Plus: Why aren't mortgage rates getting lower?
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Target earnings really missed the mark. Its failure to drum up business through promotions and price cuts sent its stock tumbling Wednesday.
An AI executive was arrested for defrauding her stockholders. AllHere Education founder Joanna Smith-Griffin joins a long list of Forbes 30 Under 30 alums to run into legal trouble.
Bitcoin cracked a record $94,000. Trading in the cryptocurrency also appears to be getting less volatile.
Google execs went through great lengths to lower a veil of secrecy over their operations. One product management vice president told underlings “I don’t do History on” with chat logs.
McDonald’s is bringing back the McRib. The fast food giant will also sell you jugs of McRib sauce if you can get past its E. coli scandal.

Instinct would tell you that when the interest rates undergirding the entire U.S. financial system go down, lenders would pass those savings along to people taking out mortgages. But that hasn’t been the case since the Federal Reserve started lowering borrowing costs.
Instead, mortgage rates have actually been going up after spending much of the year declining in anticipation of the Fed cuts. That’s because investors are skeptical that the central bank’s fight against inflation is actually over; their bets against Treasury notes are pushing up other interest rates in tandem.
What will it take for mortgages to become more affordable? Quartz’s Rocio Fabbro finds out what the holdup is.

Many of the AI products targeted at business clients so far have been focused on co-pilots that help humans with their tasks. But now the industry’s legion of chatbots assistants are going to begin moving over to the driver’s seat.
The next buzzword to accompany AI chatter will be “agents,” or bots that can complete complex tasks autonomously. Microsoft has rolled out previews of one example, which it has named “Project Manager,” with travel-booking and customer-service phone call functions not far behind from the likes of OpenAI and Google.
What lies on the other side of this brave new AI frontier? Quartz’s Britney Nguyen scopes out the future to show where things are going.