Marketplace - Trump's latest plan to lower mortgage rates

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

President Trump recently ordered government-backed mortgage companies (that’s Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) to buy up $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities. The last time they bought these bonds was the 2008 financial crisis. Will the move actually lower rates? Probably not much. Also in this episode: Venture capital can thank AI for a 2025 rebound, banks fight to block stablecoin interest yields, and more young people are getting prenups.Every story has an economic angle. Want some in your inbox? Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter.Marketplace is more than a radio show. Check out our original reporting and financial literacy content at marketplace.org — and consider making an investment in our future.

The Toronto International Boat Show, January 17th to 25th at the Intercare Center. We are summer. Are you ready? We are summer. Visit Toronto Boat Show.com. Chemical elements, 50, 79, 29, and 47, the economics thereof. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdahl.

Day. Today, this one is the 15th of January. Good as always to have you along, everybody. Our entry point into the economy today, this one and the global one, comes by the commodities markets, metals in particular, which, and I believe this is, the technical Wall Street term, have been ripping this year. Gold, nickel, tin, and copper have all hit record highs the past couple of weeks. Silver, just as a, for instance, is up 200% year over year. That's happening. in part because another particular asset isn't ripping. The U.S. dollar, and really all fiat currencies, but especially the U.S. dollar, seems to be getting debased at relatively high rates. Stephen Gleason is the CEO of Money Metals Exchange.

The dollar is down 7% over the past year. It has been debased, in other words. That is actually a technical Wall Street term. So one reduces one's exposure to those volatile U.S. dollars. How? diversify into hard assets. Hard assets, like real estate maybe, but more easily, gold, silver, also platinum. It's really just stored value and one that is not susceptible to debasement like a government-issued or Federal Reserve-issued currency is.

Hey, there's that word again, debasements. Juan Carlos Artigas is Global Head of Research, also regional CEO for the Americas for the World Gold Council. It's not just the weakening dollar, though. also the broader political badgera. I think that is a combination of so many things happening that creates uncertainty amongst investors and because they don't know exactly

how much of that is going to translate into real impact into the global economy, they utilize assets like gold to hedge. And it ain't just gold. Tin is at a record, too. Why, I hear you ask, do not at me on this one,

gang, but it's all about artificial intelligence. What is tin really used? useful for? Sodering. What needs lots of soldering? Computer chips. What needs lots of computer chips? You see where I'm going, right? Also, let us not forget copper, industrially critical as it is. Should you want to get in on that action, though, best forget the commodity markets. We are seeing a lot of folks wanting to buy copper, physical copper. And actually, one of the best ways to do that, at least on the retail side, is the old pre-1983 pennies. which are, I believe, 95% copper.

Put that one in there just for the numismatists among you. Our visit two commodities ends with oil crude tumble today. Both benchmarks down more than 4%. It's one of those good news for the rest of us is bad news for the markets. Things there seems to be less Iran tension brewing. Don't know. Equities, you do know the drill. We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

Cryptocurrency might, possibly. Eventually, someday be actual useful money. You know, a medium of exchange, a store of value, those traditional ways we think about the money that we use now. Eventually, but not yet. That does not mean, though, that there isn't a ton of backing and forthing about how to regulate the stuff before we get to our monetary future. And one slice of that fight, it's between banks and cryptocurrency companies, boils down to interest payments. banks, of course, do make those payments, interests on deposits, right? The question at hand is whether crypto firms can offer something similar for people who hold what are called stable coins.

Marketplace is a supreme venezure has the ins and outs of that one. You have money, you put it in a bank, you get interest. That's how that works. But what about crypto? Specifically, stable coins. This is a kind of crypto that doesn't go up or down in value much. It's really just a way to pay for things. The companies that issue stable coins wanted,

to offer interest on them, the same way that banks do on deposits. But Congress has already said no. We don't regulate stable coin issuers nearly as extensively as banks, and we deliberately said they can't do all the things that banks can do. Timothy Massad is a research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School and former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The question now is, can other people pay a reward or interest if you deposit your stable coins with them?

Can a trading platform like Coinbase, where people hold their crypto, offer you a reward or interest for keeping your stable coins with them? Banks say no, and they want a law that says that. The fear is that money would leave depository institutions. Rob Nichols is president of the American Bankers Association. Why keep your money in a bank if you can get a higher reward stashing into stable coins? And then that money, which normally is lent into the economy for mortgage loans, auto loans. loans, education, et cetera, would be parked in a payment mechanism, but it wouldn't create economic growth.

Crypto firms don't buy that. It's the argument they're using to try to hide the fact that they are just trying to take away consumer choice and stop competition. Summer Mercinger is CEO of the Blockchain Association. They don't want to offer consumers more money on their deposits at the bank. Buying neither side's arguments is Aaron Clarendon. Fine, senior fellow at Brookings, but he is still wary of interest on stablecoins. When a bank makes loans that go bad, customers don't have to worry because the federal

government insures their deposits. Stable coins offer no such assurance. Crypto advocates counter that stable coins are backed by treasuries and wouldn't pose any risk, but everyone is now making their case to Congress in hopes of a law that will favor them. In New York, I'm Sabree Beneshore for Marketplace. About a week ago, one loses track, to be honest, President Trump said he's going to order the government-owned mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy $200 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities. The president says that'll push mortgage rates down, and indeed, in the time since, average rates on 30-year fixed mortgages have ticked slightly lower. That's according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, although, to be clear, they had been trending down before the president's announcement, too. Nonetheless, Marketplace Justin Ho looked into how mortgages become mortgage bonds.

And what will happen if Fannie and Freddie do wind up buying $200 billion worth of them? Mortgage bonds start with mortgages. When a borrower takes out a 30-year fixed-rate loan, the lender usually isn't in it for the long haul. We may have it technically on our balance sheet for a day or two. That's Chris Duncan, Chief Lending Officer at LaSalle State Bank in Illinois. He says his bank usually doesn't want to hold on to long-term mortgages, because they pay the bank a fixed interest rate for decades, and that would be a bad investment if interest rates were to rise. If you make a terrible miscalculation and you have

too many loans at fixed interest rates as rates continue to rise on your deposits, you're paying out more money to your depositors than you are bringing into the bank in the form of loans and investment income. So instead, LaSalle State Bank, like most banks, sells off almost all of its long-term mortgages to the big government-backed mortgage companies. Our preference most of the time is going to be to sell those loans to Fannie Mae. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy up truckloads of mortgages and package them into bonds called mortgage-backed securities. And that mortgage-back security is sold into the international capital markets.

That's Nancy Wallace, a professor at UC Berkeley. She says investors love mortgage-backed. securities because their steady stream of income from all of those mortgage payments is considered almost as safe as U.S. treasuries, and they tend to pay slightly more interest. We have a huge international market that has a very high incentive to purchase mortgage bonds from the United States. The Trump administration is asking Fannie and Freddie to go back to doing something they did up until the financial crisis, buy the very bonds they're selling. Wallace says there'd be more demand for mortgage-backed securities, so Fannie and Freddie would need even more

mortgages to go into those securities. And that means? As a bank, you can originate your mortgage and expect to sell the mortgages that you originate at a reasonable price. And you're going to be very willing to originate a lot of mortgages. And the theory goes, originate them at lower interest rates. Mike Fratt and Tony is chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association. You are seeing more and more mortgage lenders offering rates below 6%. And that's really something we haven't seen very much at all, really, since 2022. The MBA reports that applications to refinance mortgages jumped 40% in the last week.

When people hear about a rate being offered with something that starts with a 5 as opposed to a 6, that will really get someone's attention. Frat and Tony says we've seen a few refi boomlets like this of the past year, whenever rates are. have dipped. They tend not to last long because there are still plenty of pressures pushing long-term interest rates higher, government debt. And what if the president pressures the Federal Reserve into pushing rates too low? So inflation picks up. Investors are going to have to get compensated for that risk of higher inflation. They're likely to push longer-term rates up. In other words, the president's order might not be enough to move the needle for borrowers. Chris Duncan says at LaSalle State Bank, mortgage rates haven't really changed.

I think our 30 years only down an eighth from the start of this. year. Our 15 years fixed rate hasn't changed and our 10 years actually up an eighth since the president made that directive. Duncan says he thinks those will have to fall a lot farther before mortgage and refi applications really pick up. I'm Justin Howe for Marketplace. position. Shared bank accounts, joint property, tax filing the list, as you know, goes on. Sometimes, though, it all falls apart, and all those economic ties need to be untied. A good pre-nup can ease things along if and when that happens, and it turns out millennials and Gen Ziers love them some pre-ups. Jennifer Wilson wrote about that in the New Yorker the other day. Jennifer,

welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. Just by way of background, we'll get to what they are now, but remind us what prenups used to be, would you? Well, prenups haven't fundamentally changed. A prenuptial agreement is essentially a private contract in which a couple decides that whatever the existing divorce laws are on the books, they don't want those applying to how they divide assets and property in the event of the divorce or how they decide to handle things like spousal support. It's sort of a carve-out for an individual couple, but you are correct that more recently those carve-outs are looking a little different. And also just who is getting pre-ups, too. So let's go to the who first. Younger people now are increasingly saying, you know what,

let's work this out before we get married just in case things go south. Absolutely. There was one poll done by the Harris poll, they found that over 40% of millennials and Gen Ziers are getting pre-ups. Now, that number struck a lot of the lawyers I spoke to as, you know, hard to imagine, but everyone told me that they are seeing a pretty sharp uptick in young couples getting pre-nups, including young couples who don't have a lot of assets. Well, that's what keyed into me when I read this piece. You know, it's usually traditionally about division of assets at the end of in marriage, that is not necessarily the case now with these younger people. No, they're concerned about all sorts of things.

So one of the companies that I profiled is called Hello Prenup, and they have an app that's quite popular with young people, and that app offers something called a social image clause. So that says that after a divorce, you are not allowed to disparage your ex on Instagram or TikTok, for instance. Really? Really? Yeah. And if you do, you can assign a financial penalty. So $20,000 per, you know, sub-tweet. Wow. Okay. Wow. Right? I mean. Yeah. Also, though, these younger folks, a lot of them now have student debt. Yes. So that's a big concern. What happens to student debt in the event of a divorce? And, you know, that really differs state by state. But I talked to one scholar in Louisiana, law scholar in Louisiana.

Louisiana, and she told me that, you know, if you come into a marriage with lots of student loan debt, and you and your, while you and your partner are together, you know, during the marriage, you're paying off some of those student loans. Because it's money earned during marriage, it's considered community property. So when you get divorced, your ex can ask you for some of the money back. All right. So this is none of my business. And ordinarily, I wouldn't ask this of somebody that I'm interviewing, because it's somewhat personal. But since you wrote about it, I don't know your marital status.

I don't know anything. But is this something that's on your radar? You know, I was saying to someone, it's really funny. People keep asking me, well, would you get a pre-naup? Would you get a pre-knit? I'm not even seeing anyone. And yet I have thoughts about it.

I have strong feelings about it. I do think that it's, you know, you learn a lot about yourself, even just reading through some of the, questions that these apps ask you, you know, what feels fair to me, you know, what kind of relationship I'm, what kind of, you know, relationship I'm looking for. How are we going to handle money in that relationship? I'm, I am thinking about that now in a way that I wasn't quite before. Maybe, and maybe that's why I'm divorced.

So I did not have a pre-up, did not have a pre-up on my first. There you go. That's the question I should have asked. Jennifer Wilson, staff writer at the New Yorker. Jennifer, thanks a lot. I appreciate for time. Thank you so much. Coming up, we may see a decline in the number of acres that are kept in forest. Missing the economic forest for the trees. But first, sure, why not? Let's do the numbers. Dow Industrials gained 292 points today, about six-tenths and one percent closed at 49,442. The NASDAQ added 58 points, about a quarter percent, 23,000, 530. The SP 500, up 17 points, also a quarter percent. 69 and 44. Justin was just talking about the mortgage market.

So some of the big lenders today, rocket companies, which owns the Digital First Rocket Mortgage, climbed 3.4%. UWM Holdings Corporation, that is, in case you didn't know, the home of United Wholesale Mortgage, surged 6 and 4 tenths of 1%. Today, Loan Depot picked up 1.910%.

The world's biggest computer chipmaker that Taiwan-based TSM is increasing its capital spending by as much as 40% this year. Why you ask? Well, because they had a net profit of $15 billion last quarter. That's why TSM's up 4.4% on the day. Lack of snow out west this year is keeping skiers off the slopes. Vail's visitor traffic was down 20% last year at its resorts in Colorado, Utah, and British Columbia. Even if the snow comes back, Vail is cutting its outlook for 2026. VAL resorts, ticker symbol, this one's a little tricky. Nothing with a V in it. It's M-TN. Pretty good. Right down 2 and 4-10%. You're listening to Marketplace. This Marketplace podcast is supported by Intuit QuickBooks.

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Apply for funding when opportunity strikes. Learn more at quickbooks.com slash money. That's quickbooks.com slash money. Terms apply. Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments, Inc. Licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. Venture Capital, should you have been wondering, is back. Last year, $340 or so billion of capital was ventured. That's at least $100 billion more than in any of the previous three years. The data comes courtesy of Pitchbook and the National Venture Capital Association.

So, where have all those VCs been hiding and who's getting their money now? Here's Marketplace's Daniel Ackerman. The last spike in venture capital funding was back in the low-interest rate, easy money days of 2021. Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School says it was like, A drunken frenzy where venture capitalists gave a lot of money to a lot of people at very high valuations. But he says after any wild party, It's inevitable you're going to have a hangover. In the last three years have definitely been that of a hangover. Now, though, the VC spending party is back on.

And Seth Kaplan of the University of Chicago says you'll be shocked, just shocked, to learn where all that money is going. Not surprisingly, it's AI. Half of all VC dollars last year went to just 0.05% of all VC deals. The money got hoovered up by the handful of firms building the most powerful AI models, like the ones developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and XAI. Shiloh Tillam and Dick is with the National Venture Capital Association. These foundational models are a base that so many other companies are able to build value off of, and they're attracting so much capital as a result of that. Tillamindick says venture capital has long been something of a winner take-all industry, but the level of concentration right now...

I think this is unusual. He says one reason besides just the general hype around AI is that it does require a good deal of capital. You have some really expensive talent, and you have some really expensive, hardware and energy costs to go with it. In this VCAI spending spree is likely to continue, says Steve Kaplan of the University of Chicago, because the stock market is strong and interest rates are on their way down. In those situations, you tend to see venture capital spending being robust. The hard part is knowing, you know, when you've gone too far.

Bubble, question mark? I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace. Let's talk trees here for a second. Actually, let's talk forestry, which is, broadly speaking, the industry of trees. If you measure it by total timber harvest, the amount of private timberland, and tree product exports, that's pulp and paper and logs, Georgia is the number one forestry state in the country. That's all well and good until you can't get people to buy what you are selling. and nearly a dozen paper mills have closed across the American South in the past couple of years. That while the industry was already struggling with low timber prices and trees lost to hurricanes.

So some landowners are trying to find a market for the carbon that their forests can store, as Emily Jones from W.A.B.E. and Grist reports. When you cut a whole tree trunk down into the neat two-by-fours and one-by-sixes sold at a lumberyard, there's a lot of woodchips, bark, and sawdust left over. That typically gets turned into paper products, but now the mills are closing. I've been in this business for 30 years, and I've never experienced anything close to what we've experienced in the last two years. Zachary Johnson is a buyer for a timber company and former president of the Georgia Forestry Association. Timber prices have been low for a long time. They never really recovered from the 2008 housing crash.

Pile on paper mill closures and a major hurricane, and the industry is in crisis. It's just everyone's scrambling. Forest landowners are weighing whether they can afford to keep growing trees they may struggle to make money on, especially with housing and solar developers knocking on their doors, eager to buy up and clear their land. David Edy is with Georgia Tech's business school. We may see a decline in the number of acres that are kept in forests and the quality of the land that is forested. Losing forests wouldn't just shrink an industry. It would be devastating for the environment.

Georgia has cut its carbon dioxide emissions by about a third since 2005, and forests are doing a lot of the work. Georgia Tech researchers credit forests with storing around 27% of the state's emissions. So Eadie, Johnson, and other experts started asking, why not use all that carbon storage to keep foresters in business? We want to be the bridge, kind of like a bridge. Yanchu Lee is with the University of Georgia's Forestry School. Between those Georgia-based companies who want to buy good quality, forest carbon, and small landowners

who want to sell carbon to get additional income from their forest land. Lee is working to develop a local carbon market. Landowners would take steps to increase or maintain the amount of carbon dioxide their forest store, replanting instead of selling to developers, or switching to carbon-friendly harvest methods. Then Georgia companies would buy carbon credits from the foresters to offset their own emissions. But that term Lee used, good quality, is key, because carbon credits are at something of a turning point, too. A carbon offset is basically a license to continue polluting. Kathy Fallon is with the Clean Air Task Force, which published a report last year showing that

most forest carbon offset programs fall short. They often don't account for change to carbon storage over time or overestimate how much storage a forest project really adds. It's critical that the credits deliver an equivalent emissions reduction benefit. Otherwise, we're both delaying real emissions reduction and potentially doing more harm than good to the atmosphere. The forest carbon industry has gone through a reckoning in recent years, as participants and outside advocates like Fallon try to ensure carbon credits aren't just greenwashing. The forest carbon team in Georgia says that's their goal, too, not just preserving the current forests, but making sure they store even more carbon in the future.

In Savannah, Georgia, I'm Emily Jones for Marketplace. This final note on the way out today, a serendipitous follow-up to yesterday's observation about inflation in the streaming space. and HBO Max and all the rest. It's up 19.5% November to December. The Hollywood Reporter discovered that. Here is today's audio analog. Spotify is raising its prices, too. A buck to $12.99 a month.

Look at it this way, though. That is a mere 8.3%. I don't know. I think the Fed's got to raise rates. I'm just saying. Our production team includes Livy Burdette, Andy Corbin, Maria Hollenhorst, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry.

McKellia Siaa Torenzo. Will Story is the supervising senior producer. And I'm Kai Rizdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is 8 p.m. This week on This Is Uncomfortable, we have two new episodes exploring our relationship with money and work. First up, we've all been told that money can't buy happiness. But also, I think I have a personal convulsion that happens inside of me when people say, like, money doesn't make you happy.

I'm like, oh, you've never been poor. And then why the job market these days can really shake your confidence. People who may have been looking for a job two years ago and were getting interviews, getting responses, are now confronting something totally different, which is that there's this sense that there's really not the kind of opportunity that there was before. Don't miss an episode.

Listen to This Is Uncomfortable on your favorite podcast app.