The week the Fed raised rates for the first time since 2023

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates on Wednesday. Last week's column said the betting had flipped toward a hike; it happened, by a unanimous 12-0 vote, a quarter point, to a target range of 3.75% to 4%. It is the first increase in more than three years. The committee's statement is four paragraphs long and one sentence of it explains the whole thing: "Inflation remains elevated."

Chair Kevin Warsh said afterward that the Fed cannot stop a price shock in oil by itself, and that its job is to keep that shock from spreading into everything else. The market read the decision as one more to come. The dot plot, the chart of where each official expects rates to end up, put a dozen participants a further quarter point above today's range by the end of the year.

The market: a shrug with a lot of moving parts

Friday's close: the Dow at 51,682.64, down 95.40 points on the day; the S&P 500 at 7,650.50, up 0.17%; the Nasdaq at 26,522.55, up 0.39%. For the week the S&P was down 0.1%, the Dow down 1.7%, and the Nasdaq up 0.7%. Three indexes, three directions, on a week that contained a rate hike. The ten-year Treasury yield finished at 4.998%, back at 5%, which matters more to a mortgage than the Fed's own rate does.

Oil: still above $100, and it is not about demand

West Texas Intermediate settled Friday at $100.30 a barrel, down $1.93 on the day and up about 1% for the week, a third straight weekly gain. Brent settled at $103.87. Wholesale gasoline rose 6% on the week and wholesale diesel 1.5%, on top of a 9% jump the week before.

The reason is supply, not appetite. DTN's Friday report has Saudi Aramco halting October term cargoes to Europe while restoring about half the capacity on its East-West pipeline after attacks, and refined-product traffic through the Strait of Hormuz running near a quarter of its pre-war volume. A barrel priced off a shipping lane behaves differently from one priced off a factory order book.

At the pump: $3.93 in Texas, and a diesel record

AAA Texas put the statewide average for regular at $3.93 a gallon on Thursday, ten cents above the week before and $1.14 above the same day last year. Houston was the cheapest metro it surveys, at $3.83. El Paso was the dearest, at $4.41. The national average was $4.44.

"Gas prices typically decline after the summer travel season, but persistently high crude oil prices are pushing costs in the opposite direction," AAA Texas spokesperson Daniel Armbruster said in the release. If prices hold, Texas records its most expensive September average. The all-time state record is $4.69, set in June 2022, and the current price is well under it.

Diesel is the one already in record territory. The Texas average reached an all-time high of $5.96 a gallon Thursday. Anyone in this county who runs a truck, a trailer, a mower crew or a delivery route is paying that, and it reaches a grocery shelf a few weeks later.

Inflation: no new reading until October 14

The August Consumer Price Index, released September 11, had prices up 0.4% for the month and 3.4% over the year, with core inflation at 2.4% and the gasoline index up 27.4% from a year earlier. That is the number the Fed acted on. The September figure is scheduled for Wednesday, October 14, at 7:30 a.m. Central.

What the hike reached, and how fast

The prime rate moved first. JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Truist, KeyCorp, Fifth Third and Huntington all took prime from 6.75% to 7%, effective the next day. Prime is the number most variable-rate consumer debt is priced against, so this is the mechanism by which a decision in Washington arrives on a statement in Magnolia.

• Credit cards price as prime plus a margin. A quarter point on prime is a quarter point on the card, applied when the issuer's change rules allow, generally within one or two billing cycles. The average card rate is just under 21%.
• Home-equity lines are also prime-linked and move on the same schedule.
• Savings accounts, money markets and new CDs move up, historically more slowly than card rates move up.
• Fixed-rate mortgages already signed do not change, ever. New mortgage rates follow the bond market: Freddie Mac's survey had the 30-year at 6.95% on Thursday, up from 6.76% the week before and 6.26% a year ago.
• Auto loans price off longer-term rates and dealer financing, so the connection is looser and slower.

Gold and silver: up in a week that should have pushed them down

Gold closed Friday at $4,380.01 an ounce, up 0.73% on the week. Silver closed at $66.35, up 3.05%, roughly four times gold's gain, putting the ratio between them near 66 to 1. The textbook says metals fall when rates rise, because metal pays no interest and a savings account is about to pay more. They rose anyway, and they did it against a dollar that gained 1.1% on the week and a ten-year yield back at 5%. Over twelve months the live board Rio Times publishes had gold up 33.2% and silver up 73.05%.

Bitcoin: still a third below last year

Bitcoin was $77,979.54 at 8 a.m. Eastern on Friday, up 2.35% on the day and down 33.41% from $117,111.87 on the same day a year ago. It cleared $80,000 during Friday's session for the first time in weeks. The record remains $126,198.07, set October 6, 2025.

New on the books

Two Texas laws that took effect September 1 reach ordinary households, and neither got much notice. One requires electronics manufacturers to sell you and independent shops the parts, tools and documentation they give their own authorized repairers. The other recognizes gold and silver as legal tender in Texas. Both are walked through in this week's New on the Books. A third, covering door-to-door solar sales, is in this week's resource piece.

What it adds up to for a family here

Worked with this week's published numbers. The arithmetic is ours; every rate is the one printed above.

• If you drive 30 miles round trip to The Woodlands five days a week in a car that gets 25 miles a gallon, that is about 26 gallons a month. At $1.14 a gallon more than it cost a year ago, the same commute runs about $30 a month more, roughly $356 a year.
• If you carry a $5,000 credit-card balance at 21%, a quarter point is about $12.50 a year. On the national average balance of $6,610 at 22% it is about $16.50 a year, which works out to roughly $1.38 on a monthly minimum payment.
• If you have a $50,000 home-equity line at a variable rate, a quarter point is about $125 a year.
• If you hold $10,000 in a savings account paying 4%, a full quarter-point pass-through is about $25 a year more. The same $10,000 in a checking account paying nothing earns nothing before and after.
• If your mortgage is fixed and already signed, none of this week changed your payment. If you are shopping, the rate moved from 6.26% to 6.95% over the past year, which on a $260,000 loan is about $120 a month.
• If you run diesel, the state average is at an all-time high of $5.96. A truck burning 60 gallons a week is spending about $358 a week on fuel at that average.

The default, if nobody in the house does anything at all: card and home-equity rates drift up on their own within a cycle or two, savings yields drift up more slowly and only if the bank chooses to pass it through, the fixed mortgage does not move, and the pump keeps doing whatever the Strait of Hormuz does.

Sources this week: the FOMC statement of September 16, 2026 and CNBC's coverage of Chair Warsh's press conference and the dot plot; index closes as reported for Friday, September 18; DTN Progressive Farmer on the Friday oil settlements and products; AAA Texas for pump averages and the diesel record; the Labor Department's August CPI release and its October 14 schedule; Reuters and Yahoo Finance on the prime-rate moves and card pass-through; Rio Times and Yahoo Finance on metals; Fortune on Bitcoin; Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey of September 17, 2026.