Today’s cooler PCE print (Personal Consumption Expenditures) is the kind of “good news” that makes Wall Street cheer and Main Street squint at the grocery bill, because inflation is finally drifting closer to the Fed’s 2% target while prices are still unmistakably higher than a few years ago. With core PCE running in the high‑2% range and markets already pricing in a high probability of a rate cut at next week’s meeting, the data tilts the Fed further toward easing, even as officials pretend they are still “data dependent” rather than markets dependent. For consumers, that means the squeeze on paychecks may ease more by a slowdown in future price increases than by any great deflationary miracle, so the average household will likely feel “less bad” rather than suddenly rich.​

For mortgage rates and housing, the irony is that falling inflation and rising odds of Fed cuts can cheapen borrowing costs just enough to keep demand alive, but not necessarily enough to fix affordability in markets where home prices never really corrected. Thirty‑year mortgage rates, which have already been drifting down ahead of expected cuts, may grind lower rather than plunge, supporting refinance activity and nudging some buyers off the sidelines, while tight inventories and construction bottlenecks keep the housing ecosystem uncomfortably expensive. In other words, the PCE report is likely to help future monthly payments more than it helps listing prices, turning housing into a slightly less punishing, but still very selective, game for America’s would‑be homeowners