🚀 Down Payment Wall remains despite lower home prices

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Market Overview
Read time 1.4 minutes

Year To Date Performances:

1. As 2025 draws to a close, the American housing market is experiencing a cautious thaw as cooling mortgage rates and stagnant price growth begin to realign the math for prospective buyers. While the 30-year fixed rate has retreated to 6.19% and inventory has surged by 12% over the last year, a significant "down payment wall" continues to prevent a full-scale recovery. Despite prices effectively declining in inflation-adjusted terms—with national appreciation sitting at a mere 0.3% against 3.1% inflation—the typical homebuyer still requires seven years of dedicated saving to enter the market. This financial hurdle, nearly double the pre-pandemic average, has pushed the national homeownership rate to a six-year low of 65%, creating a market of "growing interest but stalled entry" where rising contract signings are being frustrated by a lack of upfront liquid capital.

2. Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank has cemented its position as the ultimate financier of the artificial intelligence era, officially completing a monumental $40 billion investment into OpenAI. By transferring a final tranche of roughly $22.5 billion last week, the Japanese conglomerate has secured a greater than 10% equity stake in the ChatGPT creator, valuing the company at $260 billion pre-money (and nearly $300 billion post-money). This capital infusion, which required Son to liquidate high-performing assets like SoftBank’s entire Nvidia stake, transitions OpenAI from a research-focused startup into a global infrastructure powerhouse. The funds are primarily earmarked for "Project Stargate," a massive $500 billion joint venture with Oracle and MGX designed to build the world’s most advanced AI data centers, effectively anchoring SoftBank as the primary architect of the physical "compute grid" required to achieve artificial general intelligence.

3. The Federal Reserve's December 9–10 meeting minutes reveal a "finely balanced" and deeply divided committee that narrowly pushed through a 25-basis-point rate cut, lowering the federal funds rate to 3.5%–3.75%. Despite the 9–3 outcome, the minutes highlight that multiple officials who voted for the cut were open to a "hold," citing a "data fog" created by the October–November government shutdown that made it difficult to distinguish between temporary labor market softening and structural decline. While the Fed officially restarted a $40 billion-per-month bond-buying program to stabilize bank reserves, the updated "dot plot" suggests a much slower easing path for 2026, targeting a terminal "neutral" rate of ~3%. With a hawkish rotation of regional presidents set to gain voting power in January, markets are bracing for a prolonged "wait-and-see" period.

   Headlines

   1. Apple is counting on AI-powered Siri to drive future iPhone sales.

   2. The US has announced sanctions against Iranian and Venezuelan groups.