North Idaho Business Brief — August 2026

The 10-year Treasury sits at 4.68%. That is the benchmark your longer-term borrowing costs key off of, and it has not come down. In fact the gap between the 10-year and the 2-year widened over the past month, from 0.41 to 0.51 percentage points — long rates are holding while short rates ease.

The bank prime rate is 6.75%. If you carry a line of credit or a variable-rate equipment loan, that is roughly your cost of money right now.

What to do with that: if your 2027 plan assumes meaningfully cheaper money, stress-test it against rates staying about where they are. Nothing in this month's data says a sharp drop is coming. And if you have a balloon payment or a rate reset landing in the next eighteen months, the time to know that date is now — not next spring.

This is the most useful thing in the data this month. Producer prices — what businesses pay, before anything reaches a consumer — are up 4.66% year over year, down from 5.7% three months ago. Crude oil is at $84.77, also down. Consumer inflation is cooling as well, at 3.36% from 3.81%.

Input costs are falling faster than most owners have adjusted their pricing.

What to do with that: if you raised prices during the 2025 cost spike and your inputs have since eased, that spread is margin you are currently earning — and it is worth knowing exactly how much before you discount to win the next job. Run the math on your top three inputs before you send your next big quote.

Wage growth is 3.15%, down from 3.57% three months ago. Job creation has slowed sharply — the three-month average is 20,000 jobs a month, down from 69,000. Unemployment is 4.1%.

What to do with that: if you have been putting off a hire because you could not compete on wage, the labor market is looser than it was in the spring. That cuts both ways. It is a better time to hire, and it is a reason to watch your own demand carefully.