The week oil crossed $100 and the Fed started talking about a hike

Four down days, then a Friday bounce. That was the stock market's week, and the reason for the bounce is the same reason for the slide: oil. Crude climbed past $100 a barrel on Wednesday as fighting involving Iran spread to energy targets across the Middle East, then eased back on Friday. Wall Street followed it both directions. By the close on Friday the Dow stood at 52,573, the S&P 500 at 7,657, and the Nasdaq at 26,333, each up roughly 1% on the day and each still down for the shortened week: the Dow 1.6%, the S&P 0.8%, the Nasdaq 0.7%. Before Friday the Dow had fallen four sessions in a row, its longest losing run since late April.

None of that is a crash. A 401(k) that tracks the broad market lost less than 1% this week and is still up strongly on the year. For a family around here the number that matters more is the one at the pump, and that is where the week's news actually lands.

Oil: $100 again

West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, settled Friday at $100.05 a barrel. Brent, the international one, settled at $104.61. Both fell a little on Friday and both finished the week up about 9%, the sharpest weekly gain in months, after a new round of attacks on energy infrastructure in the Gulf and a threat from Iran to keep striking it. Crude at $100 has historically meant something in the neighborhood of $3.50 to $4.00 a gallon for regular gasoline in Texas, and it shows up at the pump within a week or two. If you drive FM 1488 to a job in The Woodlands every day, this is the line in this week's news that costs you money.

Inflation: gasoline did it

The Labor Department's August Consumer Price Index came out Friday morning. Prices rose 0.4% in the month and 3.4% over the past year. Strip out food and energy and the "core" number was 2.4% for the year, the lowest core reading since March 2021. Read those two together: the underlying trend is cooling, and the headline is being held up almost entirely by fuel. That is a better shape than the reverse. It also means the relief is hostage to the same oil market described above.

The Fed: a hike is now the expected call

The Federal Reserve meets Tuesday and Wednesday. For most of the summer the question was whether it would cut. As of this week, the betting has flipped. Markets now price a quarter-point increase, to a range of 3.75% to 4.00%, as more likely than not, after Chair Warsh's speech at Jackson Hole on August 28 and a solid August jobs report. Chase's economists put it plainly; prediction markets had the odds near 80% by Friday. The decision, and the committee's updated projections, land Wednesday afternoon.

What a quarter point does at home: credit-card rates and home-equity lines move within a billing cycle or two. Savings-account and money-market yields drift up. Thirty-year mortgage rates key off the bond market rather than the Fed directly, so a hike that is already expected tends to be priced in before it happens. Nobody's fixed-rate mortgage changes.

Gold and silver: a pause, not a turn

Gold opened Friday around $4,359 an ounce, its lowest in more than a month, and finished near $4,385. Silver traded near $63.87 and closed out its third straight losing week, down about 4%. Both metals had a very strong year before this and both tend to soften when the market starts expecting higher interest rates, because a bar of metal pays no interest and a savings account is about to pay more. USAGOLD's Friday report has the day's detail. Anyone who bought coins at the counter of a local dealer last winter is still well ahead. Anyone who bought them last month is not.

Bitcoin: a year of going nowhere, slowly down

Bitcoin was about $77,700 on Friday morning, roughly $37,800 below the same day last year. It has spent the summer drifting lower on the same inflation worries that moved everything else. A few local businesses take it at the register. Over the past twelve months it has moved more in a single week than the stock market has in a quarter, which is the number that describes what owning it is like.

New on the books this week: the $250 started landing

The one piece of new law that touched Montgomery County households this month did not come from Austin or Washington. It came from a Texas family. Michael and Susan Dell's $6.25 billion pledge to seed the new federal children's savings accounts with $250 per child began paying out on August 31, according to the Dell Foundation, for every child ten and under whose parents have opened an account and who lives in a ZIP code with a median household income under $150,000. Magnolia's 77354 sits at about $112,500 by the latest Census estimate, so the ZIP qualifies. The accounts themselves opened July 4, and more than fifty employers have said they will contribute to them for workers' children. The full how-to, including what a parent has to do before a dollar arrives, is in this week's resource piece.

What it adds up to for a family here

Three households, worked with this week's numbers. The math is illustrative; the rates are the ones published this week.

• If you drive 30 miles round trip to The Woodlands five days a week in a car that gets 25 miles a gallon, every 25 cents at the pump is about $8 a month. Crude at $100 has historically carried regular gasoline in Texas 30 to 50 cents above where it sat in August.
• If you carry a $5,000 credit-card balance at 24%, a quarter-point increase adds about $12.50 a year in interest. A $50,000 home-equity line at a variable rate adds about $125 a year.
• If you have $10,000 in a savings account paying 4%, a quarter point the other way is about $25 a year more. The same $10,000 in a checking account paying nothing stays at nothing either way.

• Fuel is the budget line to watch. Oil at $100 is not yet at the pump in full. Expect it over the next two weeks.
• Debt with a floating rate gets a little dearer if Wednesday goes the way the market expects. Card and home-equity rates typically follow within a billing cycle or two.
• Cash earns more. A high-yield savings account or a money-market fund will pay more after a hike, not less. Money sitting in a checking account earns nothing either way.
• Retirement balances wobbled less than the headlines. Under 1% for the week. Nothing to act on.
• Metals and Bitcoin were the week's losers. Long-term holders of either are still fine. Short-term buyers are underwater.
• There is unclaimed money for children. The Dell $250 is deposited only into accounts a parent has opened. That is the only step between a Magnolia child and the deposit.

Sources this week: the Labor Department's August CPI release; Associated Press index closes via ABC News; CNBC on Friday's oil settlement; the Federal Reserve's meeting calendar; Yahoo Finance's daily gold and Bitcoin reports; CNBC on the Dell deposits; Census ACS income estimates for 77354.