How Blue States Plan to Get More Taxes From Wealthy Residents
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Relief ahead for U.S. buyers and sellers as mortgage rates hit their lowest level this year. Plus, how some blue states are planning to get more in taxes from their wealthiest residents.
A lot of states are in a situation where they could be facing budget deficits going forward. And then once you add into the picture the potential impact of the new federal tax law, the picture can start to get more bleak.
And after riding the AI boom, can CoreWeave keep its investors enthused? It's Thursday, August 14th. I'm Alex Ocelev for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. We begin this evening's show with a lead-up to President Trump's planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin tomorrow in Alaska. White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt said today that Trump and Putin will hold a joint press conference after their one-on-one meeting in Anchorage. Ahead of his trip to Alaska, Trump said in an interview with Fox News Radio aired today that he thinks Putin is, quote, going to make a deal. But he said there was a 25 percent chance talks would fail, describing the summit as a chess game.
If the meeting goes well, Trump raised the possibility of inviting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for further negotiations. During a meeting with senior ministers and security officials today, Putin said that the Trump administration had been making, quote, "...what I consider to be fairly vigorous and sincere efforts to halt hostilities, resolve the crisis, and reach agreements that serve the interests of all parties involved in this conflict." Mortgage rates edged down to their lowest level of the year, offering a dash of hope to prospective buyers who have been forced to the sidelines by elevated rates and home prices. According to a survey of lenders by mortgage finance firm Freddie Mac, the average rate on the standard 30-year fixed mortgage declined to 6.58%.
That was a low not seen since October 2024 and down from 6.63% a week earlier. Mortgage rates tend to move loosely with government bond yields, which helps set some borrowing costs across the economy. Bond yields have edged lower after a report this month showed hiring slowed sharply over the summer, putting downward pressure on mortgage rates. Americans' nest eggs are increasingly tied to the fate of the stock market. According to Vanguard Group, workers in their late 30s had 88 percent of their 401ks in stocks last year versus 82 percent a decade earlier. 401k investors in their early 60s had allocations to stocks of 60 percent, up from 57 percent a decade ago. Anne Turgason covers retirement for the journal and joins me now.
What headlines open the PM Edition and set the episode's agenda?
Anne, how are investors behaving with their 401ks versus, say, a retail investment?
So 401k investors tend to really buy and hold. And there have been many more days in which trading activity in 401ks has spiked. However, we're talking only like about 1.3% of assets in 401ks have been traded this year. That's a high level relative to what you normally see. That just shows you how infrequently people trade.
What kinds of risks does that come with?
The risk of having more in stocks means that if the stock market really hits like a bad time, then it sets you up for higher losses than you would have had if you were more conservatively invested. That said, historically, one of the biggest risks that investors had run is that they had insufficient exposure to the stock market at younger ages.
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