New salary and pension ,finance division notification 2026, update for govt employees & pensioners
Follow Me on Other Social Media
facebook:
instagram:
Whatsapp channel:
#myonlinestudents
#pensionersnews2024
#govtemployeesnews
#latestupdates
source
Foster parents take on work the state would otherwise have to pay for, and a lot of them are doing it while still carrying student debt. So the question comes up constantly: is there a student loan forgiveness program for foster parents?
The honest answer is no. There is no federal program that forgives student loans because you are a licensed foster parent. There never has been. Federal Student Aid’s full list of forgiveness and discharge options has no foster care category, and the state programs that use the words “foster care” are almost always aimed at people who were in foster care as children — not the adults raising them.
What does exist is a set of programs you can qualify for through your job, your tax return, and the repayment plan you choose. Several of those changed in a big way on July 1, 2026, so anything you read about this before then is out of date.
Here is what actually applies.
PSLF is the biggest one, and it is employment-based, not fostering-based. If you work for a state or county child welfare agency, a 501(c)(3) foster care or family services agency, a school district, or any other government or qualifying nonprofit employer, you can have your remaining Direct Loans forgiven after 120 qualifying payments.
Other qualifications for becoming eligible for the PSLF are :
If you think this is a program that would benefit you, you should fill out this form to determine your eligibility
If you don’t qualify for the PSLF, another program you can take advantage of is the Federal Perkins Loan Cancellation.
This program was designed to ease the burden of student loan repayments on public servants. If you work in any of the following public service positions, you could qualify for the Federal Perkins Loan Cancellation program.
Under the Federal Perkins Loan Cancellation program, as long as you qualify, up to 100% of your loan can be cancelled over a period of 5 years.
The catch to this program is that the college you attended is the entity that deems you eligible to receive the benefit.
To find out more information about how to get the process started with this program in particular, we highly recommend you call or visit your school’s bursar’s office or the financial aid office.
A lot of foster parents also work in social services. If that is you, state and federal loan repayment programs are usually worth more per year than anything else on this list.
The National Health Service Corps covers behavioral health clinicians — LCSWs, licensed professional counselors, psychologists, and marriage and family therapists. Full-time behavioral health awards run up to $50,000 for a two-year commitment at an approved site. The Substance Use Disorder Workforce program pays up to $75,000 for three years, and the Rural Community version pays up to $100,000. The 2026 cycles have closed, but the programs are active — watch for the next application window.
State programs vary widely:
| Program | Award |
|---|---|
| New York Child Welfare Worker Loan Forgiveness | Up to $10,000/yr, $50,000 max over 5 years (currently closed) |
| Maryland Janet L. Hoffman LARP | $1,500–$10,000/yr by debt level (open through March 1, 2027) |
| Texas Mental Health Professionals LRP | Up to $80,000–$100,000 over 3 years for LCSWs, LPCs, LMFTs |
| Illinois Community Behavioral Health Professional LRP | $4,000–$40,000/yr by credential |
Check your own state’s programs — most states run something, and many are funded through HRSA’s State Loan Repayment Program match.
If you are still in school for social work, roughly 35 states run Title IV-E child welfare education stipend programs that pay tuition up front in exchange for a year of public child welfare employment per year of support. That beats borrowing and forgiving later.
Now let’s take a look at loan repayment programs that work with your income. While these are not forgiveness programs, they can provide you some financial relief.
Two things work in your favor here.
First, foster care maintenance payments are generally excluded from gross income under IRC §131. They do not show up in your AGI, which means they do not raise your income-driven payment. The stipend supports the child without inflating what you owe on your loans.
Second, RAP reduces your payment by $50 per month for each dependent you claim on your federal return. A foster child placed with you by an agency or court order can meet the qualifying child relationship test under IRS Publication 501 if the age, residency, and support tests are also met.
Family size for IBR is messier. The rule counts other individuals living with you who receive more than half their support from you — and because the state stipend is designed to cover that support, whether a foster child clears the threshold depends on your actual numbers. Keep records of what you spend beyond the stipend.
Ask your employer. The $5,250 annual tax-free employer student loan benefit became permanent under OBBBA and starts adjusting for inflation after 2026. Plenty of child welfare agencies, hospitals, and school districts already have a Section 127 plan and never mention it. The loan has to be yours, not a Parent PLUS loan you took for a child.
If you adopt from foster care, the adoption tax credit is worth $17,670 per child in 2026, with up to $5,120 of it refundable — new under OBBBA, so it pays out even if you owe no tax. Most children adopted from U.S. foster care carry a special needs determination, which means you claim the full credit whether or not you had any adoption expenses. Details are on the IRS adoption credit page.
Is there student loan forgiveness for foster parents?
No. No federal program forgives student loans based on being a foster parent. You qualify through your employer, your repayment plan, or the tax code.
Do foster care payments count as income for student loan payments?
Generally no. Payments made under a state foster care program are excluded from gross income under IRC §131, so they do not appear in your AGI or raise your income-driven payment.
Can I count a foster child as a dependent for repayment purposes?
Under RAP, dependents claimed on your federal return each reduce your payment by $50 per month. Under IBR, the test is whether the child receives more than half their support from you, which is fact-specific when a state stipend is involved.
What if I work for a foster care agency?
Then you likely qualify for PSLF, and possibly Perkins cancellation if you still hold a Perkins Loan. Submit an employer certification form and confirm your payment count.
What happened to the SAVE plan?
It ended. Borrowers are being moved off in batches with at least 90 days’ notice. If you do not choose a plan, you get placed in a Standard plan that may not count toward PSLF.
There is no shortcut for foster parents, and pretending otherwise wastes your time. The money is in three places: the job you hold, the repayment plan you pick, and the tax return you file. Foster care stipends staying out of your AGI is a real advantage. So is the $50-per-dependent reduction under RAP, and the refundable adoption credit if you adopt.
If you work in child welfare in any capacity, start with PSLF and your state’s loan repayment program. That combination is worth more than everything else on this page.
Are you a foster parent ? How have you tackled your student loans? I would love to hear about your experiences in the comments.
Editor: Clint Proctor
Reviewed by: Claire Tak
The post Student Loan Forgiveness For Foster Parents appeared first on The College Investor.
GalaxyOne has launched a very generous limited-time signup offer that effectively gives new customers a 10% bonus on a $10,000 deposit.
New customers who open a qualifying GalaxyOne personal account between August 17 and August 31, 2026 can earn a $1,000 cash bonus after depositing at least $10,000 in new money. Both cash and crypto deposits can qualify.
To qualify:
The $1,000 bonus will be deposited into your GalaxyOne Cash account within 30 days after completing the 120-day maintenance period.
The promotion is for new GalaxyOne customers who are U.S. residents and at least 18 years old. It’s limited to one promotional credit per person and applies to personal accounts, not business accounts.
GalaxyOne combines several financial products in one platform, including a cash account currently paying 3.50% APY, brokerage accounts with commission-free U.S. stock and ETF trading, and crypto trading. Cash deposits are held at Cross River Bank and are FDIC insured up to applicable limits.
This is a pretty good bonus, although not as good as the $3,000 bonus they briefly offered for the same requirements as reported by DoC. You’re getting $1,000 for tying up $10,000 for roughly four months, plus whatever interest you earn during that time.
At Loan Factory, we built an artificial intelligence application tool that has been live for two years. A borrower or loan officer uploads documents, and the system reads them and populates the application automatically. We are now extending that further so the tool can interview the borrower directly, the same way a loan officer would when taking an application. Between document reading and conversational interviewing, we can capture roughly 70 to 80 percent of an application from documents alone, with artificial intelligence gathering the rest through a normal conversation. Consumers are intimidated by long, complicated forms. When the process feels like a conversation instead of paperwork, the borrower experience improves significantly.
“That is the same shift we saw when electricity replaced manual labor and when the internet rewired how business gets done.”
We have also built tools that review the 1003 and supporting documents to flag missing items before submission, along with systems that underwrite loans and calculate debt-to-income ratios. These are not experimental add-ons. They are doing work that used to require a person, and doing it in a fraction of the time. That trajectory tracks with a broader look at how AI is reshaping the American mortgage broker, where brokers describe recapturing hours once lost to administrative work.
Building proprietary technology has worked for us because we have run an in-house engineering team for ten years. That is not the reality for most brokers and lenders, and it should not stop anyone from adopting artificial intelligence. For the vast majority of the industry, the right path is to subscribe to tools built by companies that specialize in this work, rather than trying to build from scratch without the resources to support it.
Almost everyone in this industry will tell you they are using artificial intelligence. Far fewer are using it at a level that actually changes their output. There is a real difference between opening a chatbot occasionally and building it into a genuine productivity system, whether that means automating email triage and scheduling or setting up agents that handle the repetitive tasks you already know so well that you should not be spending your own time on them.
Nvidia jolted investors on Wednesday with a projection that its revenue would skyrocket by 70% next fiscal year and said demand for its AI chips is growing at 100%, prompting an after-hours stock rally.
The 70% preliminary expectation wildly exceeded projections for fiscal 2028 revenue of roughly $570 billion, or 44% growth from fiscal 2027 (the current year). Nvidia’s projected growth, applied to fiscal 2027 revenue and expected revenue, would imply fiscal 2028 revenue in the range of $690 billion to $700 billion, more than $100 billion over the $570 billion analysts had been modeling.
“We wanted to make sure that everybody has the same set of information,” CEO Jensen Huang said on a conference call Wednesday. “We’ve got a huge year coming up next year, and it’s going to be pretty extraordinary.”
“It is the case that we’ve never forecasted, never guided to a year in advance,” Huang noted later in the call.
Melissa Otto, global head of Visible Alpha research at S&P Global, said the magnitude of growth on the top line “blew away expectations” especially given that Nvidia doesn’t normally provide such guidance.
“I think what wowed the market was that 70% fiscal year 2028 number that they gave that was way ahead of Visible Alpha consensus,” said Otto. “I think the whole market was like, ‘Whoa, 70%.’”
Chief financial officer Colette Kress said customers’ forecasts pointed to Nvidia’s growth doubling next year. She delivered the news to investors after the market closed and her comments sent Nvidia’s stock rallying more than 4% in after-hours trading.
However, Nvidia is also battling with significant supply constraints, much like all the other mega-cap tech companies. “Our entire supply chain is challenged, and it’s everybody; everybody is really running flat out,” Huang said.
Huang said that if not for these constraints, revenue growth next year would be even greater.
“Even though our demand is much greater than 70%, our supply allows us to confidently deliver 70%,” Huang said in response to an analyst question.
The never-before-seen growth forecast came after the company disclosed quarterly earnings results that crushed across the board. Revenue for Q2 came in at $96.2 billion, up 106% from a year ago and sailing past projections of $92.2 billion from analysts. The company earned $2.22 per share on a non-GAAP basis, above the $2.06 to $2.09 expected. Kress guided next quarter to $108 billion in revenue, matching the so-called buyside whisper range of $105 billion to $108 billion.
Nvidia
Huang said massive demand was coming from both hyperscale cloud providers as well as non-hyperscalers including sovereign AI, neoclouds, AI startups, and enterprises. The non-hyperscale crowd “represents about half our business, and that’s growing 100% a year,” said Huang.
Much of rising demand reflects a shift in the way AI systems are consuming AI compute, particularly as the use of agentic AI becomes more widespread, Huang explained. The amount of compute an AI agent gobbles up versus a human user is about 15 to 100 times greater, depending on the type of task or problem being solved, he said. And the number of agents within businesses is only going to grow.
“We have 40,000 employees, roughly,” he said. “In the future, we’ll have 400,000 agents, 4 million agents, and those agents are running continuously.”
While the booming demand for AI chips has made Nvidia the world’s most valuable company, with a market cap of more than $5 trillion, critics have warned about the company’s spate of investments in other companies within the AI industry, from data center operators to frontier model makers like Anthropic. Many view the deals, which Nvidia is financing from its massive cash pile, as creating dangerous interdependencies with the AI business.
Kress offered up a defense against critics during the call: “We recognize the scale of this support, and we know some will call this circular financing,” the Nvidia finance chief said. “We see it differently.”
She said the frontier AI labs have proven technology leaders, traction from customers, and “skyrocketing” usage.
“We expect them to become the largest technology companies in history,” said Kress. Their growth “isn’t limited by their technology or customer demand. It’s limited by compute.”
Still, Nvidia’s involvement has been critical and substantial and, moreover, has led to a drag on the stock price. The company disclosed maximum gross guarantee exposure of $108.5 billion, which mostly stems from credit support for SB Energy’s Ohio tech campus, which will host Nvidia compute leased to OpenAI. The rest is due to $3.5 billion backing lease obligations for AI cloud partners. Nvidia has also publicized investments of nearly $50 billion in frontier AI labs and has partnered with private equity giants Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to raise more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure.
Kress said the investments in partners were low-risk, high-reward for Nvidia.
“We believe these investments, measured against the strength of their demand, the business they create for us, the ecosystem they build on Nvidia’s platform, and the equity returns on our invested capital will be excellent, and our risk is limited,” said Kress.
Secondly, Kress said demand from the AI labs will contribute to about a quarter of Nvidia’s business next year. She added that Nvidia’s platform is “fungible and durable” and can be used for other business if a partner alters their forward-looking projections.
For smaller, AI-native cloud providers known as neoclouds, Kress said Nvidia offers a deal structure where Nvidia guarantees it will pay for a minimum portion of a data center’s capacity, which satisfies the banks. In exchange, Nvidia takes a cut of the provider’s rental revenue above that threshold.
“Independent capital still underwrites every deal on its own merits. We’re not making loans,” said Kress. “In this model, we get paid twice—once on the hardware sale, and again through the share of rental revenue.”
Markets haven’t exactly loved the circular nature of all of these deals. Bill Birmingham, managing director at Rex Financial, said that when reports surfaced in July that Nvidia was in talks to guarantee as much as $250 billion in capacity for OpenAI in Ohio, the credit-default swap market repriced Nvidia’s five-year risk from 40 basis points to 82 basis points.
“The equity shed $250 (billion) in turn,” wrote Birmingham in a pre-earnings note seen by Fortune. “Even though the final number came in at $105B, the market read this as less demand and not less risk.”
One point that was slightly less than sterling was Nvidia’s third-quarter gross margin guidance of 74%, down from 75% it delivered in the second quarter, noted S&P Global’s Otto. Still, based on consensus estimates, the market “was already there,” she said.
“The market was expecting 72.6% for Q3, and the fact that they guided to 74% suggests that their gross margin is actually more resilient than the market was expecting,” said Otto.
Kress, in her CFO commentary, said supply and capacity commitments surged from $119 billion to $279 billion, driven by rising memory costs, a persistent boogeyman that has been behind rising prices all around the tech sector. During the call, Kress clarified further that the magnitude of memory prices led Nvidia to reset expectations, given the higher prices expected next year, said Kress.
John Belton, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, said Nvidia had likely gotten a jump on the memory price issue by engaging early on with suppliers to strike long-term agreements with locked-in prices. During Wednesday’s call, Huang confirmed he had worked with suppliers about visibility into pricing well in advance.
“A long time ago, people asked me why it is that we’re working with memory suppliers when we’re a chip company,” he said. “Today, people understand it’s really quite genius that we were working on our supply chain so far upstream.
Birmingham wrote that Nvidia has been raising prices to customers by about 15% to pass through the inflation related to memory costs, which he said was a risk.
“It’s dangerous to raise prices when ROI for AI at the customer level is still unknown,” he wrote.
Kress said margins will bottom at 71% to 72% in the fourth quarter, and settle around 72% to 73% next fiscal as price increases take effect.
The apocryphal quip attributed to Mark Twain, “the rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated,” rings true for certain companies in the software space amidst widespread but premature fears of AI-driven obsolescence.
Over the last year, approximately $2 trillion in software value has been torched on fears that AI will render many software businesses obsolete in the years ahead, in what has become known as the “SaaSpocalpyse,” prematurely announcing the death of the software as a service (SaaS) sector.
The original SaaSpocalpyse thesis of “death,” or at least massive disruption, was how bears were thinking in the early part of the year, but that bearish thesis has now morphed into a less drastic, but still incorrect, theme of how software companies will have to pay more for customer acquisition moving forward with far less pricing power, compressing margins and hindering profitability.
Just as the classic 1979 Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now was based on a fictional delirium, so, perhaps is the SaasSpocalyse now.
Yes: there is no question that many high-flying technology winners will be under increasing competitive threat from autonomous AI agents moving forward, and the list of companies that look vulnerable is a long one.
At the same time, the panicked investor stampede to the exits across software firms has wrongly punished several of the clearest beneficiaries from AI as if they were obvious casualties. Three examples – Salesforce, Booking Holdings, and IBM – illustrate how, contrary to short-term market fears, there are certain software companies well positioned to become big AI winners in the long term, with greater profitability and pricing power from AI-driven wins, not less.
The misleading bearish AI scenario has an appealing simplicity for some anxious analysts.
Salesforce, the leading customer relationship management (CRM) system, was wrongly predicted to be facing obsolescence by LLM companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, whose autonomous AI agents would presumably manage customer relationships from beginning to end. This led misinformed critics to demote Salesforce from its robust position as the central command center of a business to that of merely a passive database sitting in the background that agents occasionally query. The erroneous presumption was that the AI models would capture all the value, and Salesforce would be relegated to being an interchangeable commodity if not entirely redundant. Down roughly 20% this year and 40% from its high, the stock has been priced for precisely that faulty diagnosis.
These confused critics read the dynamic backwards. Salesforce isn’t what’s being commoditized; it’s the LLMs, and in this new world, data is the new moat – and Salesforce has the data. As analysts at Wells Fargo declared, “lower cost of intelligence increases value of incumbent data.”
At the end of the day, AI agents are only as good as the data on which they operate. An AI agent working on closing a sale still needs somewhere to research the customer, log new interactions, store the contract, and customize the terms – and it needs decades of customer data and history to understand what all of it means. That’s where Salesforce comes in, as the ultimate repository of customer data.
Despite analysts’ delusions, Salesforce in reality has processed over 216 trillion customer records this year alone, and still counting. All that customer data, ranging from key customer contacts, to deal histories, to support tickets, to marketing interactions and histories, already lives inside Salesforce for virtually every major company. There is no way to just rip that out and store it inside a LLM instead of Salesforce – nor would anyone want to trust a LLM as the repository of all their proprietary customer data. Clean, unified, trusted data is exactly what AI agents need to function well, and Salesforce has more of it than anyone, with built-in security and confidentiality protections far surpassing LLMs.
No wonder the results reflect Salesforce’s position as an emerging AI winner. Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI agent platform, has gone from $100 million to $1.5 billion in annual recurring revenue within 18 months of launch, with well over 30,000 Agentforce deals already closed amidst exciting new partnerships with Anthropic’s Claude as the premier agent inside Agentforce. All those AI agents are producing more and more data by an exponential factor, which conveniently needs to be stored within Salesforce, with Salesforce ingesting 104 trillion records last quarter alone, double that of just last quarter.
And interestingly, the long-underestimated acquisition of Slack has become extraordinarily important to Salesforce’s AI future, as Slack is where key decisions are argued out, providing agents with critical context and human insights they would have never been able to glean from a database field alone. It is why Slack is growing at a record rapid clip, just delivering its fastest quarterly Net New Annual Order Value (“NNAOV”) growth since acquisition as Slackbot users grew over 150% Q/Q; and when Salesforce opened Slack up to outside AI agents, a million users plugged in within a month. Visionary founder/CEO Marc Benioff’s decision to spend $25 billion buying back his own stock in a single quarter earlier this year — the largest repurchase in company history, roughly a fifth of its market capitalization – is looking incredibly savvy for the largest repository of customer data on the planet.
The balance of power shifting to Salesforce, with Salesforce getting more pricing power, not less, is why leading frontier LLMs such as Anthropic are now rushing to strike partnerships with Salesforce, exemplified by the debut of “Claudeforce,” Salesforce and Anthropic’s exciting new partnership allowing full integration of Claude within Salesforce, a win-win partnership which will increase usage of both platforms and push customers toward the highest-end premier subscription plans.
The bearish AI narrative here is also deceptively simple – and wrong. Earlier this year, some analysts presumed that if a traveler can ask a chatbot for a hotel or flight, who needs Booking.com? But time has shown just completely wrong those skeptics were, with Booking Holdings stock having now bounced back to near all-time highs, just as other OTA rivals such as Expedia have as well. The mistake these wrongheaded skeptics made was simple: they mistook Booking Holdings as a search engine when in reality, it is a differentiated travel transaction platform enjoying a strong competitive moat.
The distinction that matters, and which is too often overlooked, is between the top of the travel funnel, where trips are discovered, and the bottom, where money changes hands and the trip actually planned and executed. Travelers are indeed turning to AI for recommendations, and that is genuinely ominous for metasearch and referral businesses whose entire function was comparison. It is not ominous, however, for the company that is merchant of record on roughly three-quarters of its bookings — a share up four points in the past year and still fast rising — settling more than 100 payment methods across 50 currencies and adjudicating the thorny disputes and complex last-minute cancellations that AI platforms have shown no appetite to touch.
Indeed, Google’s own leadership declared that the company has “no intention of becoming an OTA (online travel agency)” and has zero interest in acting as merchant of record. OpenAI reached the same conclusion the hard way, retreating from in-chat checkout this spring after a badly botched rollout was widely panned.
Furthermore, contrary to popular perception, almost all of Booking.com’s room nights come from independent properties and smaller hotels, to the tune of 90% of all bookings, rather than large hotel chains. These smaller properties would never be able to run global payment processing, multi-currency settlement, and dispute resolution even if they are somehow able to surface independently through AI searches. This is the critical gap that Booking’s infrastructure fills, and why Bookings’ hotel partners are so loyal and not going anywhere anytime soon. The importance of this structural advantage shielding against LLM disruption can be seen in how Airbnb’s stock price is up 40% YTD, partly because its inventory of exclusive properties is seen as a strong moat against LLM disruption.
However, those same bears, undeterred by their prior mistakes as the overwrought SaasPocalypse “death” narrative faded, have now pivoted towards believing that just like with Salesforce, Booking Holdings will have less pricing power moving forward, and will have to pay more for customer acquisition than it did before with less direct customer loyalty, compressing margins and hindering profitability. But this margin compression thesis is equally wrong, as accelerating AI changes will only increase the relative power of Booking Holdings in the marketplace and make its value proposition more singular and irreplaceable.
Simply put, Booking Holdings is well positioned to use AI to gain even more market share from its less tech-savvy competitors. With Booking Holdings’ moat secure as the travel infrastructure provider of choice, there is every reason to think that AI will only drive greater traffic towards Bookings’ unique platform in the years ahead, rather than less. We are still in the earliest stages of this pivot, as AI-driven traffic has been remarkably limited for OTAs thus far. On its August earnings call, Booking disclosed that traffic sourced from large language models remains well below 1% of room nights, with no material change over recent quarters, while direct traffic held steady in the mid-60% range and grew in absolute terms.
But in a future where AI drives an inevitably greater share of discovery, building on the lessons it has learned bidding for web browser search traffic for 20 years, Booking Holdings is the best positioned of its competitors to apply those lessons to bidding for preferential AI traffic and advertising – with the same tried-and-true machinery for converting a click from search traffic, regardless of whether from AI or from a search engine, into a direct, repeated, loyal Booking customer. That is the same exact singular playbook Booking has pioneered to perfection under the continued leadership of Booking’s widely admired CEO, Glenn Fogel, who is seen as one of the best capital allocators of our era – all of which are unique advantages that position Bookings to be the biggest AI beneficiary of any of its competitors.
IBM bears wrongly believed they’d stumbled onto gold last month when IBM stock fell 25% in a single day, the worst in the company’s history, as several large clients redirected capital budgets towards memory amidst a severe memory crunch. Although a third of those supposedly lost deals ended up closing within the next few weeks, and IBM CEO Arvind Krishna won widespread plaudits for his honest transparency.
Nonetheless, a common misguided bearish narrative is that AI is poised to disrupt IBM’s $21 billion consulting business as well as its hugely profitable legacy software business, on which runs the core systems of many banks, insurers, and airlines.
But what some critics miss is that AI has actually been a boon for IBM’s consulting business: AI now accounts for half of all new consulting signings and is one of the largest components of IBM’s backlog — at far higher margins than traditional consulting, thanks to IBM now being able to bill on the basis of outcomes and productivity rather than brute hours worked. And Red Hat, the software that enables a company’s AI agents to run across any cloud and any platform, grew 11% as paradoxically, AI creates new needs for software powers continued revenue growth in the subscription software business.
Simply put, IBM is being paid to build the AI transition, not run over by it, which is why IBM’s AI business has more than doubled over the last year.
Everybody – ourselves included – concedes that AI is disrupting legacy technology and software companies. But financial markets seem to be tossing out the baby with the bath water, looking past vital software companies which own things that AI agents cannot run without. The key question now, is whether a company still owns something that AI agents need, and where the power in the marketplace lies. And we believe that power is rapidly shifting back to software firms which just months ago were seen as the biggest losers but are now quickly transforming into the biggest winners from AI.
Salesforce owns the data that AI agents cannot operate without. Booking Holdings owns the travel platform that agents cannot execute travel bookings without. IBM owns the underlying technological infrastructure that AI agents run on. Every one of these is a differentiated moat, which is worth more in a world of AI, not less. These are just three particularly compelling examples of several prominent software companies poised to benefit from AI, with ServiceNow under the capable and experienced leadership of CEO Bill McDermott and Snowflake also standing out as core examples.
As legendary Intel CEO Andy Grove famously quipped, “only the paranoid survive.” But paranoia and panic are very different, and amidst widespread panic across markets, commendable prudence has turned into reckless lack of discrimination in discerning AI winners and losers in the software space, with software bears missing the transformation taking place before our eyes as software firms turn into some of the biggest beneficiaries of AI.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
Direct link to offer
If you purchase three $100 cards you’ll pay $287.85 after fees, probably can’t stack with portals as the promo code isn’t listed. You can get 5% back via Chase offer. This is better than the other Visa eGiftcard deals currently available.
Hat tip to SD
Telegram –
X –
WhatsApp –
———————————————————————————————————————–
✅ FIU REGISTERED EXCHANGE
BINANCE –
————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
“Join me in this live bitcoin trading session, where we dive deep into real time price analysis and profitable trading strategies.whether you are new to crypto or a seasoned trader, you’ll learn how to navigate the market, sport key trends, and make informed trades. do, not miss out on live update and prediction as well break down bitcoins price movements!”
Join Our Membership For Fast Comment –
————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
🚨Disclaimer – – – –
The information provided during this stream is for educational and informational purposes only. it does not constitute financial advice, investment recommendation involves high risk, and you should not trade with moneynyou cannot afford to loss. Always conduct your own research, consult with a financial advisor, and make decisions bases on your personal circumstances. the content shared in this stream reflects my personal opinions and may not be suitable for everyone.
🚨”Disclaimer: Forex and CFD trading involve significant risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Exness is an offshore broker and is not regulated by SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India). Indian laws allow forex trading only on SEBI-approved exchanges and INR-based currency pairs. Trading with an offshore broker may lead to legal and financial risks, including potential issues with fund withdrawals or regulatory actions by RBI or SEBI. Please do your own research and consult a financial advisor before investing.”
————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
#bitcoin
#live
#cryptolive
#bitcoinlive
#btc
source
The buydown transfers mark-to-market risk from builder’s income statements onto the balance sheets of the buyers who took the subsidized deals, and selectively. A buyer whose 6.65% payment would exceed the DTI threshold can instead qualify at the bought-down 4.9%. The subsidy does not change the preferences of infra-marginal buyers; it changes who can close. This buyer, however, is the one with the least equity cushion, the least refinance flexibility, and the least room to absorb a later shock, such as tax reassessments, insurance repricing (sharpest in Florida, Texas, and Arizona), and dues from homeowners associations.
The risk does not need a downturn to bite; it is priced in at closing. The recorded price and every comp built on it read $426,000, but the price a resale buyer can finance at 6.65%, with no buydown available to them, is closer to the $371,000 the builder netted. That gap is not the home’s value collapsing; it is the distance between the inflated recorded price and the resale-clearing price. The owner does not feel it while living in the house because the rate buy-down delivers an ongoing below-market payment. They feel it on exit.
Trace the exit for the marginal buyer the subsidy pulls in, with the market unchanged. They buy at the recorded $426,000 with 10% down: $42,600 in cash, and the remaining $383,400 is financed. The resale clears at the $371,000, the builder’s true realized net revenue. After roughly 6% ($22,260) a sale carries in commissions and closing costs, that yields $348,740, which is $34,660 short of the loan. The seller must write a check for that $34,660 just to clear the mortgage, and gets none of the $42,600 back. The seller walks away about $77,260 poorer ($42,600 down payment plus $12,400 loan gap plus $22,600 closing cost), without a single point of price decline. Even at the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) minimum 3.5% down the loss is $77,260; the difference is the seller now needs to bring $62,350 to the closing. Refinancing offers no escape in either rate environment. The buyer is locked in.
This phenomenon is most visible in the Sunbelt metro area, where we see the most buy-down-driven volume, and where valuations were already stretched, as noted in Zillow ZHVI and Census income data. Austin sits at 5.13x price-to-income, 32% above its pre-2020 norm of 3.90x; Phoenix (4.56x) and Tampa (4.53x) run 30% to 42% above the 3.2 to 3.5x national baseline. A buyer entering at an inflated price there carries the exit risk on top of a high valuation. Builders hold reported margins and equity valuations by pushing that risk onto the households least able to absorb it.
While they aren’t at their absolute worst, mortgage rates remain very close to their one-year high.
They’re about .125% below their 52-week highs, which were seen in late July before we got some favorable economic data.
However, they remain stubbornly high with no real relief in sight.
Let’s break down how they got here and why they remain sticky at these levels.
And how they could finally break this unfriendly trend and move lower again.
Without a doubt, the biggest driver has been the Iranian conflict and the higher oil prices that came with it.
Why? Because before that took place at the end of February, mortgage rates were below 6% for the first time since late 2022.
They were enjoying their best levels in three and a half years!
Then seemingly overnight (but in reality over the course of just one month), they increased to about 6.625%.
That’s a nasty move higher and could only be explained by the geopolitics that nobody saw coming at the time.
I think if you remove that conflict from the equation, mortgage rates would likely be in the low 6s today (or even lower).
They probably wouldn’t be markedly lower than those late February/early March levels, but they certainly wouldn’t be at or near one-year highs.
So if you want major relief, you end that war and hope oil prices come back down.
There was some positive movement this week after the U.S. signaled a move away from actual warfare and into economic sanctions instead.
We’ll see how that goes, as everyday it seems the script changes.
Another big issue at the moment is the amount of government debt, which just recently officially passed the $40 trillion mark for the first time in history.
That means there’s a lot of bonds out there, and with increased supply comes the need for higher yields to attract investors.
This is one reason why we’ve seen yields on government bonds like the 10-year (which acts as a bellwether for 30-year fixed mortgage) hit 52-week highs recently.
They’ve since eased a bit but aren’t far from the high seen in late 2023 (around 5%) when the 30-year fixed climbed to 8%.
Simply put, we need to get our spending under control, balance the budget, and make our debt attractive again to the rest of the world.
If we don’t, it increases the cost of lending for everyone, including those seeking a student loan or a mortgage.
Along those same lines, we’ve got a massive AI buildout that requires a ton of capital.
Instead of paying cash, these tech companies are issuing bonds so they can raise funds and pay for all their expensive datacenters.
Those bonds compete for the same investors that buy things like Treasuries or mortgage-backed securities (MBS).
Again, to attract investors, they need to offer higher yields (interest rates) to lure in the buyers.
This puts additional upward pressure on mortgage rates as increased supply leads to higher yields on all fixed-income securities.
As we all know from economics, it’s simple supply and demand. You have too much of something, the price goes down.
To offset the drop in price, the yield goes up and it needs to move ever higher to become attractive.
Limit the supply and the price can go up, and the yield can drop too.
There’s also the matter of inflation, which has proven to be sticky and above the Fed’s long-term target of 2%.
At last glance, it remains above 3%, whether you rely on CPI or the Fed’s preferred PCE index.
Speaking of PCE, it’s due out Wednesday and the consensus is prices up 3.6% from a year ago (+3.3% for core).
While oil has been the scapegoat of late, we’ve yet to really shake the price increases in other categories whether it’s software, tech components, transport, or even housing services inflation.
We got hot inflation reports for April and May, which also coincided with a hot jobs report, which led to the highest mortgage rates in about a year.
Fortunately we’ve had some cooler reports lately that took some of the pressure off, but we’re not out of the woods yet.
Especially with President Trump announcing fresh tariffs on Canada.
I’ll keep it short and sweet and end this with Fed rate expectations, which are hikes or cuts (or doing nothing).
They are driven by the aforementioned reports, whether it’s CPI, PCE, or the monthly jobs report.
While the federal funds rate is an overnight rate (very short duration) and the 30-year fixed mortgage is well, a 30-year loan, there is some influence from the Fed.
The Fed doesn’t set consumer mortgage rates but it does have some say.
If investors expect the Fed to hike, bond yields tend to rise and mortgage rates move higher as well.
If they expect a cut, the opposite happens and mortgage rates tend to come down.
However, this happens before the Fed actually announces its policy decision, and is largely baked in by the time of the FOMC announcement.
There was a while where it appeared the Fed would hike thanks to that hot economic data and the Iran war.
But recent, cooler reports might allow the Fed to avoid another hike, especially if new Fed chair Kevin Warsh can convince the others it’s the right move.
That line of thinking has allowed mortgage rates to step back from their one-year highs, but only marginally.
Until we solve Iran and the inflation comes with it, mortgage rates will have a tough time moving much lower.
The good news is they might be near their top and not necessarily at risk of moving much higher either.
Before creating this site, I worked as an account executive for a wholesale mortgage lender in Los Angeles. My hands-on experience in the early 2000s inspired me to begin writing about mortgages 20 years ago to help prospective (and existing) home buyers better navigate the home loan process. Follow me on X for hot takes.
