A type of mortgage that fell out of favor in the aftermath of the financial crisis is catching on again.

Adjustable-rate mortgage demand has surged this year, making up 12.9% of all originations last week, a postcrisis high. The loans allow borrowers to lock in a lower rate than they could get on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for five, seven, or 10 years before the rate readjusts to market levels. They’re catching on as conventional mortgage rates remain stubbornly high.

At today’s rates, ARMs can offer substantial savings. One popular type, a 7/6 ARM, which carries a fixed mortgage rate for seven years and adjusts every six months thereafter, had an average rate of 5.78% on Friday, compared to 6.35% on a 30-year fixed mortgage. But accepting the lower rate can come with added risks for borrowers because they’re giving up the certainty of a stable interest rate for the life of their loan.

These days, though, the risk looks increasingly worth it in a punishing market of near record-high home prices and elevated mortgage rates. Surveys suggest that many sidelined homebuyers want to see rates around 5.5% before they jump into the market. While 30-year mortgage rates remain far from that level, ARMs are close.

“A lot of people want to get reengaged with the market,” said Rick Palacios Jr., director of research at John Burns Research and Consulting. “At this point in time, they don’t care if it takes an ARM to get them there.”

Postcrisis makeover

Mortgage brokers and lenders say they’ve seen an uptick in prospective clients’ curiosity about ARMs. They have others who stand to benefit from an ARM but might not be familiar with the loans, or are wary because of their association with the 2008 financial crisis.

Many people who defaulted on their mortgages in the lead-up to the crisis had ARMs they couldn’t afford. Back then, ARMs often had two or three years of ultra-low “teaser rates” and then would adjust interest monthly. In many cases, after the teaser period expired, borrowers saw big rate hikes that left them on the hook for payments they couldn’t handle.

In the years leading up to the crisis, ARMs made up as much as a third of overall loan volume, according to Mortgage Bankers Association data.

After the crash, ARMs fell out of favor. By late 2008, they were less than 1% of the market. Mortgage lenders tightened their requirements, and ARMs gradually came back into use — but at a fraction of precrisis levels. When rates on 30-year fixed mortgages were ultra-low, few borrowers bothered with ARMs because the savings were minimal. But they enjoyed a brief resurgence in 2022 when rates ratcheted from around 5% to 7% in just a few months.

The ARMs of today are different than those available two decades ago. As with all mortgages, qualification standards have grown more stringent. Borrowers typically need to have a high credit score, a large down payment, and enough income to cover loan payments even if their interest rate jumps. ARMs also typically come with longer intro rate periods — seven years is common, and five or 10 years is also often an option — and have caps on how much an interest rate can rise during one adjustment phase and over the life of the loan. Adjustments usually happen in six-month or one-year intervals, not monthly.

While additional safeguards protect borrowers from massive interest rate hikes, paying higher interest rates down the line remains a risk. Many people who take out ARMs now do so with plans to move or refinance before their fixed-rate period ends.

“Even if you plan to stay in your home forever, the probability that you may refinance in the next five, seven, or 10 years is probably pretty high,” said Scott Bridges, chief consumer direct lending production officer at Pennymac, one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders.

Those sorts of borrowers can potentially save hundreds of dollars a month in interest payments by choosing an ARM over a higher-rate fixed loan, he added. Client demand has been growing: ARMs have made up around 15% of the company’s new business recently, up from around 5% a year ago.

Terry Roberts, branch manager of E Mortgage Capital in Columbia, Mo., said he still gets mixed reactions when he presents prospective borrowers with the ARM option and explains the potential rate savings.

“People seem to be warming up to the idea,” he said. But despite lending guidelines designed to make sure borrowers can afford future interest rate adjustments, some borrowers still fear they won’t be able to handle the higher payments.

“It’s a seed that was planted years ago that scares people to death,” Roberts said. “That’s your biggest fear — losing your home.”

An interest rate bet

While most customers worry about their rate jumping higher during an adjustment period, the opposite can happen too, especially when the Federal Reserve cuts rates. While 30-year fixed mortgage rates are influenced by — but not directly tied to — Fed actions, ARMs have a more direct link.

ARMs in their adjustment period are benchmarked to what’s known as the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, or SOFR. SOFR is closely tied to the federal funds rate, meaning that when the Fed begins cutting rates, as it did on Wednesday, SOFR follows. In that environment, ARMs in their adjustment period can have their rates reset lower.

Still, there’s no way to guarantee where interest rates will be years down the line. Financial advisers caution that while ARMs can make sense for people who are sure they’ll move or refinance before their adjustment period starts, they’ve seen plans change, and it’s important to consider the overall affordability of the loan.

“I have seen countless situations where someone will get an ARM, and then when that adjustment occurs, their finances get blown up,” said Alex Caswell, founder and chief executive officer of Wealth Script Advisors in San Francisco.

Marcos Zambrano, president of Andes Mortgage in Atlanta, said he’s been doing more ARM business in recent years as interest rates have risen. Recently, they’ve been most popular among repeat buyer clients who are familiar with mortgage basics and have sizable down payments that can help them land the lowest rates.

“Those who have experience are a little more open to the program,” Zambrano said. “And the programs like a big down payment — the bigger the down payment, the better the rate is going to be.”

The breadth of strength is unmistakable for anyone watching their portfolios and financial headlines.

At long last, rate cut relief has arrived. And while Wall Street had priced in the Fed’s shift toward easing, the actual decision brought a jolt of bullish energy.

All three major averages clinched record closes this week. And for the first time since 2021, the Russell 2000 (^RUT) notched a new closing high. Investors poured into small-cap stocks that are poised for a boost with lower interest rates on the horizon.

Tech stocks are also continuing their strong climb and have completely brushed off Chinese AI developer DeepSeek’s revelation that training its R1 model came at only a fraction of the cost of its US rivals. Certainly a marked departure from the last time DeepSeek dropped big news.

With more paths to revenue and a renewed commitment to invest in AI, any shock value of DeepSeek as a competitor to the tech giants has faded. And Intel’s government backing and partnership with Nvidia also added to investor optimism.

Rallying markets appear to be shaking off the initial hesitation after the rate decision.

Yes, more cuts are coming, the forecasts of central bankers showed, but there was a wide dispersion of predictions for when those cuts would show up and how many would be appropriate. New Federal Reserve governor Stephen Miran on Friday revealed that he was the outlier on the “dot plot,” penciling in a total of six cuts this year. But Fed officials, by and large, were less aligned than in previous forecasts.

In some ways, the meeting whose outcome was largely predicted also confused investors with mixed messages. As often happens when we get what we want, we ask what’s next — and a satisfactory answer isn’t immediately obvious.

The Fed, for instance, upgraded its growth outlook but flagged a weakening labor market with downside risks, suggesting that the priority for policymakers is to protect jobs, even as inflation persists above target levels. Two more cuts are likely this year, according to the Fed’s “dot plot.”

But even as Fed Chair Jerome Powell signaled confidence in eventually taming inflation, he said that “there are no risk-free paths now,” a line we brought attention to Thursday. Central bankers now have to execute a balancing act — grappling with labor weakness and sticky pricing pressures — with unclear outcomes. Nonetheless, Wall Street is extending its record run.

Jar, an Indian fintech startup that allows users to invest in gold, has turned profitable by helping millions of first-time savers use its app to build digital gold holdings.

While many consumer fintechs focus on affluent urban users or credit products, Jar has gained traction by offering a culturally familiar asset — gold — as a low-barrier entry point to saving. The four-year-old startup targets low- to middle-income users —a segment often underserved by traditional financial institutions—by allowing them to save in gold for as little as ₹10 (about $0.11) a day.

That strategy has helped Jar reach over 35 million registered users across 12,000 zip codes, co-founder and CEO Nishchay AG said in an interview. About 60% of users are from India’s smaller cities and towns (known as tier-2 and tier-3 towns), and more than 95% are saving formally for the first time, he told TechCrunch.

The startup’s financials reflect this momentum, and two sources familiar with the matter tell TechCrunch that it is even planning to go public next year. Investment bankers are engaging with the startup for its IPO, the sources said.

These bankers have a compelling growth story to share. Jar’s operating revenue — primarily from its core gold-saving app — grew ninefold in fiscal year 2024, which ended in March, to ₹2.08 billion (roughly $23.6 million), as disclosed in its latest filing. More dramatically, its total revenue across all business lines during that same period jumped to ₹24.50 billion (approximately $279.3 million), representing a 49-fold jump from ₹500 million ($5.7 million) in the previous financial year (FY24).

This total revenue figure includes earnings from digital gold transactions, jewelry sales through its Nek platform, and fees from third-party distribution partnerships.

The jewelry component is a sizable piece of this diversified approach. Nek launched early last year to offer gold, silver, diamond, and lab-grown diamond jewelry across over 8,000 zip codes. The platform works on a drop-shipment model with zero inventory. It crossed ₹1 billion (approximately $11 million) in annual revenue last year and has been “growing steadily since,” Nishchay said.

Jar has been profitable after tax for the last two consecutive quarters, Nishchay told TechCrunch.

That growth ties to a bet by the company on a new direction. Until last year, Jar functioned primarily as a distribution platform working with a third-party digital gold provider — essentially acting as a middleman. Since then, it has vertically integrated its operations, building an in-house tech stack to purchase, store, and manage gold directly, with BDO serving as its statutory auditor and Brinks as its custody partner. By controlling the entire value chain, Jar can now capture a larger share of the gold value chain and even distribute its gold through third-party platforms,including the Walmart-owned fintech firm PhonePe.

Earlier this year, the Bengaluru-based startup partnered both BharatPe and Unity Small Finance Bank to let users make digital payments — both to individuals and merchants — directly through the Jar app using India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system. UPI is India’s dominant digital payment network that allows instant bank-to-bank transfers using smartphones. The move opens up a new revenue stream and aims to increase user engagement and retention by broadening the app’s utility beyond just gold savings.

Jar has also been an early adopter of UPI AutoPay, a feature introduced by the Indian government in 2020 to enable recurring payments on the UPI platform. The feature has helped the startup, which only supports UPI-based payments for gold savings, drive repeat transactions from users, according to sources familiar with the matter.

“Daily savings is our hero feature, and that’s what most of our users use it for,” Nishchay said when asked how UPI AutoPay has contributed to the company’s growth.

The app serves a diverse user base, from skilled professionals in IT and manufacturing to small business owners and daily wage workers, such as electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and construction laborers. The app supports nine Indian languages, which the company says helps it cater to users across education and income levels.

The startup has also designed its app to offer a personalized experience to users, with gamification and nudges to encourage gold savings.

“The growth team consistently built different cohorts to identify the consumer based on a lot of attributes and data signals, based on what phone you use, which location you are operating the phone, from what language, what is your consistent saving pattern, all of those things they take into consideration,” Nishchay said.

The startup counts Tiger Global, Tribe Capital, Arkam Ventures, and WEH Ventures among its investors. It has raised $63.3 million in funding to date, per Tracxn, and was last valued at more than $300 million.

BEIJING (Reuters) – Hundreds of people lined up at Apple’s flagship store in Beijing on the launch day of the iPhone 17 on Friday in a sign that sales of the series are off to a promising start in the world’s second largest economy.

Among the roughly 300 people that arrived in the morning at Apple’s store in downtown Sanlitun to pick up phones ordered online was Shuke Wang, 35, who said he purchased the Pro Max model, priced from 9,999 yuan ($1,406) in China and pegged by analysts to be the best selling model in the 17 series.

“I really like the 17 series’ redesign, and I think the orange-coloured one looks good, but too flashy. The Air Model looks good too, but the Pro Max gives longer battery life,” he said.

Apple says the base model iPhone 17 has a brighter, more scratch-resistant screen, and will also have a better front-facing camera that will make horizontal selfies look better.

Analysts say the iPhone 17 series could give a crucial end-of-year boost to Apple’s market share and shipments in China, which have been pressured this year by intensifying competition from Xiaomi and Huawei amid weak consumer demand.

Apple does not disclose pre-order figures.

In the first eight weeks of the third quarter, Apple’s shipments decreased 6%, according to data from Counterpoint Research released earlier this week.

Chiew Le Xuan, a senior analyst at research company Omdia, said they expected iPhone shipments in China to rise 11% year over year in the second half, driven by the new series, contributing to 5% full-year growth for Apple in 2025.

“The iPhone 17 Pro Max is expected to outperform the 16 Pro Max, driven by a major redesign – a factor that has historically spurred replacement demand in China,” said Chiew. “It is likely to become Apple’s top-performing model in the Chinese market in 2026.”

The iPhone Air will be the only model in China to have telecom operators’ support for an e-SIM – a digital SIM embedded in the device. However, Apple has not opened pre-sales for the Air in China and says the availability of eSIM services from China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom is subject to regulatory approval.

“The iPhone Air may serve as a testbed for thin-and-light technology that could later be applied to a foldable iPhone,” said Will Wong, a senior smartphone analyst at IDC.

Wong said the Air won’t deliver a major sales boost, as Apple traded off battery life and camera and audio quality, which Chinese consumers value, to achieve the slimmer design features.

($1 = 7.1138 Chinese yuan renminbi)