By ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writer

The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage slipped this week to its lowest level in 10 months, but remains close to where it’s been in recent weeks.

The long-term rate eased to 6.56% from 6.58% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. A year ago, the rate averaged 6.35%.

Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, were unchanged from last week. The average rate held steady at 5.69%. A year ago, it was 5.51%, Freddie Mac said.

Elevated mortgage rates have added to a slump in the U.S. housing market that began in early 2022, when rates began climbing from pandemic lows.

For much of the year, the average rate on a 30-year mortgage has hovered relatively close to its 2025 high of just above 7%, set in mid-January. It’s has mostly trended lower six weeks in a row and is now at the lowest level since Oct. 24, when it averaged 6.54%.

The recent downward trend in mortgage rates bodes well for prospective homebuyers who have been held back by stubbornly high home financing costs. But it has yet to translate into a turnaround for home sales, which have remained sluggish this year after sinking in 2024 to their lowest level in nearly 30 years.

Economists generally expect the average rate on a 30-year mortgage to remain near the mid-6% range this year.

Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy decisions to bond market investors’ expectations for the economy and inflation.

The main barometer is the 10-year Treasury yield, which lenders use as a guide to pricing home loans. The yield was at 4.21% at midday Thursday, down from 4.24% late Wednesday.

The yield has been mostly easing since mid-July as bond traders weighed data on inflation, the job market and how the potential economic impact of the Trump administration’s tariffs may influence the Fed’s interest rate policy moves.

In a high-profile speech last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell signaled the central bank may cut rates soon even as inflation risks remain elevated.

Powell noted that there are risks of both rising unemployment and stubbornly higher inflation, and suggested that with hiring sluggish, the job market could weaken further. That could warrant the Fed adjusting its “policy stance,” he said.

The central bank has so far been hesitant to cut interest rates out of fear that Trump’s tariffs could push inflation higher, but data showing hiring slowed last month have fueled speculation that the Fed will cut its main short-term interest rate next month.

Related Articles

Online age checks are proliferating, but so are concerns they curtail internet freedom

How Gen Z is preparing (or not) for retirement

Fed official sues Trump over attempt to fire her, challenging his power over the independent agency

US applications for jobless benefits fell last week as layoffs remain low

Japan’s chief trade envoy postpones US trip as Tokyo calls for faster action on its tariffs deal

The Fed doesn’t set mortgage rates. And while a Fed rate cut could give the job market and overall economy a boost, it could also fuel inflation. That could push bond yields higher, driving mortgage rates upward in turn.

“While the Fed is likely to cut interest rates at their September meeting, it is not at all certain that mortgage rates are going to come down,” said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS. “As a result, buyers and sellers are still going to be cautious and the market could remain gridlocked this fall.”

New data on contract signings suggest home sales could remain sluggish in the near term.

A seasonally adjusted index of pending U.S. home sales fell 0.4% in July from the previous month, the National Association of Realtors reported Thursday. Pending home sales rose 0.7% from July last year.

There’s usually a month or two lag between a contract signing and when the sale is finalized, which makes pending home sales a bellwether for future completed home sales.

By GERALD HERBERT and TED ANTHONY, Associated Press

The power of place is real.

In an increasingly virtual world, the physical spots where momentous things happened remain potent — and able to evoke some of our deepest-cutting moments.

That was the thinking behind these photos from New Orleans on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. By projecting images of places at some of their worst moments onto the way those places and neighborhoods appear now, something of a rudimentary visual time machine emerges.

The photos haunt. They bring back the chaos and fear of those jumbled days two decades ago. Images of moments captured and gone — water pushing up against buildings, makeshift memorials, empty roads with the projection of the days when people were using them in desperate bids to get out.

In one frame, the wreckage and rubble outside a house in 2005 is projected, at night, against the house as it stands today. In another, a woman, huddled up, wrapped in an American flag, braces herself against the elements and the world around him. Today, projected against a building, it is a phantom portal into another era.

Photography freezes and preserves moments. By having those moments touch time — reappearing in the city, in the spots where they happened in the first place — the power of the photos is magnified.

Remembering history is grounded in summoning the past in vivid and relevant ways. By bringing August 2005 in New Orleans to August 2025, a generation later, these photos show not only what disaster looked like, but what recovery and moving on look like as well.

This photo of a man pushing his bicycle through floodwaters near the Superdome in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, taken by AP photographer Eric Gay, is projected Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025, onto the same spot in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This photo of a makeshift tomb at a New Orleans street corner, concealing a body that had been lying on the sidewalk for days in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, taken by AP photographer Dave Martin, is projected onto the same sidewalk Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2025, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This photo showing throngs of New Orleans residents gathering at a evacuation staging area along Interstate 10 in Metairie, La., in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, taken by AP photographer Dave Martin, is projected Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025, onto the same roadway. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This photo of a New Orleans resident walking through floodwaters coated with a fine layer of oil in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, taken by AP photographer Bill Haber, is projected Thursday, Aug. 14, 2025, in New Orleans, underneath the same overpass where photo was made. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This photo of people taking goods from stores on Canal Street in downtown New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, taken by AP photographer Eric Gay, is projected Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025, onto a storefront in the same location. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This photo of Milvertha Hendricks, 84, waiting in the rain with other flood victims outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, taken by AP photographer Eric Gay, is projected Monday, Aug. 25, 2025, next to statues of the king and queen of Mardi Gras next to the center. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This photo of receding floodwaters leaving their mark on a house and automobile on Orleans Avenue in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, taken by AP photographer Ric Francis, is projected Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2025, onto the same house. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This photo of Valerie Thomas and her nieces Shante Fletcher, 6, and Sarine Fletcher, 11, viewing the destruction of her brother’s home in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, taken by AP photographer Gerald Herbert, is projected Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025, onto the same block, while a heat lightning storm illuminates the clouds. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This photo of a young man wading through chest-deep floodwaters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, taken by AP photographer Dave Martin, is projected Monday, Aug. 25, 2025, next to a mural of New Orleans music legend Allen Toussaint, below the overpass where the original photo was made. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This photo showing the body of a flood victim tied to a telephone pole in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, taken by AP photographer Steve Senne, is projected Monday, Aug. 18, 2025, onto the same spot the original photo was taken. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This photo of a poodle perching itself precariously upon a pile of trash while surrounded by floodwaters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, taken by AP photographer Rick Bowmer, is projected Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025, onto a house in a neighborhood that was flooded by the storm. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This photo of the FEMA markings indicating a deceased victim in the home of Michael Harrison, who died inside during Hurricane Katrina in Bay St. Louis, Miss., taken by AP photographer Gerald Herbert, nephew of Harrison, is projected Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025, onto his grave in Pass Christian, Miss. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This photo showing flood victims sitting at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center where they had been waiting for days to be evacuated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, taken by AP photographer Eric Gay, is projected Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025, along the Mississippi River behind the convention center. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Related Articles

Gun used in Emmett Till’s lynching is displayed in a museum 70 years after his murder

Mystery surrounds $1.2 billion Army contract to build huge detention tent camp in Texas desert

Online age checks are proliferating, but so are concerns they curtail internet freedom

A mother’s choice: Jail in LA or deportation to Mexico with her children

The Treasury Department wants US banks to monitor for suspected Chinese money laundering networks

By SOPHIE BATES, Associated Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The gun used in the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till is now on display for the public to see, 70 years after the killing.

The Mississippi Department of Archives and History unveiled the .45-caliber pistol and its holster during a news conference Thursday, which is the 70th anniversary of Till’s murder.

The gun belonged to John William “J.W.” Milam who, alongside Roy Bryant, abducted Till from his great-uncle’s home on Aug. 28, 1955. The white men tortured and killed Till after the teenager was accused of whistling at a white woman in a rural Mississippi grocery store.

Till’s body was later found in the Tallahatchie River. Bryant and Milam were charged with Till’s murder, but they were acquitted by an all-white-male jury.

The gun was previously in the possession of a family in the Mississippi Delta, who donated it on the condition of anonymity. It will be displayed in the Emmett Till exhibit at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. The gun was authenticated using the serial number, which matched the one written in FBI reports on Till’s murder.

Michael Morris, the director of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the Museum of Mississippi History, said he hopes the anniversary will cause people to reflect on how Till’s story has impacted societal progress.

“To me, that’s the legacy. It’s not just his death. It’s the way that he still finds a way to inspire folks to be the change that they want to see in the world,” Morris said.

Till’s murder was a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement. Thousands came to his funeral, and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open casket so the country could see the gruesome state of her son’s body.

Related Articles

A mother’s choice: Jail in LA or deportation to Mexico with her children

The Treasury Department wants US banks to monitor for suspected Chinese money laundering networks

US applications for jobless benefits fell last week as layoffs remain low

Rwanda says 7 deportees arrived from the US in August under agreement with Washington

Today in History: August 28, Emmett Till’s brutalized body found

Texas Observer reader,

Gall. We live in a state whose top leaders have entirely, vastly, monumentally too much goddamn gall. 

Just five days after the deadliest Texas flood in 104 years, Governor Greg Abbott announced a special legislative session not narrowly focused on the disaster but rather covering a Christmas list of far-right pet political projects including a Trump-led redistricting power grab. At the time of his announcement, more than 150 human beings were still officially missing in the Hill Country. 

By the time you read this, you’ll already know how that special session turned out. You might even—God help you (me, us all…)—be already following stories about a second one. So it goes. Today’s news moves at an unnatural speed, accelerated by technology, and today’s politics do the same, unimpeded by accountability.  

September/October 2025 Issue (Texas Observer)

Maybe you know that all too well, or feel it, something like a buzzing in the brain dispersing complex thoughts or strong moral sentiment. Maybe that’s part of why you picked up this magazine, a journalistic product whose norms developed in a bygone era but may be most needed today. Novelty, clarity, challenge, curation, empathy, elegance—all features of this form that are disfavored by profit-driven algorithms.

In this issue, I hope you’ll find and enjoy these sorely missed anachronisms. Whether in our investigative features that tackle stubborn policy issues—each amounting in its own way to state mistreatment of the vulnerable—or in our shorter pieces that illuminate a Jewish case against border militarization, an intellectual battle over Texas history, and, yes, the state of screamo music in Austin bookstores. 

It’s a pleasure to edit this stapled stack of papers you hold in your hands (or PDF you view on your screen), even in shadowy days for our profession. As always, I hope you’ll find pleasure, alongside the inevitable indignation, in reading it. 

Anyhoo, I’ve spent too long writing this. It’s time I got back to studying various forms of witchcraft to ward off that second special session…

Solidarity,

Note: To be the first to get all the stories in our bimonthly issues, become a Texas Observer member here.

The post Editor’s Letter: Introducing Our September/October 2025 Issue appeared first on The Texas Observer.