GRO MONEY NEWS - 🚨 THE FED PAUSED. YOUR COST OF CAPITAL DIDN’T. 💸

The Fed held rates at 3.75 percent to 4 percent yesterday, but the 10 year Treasury is still hovering around 5 percent. Mortgage rates are roughly 7.35 percent, Nasdaq futures are under pressure, and the market is making one thing very clear: capital is available, but investors are charging aggressively for risk.

🏠 Mortgage applications rose 3.4 percent last week, but purchase activity remains roughly 18 percent below last year and refinancing activity is down about 61 percent. Existing home closings improved in September, while pending sales fell sharply, which tells you the forward housing pipeline is weaker than the closing data suggests.

🏗️ Infrastructure capital is telling an even more interesting story. CRE and data center credit spreads have widened, yet private capital continues hunting for digital infrastructure, including reported talks around a roughly $5 billion acquisition of Ark Data Centres.

🛰️ CoStar is also buying Vexcel for roughly $730 million after its Zonda acquisition. The real estate technology arms race is moving from listings toward ownership of data, imagery, intelligence, and the decision layer.

💰 That is the opportunity. The winners in this market will control assets that can be financed: land, power, compute, data, offtake, creditworthy contracts, and cash flow.

GRO GROUP has billions available for qualified infrastructure, data center, energy, and development projects. We are looking for projects that are actually bankable, not projects that simply have attractive renderings.

Today’s question is not, “Can I raise capital?”

It is, “What makes my project financeable?”

Until tomorrow, be the best human you can be.
~ Teresa Grobecker

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Duration: 10m
Broadcast on: 29 Oct 2026
Audio Format: other

grow money news. The Fed paused. The bond market didn't. Good morning. The Federal Reserve paused yesterday, but nobody told the bond market to relax. The 10-year treasury is sitting around 5 percent this morning. Mortgage rates remain firmly above 7 percent, and technology futures are under pressure again. Apparently, the market heard the word "pause" and translated it as "money is still expensive." This episode is brought to you by Grow Group. We have billions in capital available for qualified infrastructure, data center, energy, and development projects, including structures that can reach very high leverage, where the underlying project is genuinely bankable. That last part matters, because in this market, capital exists, but it is increasingly allergic to bad underwriting. Yesterday, the Fed held the federal funds target range at 3.75 percent to 4 percent. The vote was 10 to 2, and the two dissenters wanted another quarter point increase immediately. That tells you almost everything you need to know about where we are. The Fed paused, but inflation has not been declared dead, and the possibility of additional tightening remains very much alive. The bond market is reinforcing that message. The 10-year treasury is hovering around 5 percent this morning, which means long duration assets, residential mortgages, commercial real estate, infrastructure financing, and growth equity are all still being forced to clear a much higher hurdle rate. Equity markets are telling a similar story, although not uniformly. Dow futures were modestly positive early this morning, while S&P 500 futures were lower, and NASDAQ 100 futures were down roughly 1 percent or more, as investors digested technology earnings and renewed concerns around the amount of capital being consumed by artificial intelligence. Asia was mixed. Japan finished sharply higher, while South Korea and parts of China traded lower. That is important, because the AI trade is no longer one trade. Investors are beginning to distinguish between the companies selling the picks and shovels, the companies consuming enormous amounts of capital, and the companies that can actually turn compute into durable cash flow. Investor sentiment is still cautious. The CNN fear and greed reading is sitting in fear territory around 36, while volatility itself remains relatively contained. That combination is interesting. Investors are nervous, but they are not panicking. They are simply demanding a better price for risk. And now we get the next test. At 8.30 Eastern this morning, the market gets GDP, jobless claims, personal income and spending, and the PCE inflation data. Consensus expectations are looking for strong economic growth paired with inflation that is still uncomfortable. If you are listening after the release, do not obsess over the headline number. Watch what happens to the 10-year treasury. That is where the market will tell us whether the data actually changed the cost of money. Housing continues to show the same contradiction. Mortgage News Daily had the average 30-year fixed mortgage at approximately 7.35 percent yesterday. The 15-year was around 7 percent, jumbo financing around 7.60 percent, and the 7-year SOFR arm around 6.86 percent.

Mortgage applications still increased 3.4 percent last week. Purchase applications rose 4 percent, and refinancing activity rose 3 percent. That sounds encouraging until you widen the lens. Purchase activity remains roughly 18 percent below last year, while refinance activity is approximately 61 percent lower. That is not a healthy refinance cycle. It is a market learning how to transact with expensive money. Existing home sales increased 1.5 percent in September to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.99 million units. Inventory climbed to 1.60 million homes, approximately 4.8 months of supply, while the median existing home price reached $417,500.

But pending home sales fell 7.3 percent month over month, and 11.3 percent from a year earlier. Read those two numbers together. Closings improved slightly, but the forward pipeline weakened materially. The consumer is not disappearing. The consumer is price sensitive, payment sensitive, and increasingly willing to wait. Commercial real estate is sending an even sharper message. The private label CMBS and CRECLO market has issued roughly $147.7 billion so far this year, approximately 16 percent more than the comparable period last year. So, liquidity exists. But spreads have widened. Dealer data show parts of the conduit market sitting around their widest levels of

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