Thursday, October 15, 2026
The average 30-year mortgage rate rose to 7.28 per cent this week, Freddie Mac said, the highest since November 2023 and the biggest weekly jump since October 2022. The rate is the same as three years ago. What produces it is not. In 2023 lenders charged almost three points over the ten-year Treasury. Now they charge about two, and the ten-year is doing the rest.
In a survey of 520 homeowners in April, 44 percent said their insurance premium now rivals their mortgage payment and 23 percent had been dropped by a carrier since 2024. Of those dropped, 16 percent ended up in state-sponsored coverage.
Headline inflation cooled, but households keep feeling squeezed, and the culprit hiding in the budget is insurance: home, auto and health premiums repricing years of accumulated risk.
After years of earning nothing, household savers have become rate shoppers, and the deposit market is behaving like a market again.
The meme-stock cohort did not disappear when the fever broke. It aged into the most financially engaged retail generation in decades, with the account balances to show it.