U.S. mortgage rates declined to their lowest level in nearly a year, prompting more homebuyers and homeowners to apply for loans. The average interest rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage fell to 6.49% in the week ending Sept. 5, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA). That is the lowest since October 2024. The lower rates pushed more borrowers to act. Homeowners rushed to refinance, with applications up 12% from the week before and 34% higher than the same week last year, per the MBA. Buyers al ...

Retiring early may seem like a dream come true. And for some, it is — but often not for the reasons you might think. While more than half (58%) of workers retire earlier than planned, it’s frequently due to unforeseen life events, according to research from Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies and Transamerica Institute. Learn More: I’m a Financial Advisor: Here Are the Top 3 Surprises My Clients Face in Retirement Find Out: 3 Advanced Investing Moves Experts Use to Minimize Taxes and Help Boost Retur ...

Survey: Small business owners are less confident about year-end profits Business owners are heading into the last quarter of 2025 — often the most crucial time of year for retail, e-commerce, restaurants, and hospitality — with less confidence in profit growth expectations than they had at this time last year, according to a recent NEXT Insurance survey. This year, just under half of business owners (49%) expect their profits to increase, down from 55% in 2024. That six‑point drop may reflect that small b ...

At the same time, marketplaces Collector Crypt and Phygitals have established similar businesses, and they issue their respective NFTs on Solana . Another project called RIP.FUN is in closed beta on the Ethereum scaling network Base . The NFTs issued by these firms are permissionless, so anyone can build an application that supports them on-chain.Courtyard emerged as a marketplace for tokenized Pokémon cards, and other collectibles, on Ethereum scaling network Polygon in 2021. And its business has been grow ...

For some DeFi projects, when airdrop rewards dry up, it kickstarts a terminal liquidity decline from which they don’t recover. DeFi lending protocol Gearbox has defied that pattern. Last year, its total value locked fell 80% from its $410 million peak. Users caused the slump by abandoning Gearbox when opportunities to farm airdrops of restaking services like Renzo shrank. TVL is a metric that measures the amount of deposits to a DeFi protocol. Yet, Gearbox’s TVL has since bounced back to $340 million, D ...

Bitcoin ticked higher after the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the producer price index dropped 0.1% in August—suggesting there’s less pressure on producers to raise prices and making a Fed rate cut more likely next week. As of this writing, BTC has gained about 0.5% in the past hour since the new U.S. economic data was released and is trading over  $114,000. That puts Bitcoin 2.3% higher than it was this time last week, but still 5.7% below its price 30 days ago. Ethereum also got a slight boost fro ...

ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images Moneywise and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue through links in the content below. Insurance companies are cautiously optimistic about the Trump administration’s policies for their industry: insurers saw their stocks soar in early April when the federal government announced a record 5.06% benchmark increase to Medicare Advantage plans. Must Read That is more than double the rate (2.23%) proposed by the Biden administration in January 2025, which was ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. wholesale inventories increased a bit less than initially thought in July, suggesting businesses were not rushing to rebuild inventory after stocks were depleted in the second quarter. Stocks at wholesalers edged up 0.1%, instead of rising 0.2% as estimated last month, the Commerce Department's Census Bureau said on Wednesday. Economists polled by Reuters had expected last month's estimate would be unrevised. Inventories, a key part of gross domestic product, gained 0.2% in Jun ...

Genesis has secured the Stage 1 Mining Proposal and Mine Closure Plan approval from the Department of Mines, Petroleum and Exploration for its Tower Hill project in Western Australia. This milestone aligns with the company's development timeline for stage one mining, ensuring that the project is on track for mine development in fiscal year 2027 (FY27) and the extraction of first ore in FY28. Genesis anticipates that agreements with rail users regarding the shortening of the rail line for stage two will b ...

Foodservice technology provider PAR Technology has introduced the PAR AI intelligence suite, a new embedded intelligence layer within its PAR product suite. The launch features an intelligent assistant, Coach AI, tailored to enhance critical functions in restaurant operations, facilitating actionable insights and outcomes. This integration of AI-powered features into PAR's core offerings, including point of sale (POS), drive-through, loyalty, back office and payments, requires no new apps or technical tr ...