In One Chart: Mortgage rates and gas prices push consumer ‘pain points’ to highest in over 20 years

The below Bespoke chart shows an average new 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 7.38% as of last week, plus the national average price for a gallon or regular unleaded gas at $3.83.

Consumers now pay slightly more for a new home loan and a gallon of gas than in the past two years when U.S. inflation peaked and as pandemic supply chains were being untangled, but also more than in the wake of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis when credit froze, according to Bespoke data.

To be sure, measures of consumer costs depend on the averages being tracked. While rates on 30-year mortgages frequently have been above 7% in 2023, Freddie Mac
FMCC,
+1.79%
pegged the weekly average rate as slightly less at 6.9% on August 3. The 30-year mortgage rate is more closely tethered to long term Treasury yields,
BX:TMUBMUSD10Y
which have been volatile in August.

Also, as MarketWatch’s Aarthi Swaminathan wrote in July, only a tenth of U.S. mortgages have an interest rate above 6%, which means few homeowners have an incentive to move with new, 30-year mortgage rates around a two decade high.

Still-elevated home prices and fixed mortgage costs mean that many U.S. homeowners have been insulated from the worst stings of the Federal Reserve’s rapid rate hikes since 2022.

Prices at the gas pump were pegged at $3.829 a gallon on average nationally on Monday, according to AAA.

That’s up from about $3.537 a gallon a month ago, with William Watts explaining prices have climbed after Saudi Arabia said it would continue with production cuts, but also from refinery outages, some tied to extreme heat.

Analysts also said a general rule of thumb is that for every $10 rise in a barrel of crude roughly translates to 25 cents more in the average U.S. gasoline price at the pump.

The global benchmark Brent crude
BRN00,
-0.85%
 was down about 1% on Monday to $85.57 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate crude
CL00,
-0.85%
CL.1,
-0.85%
was off about 1% to $82.13 a barrel.

Stocks resumed their climb on Monday toward record territory, despite wobbling last week after Fitch Ratings took away its top credit ratings for U.S. debt. The Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA
was up 1%, while the S&P 500 index
SPX
was 0.7% higher and the Nasdaq Composite Index
COMP
was up 0.2%, according to FactSet.