 6:25 a.m. ET Kwasi Kwarteng, who served as the U.K.’s finance minister during the mini-budget crisis which saw Britain’s pound drop to its lowest ever levels against the U.S. dollar, has said he will not stand for reelection as a member of parliament. The British politician, who had previously worked
While the U.S. stock market has been pricing in a “soft-landing” scenario for the economy, a blowout January jobs report, relatively strong corporate earnings, and Federal Reserve Jerome Powell’s comments during the past week could point to the possibility of “no landing,” where the economy is resilient while inflation stays target. Such a scenario
Stock investors have gotten off to a wobbly start to the new year, hobbled by shifting expectations on the timing and extent of Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts in 2024. All three major U.S. stock indexes snapped a nine-week winning streak on Friday, after unexpectedly strong December job gains prompted traders to briefly pull back on
Liu Jianguo, a 47-year-old teacher in the second-tier city of Guiyang, considers himself lucky. He lives in a sliver of China where the property market isn’t withering. “I have friends in the big cities,” he said. “They are aware they’re in a bad place for buying or selling real estate.” New home prices in China’s