Coca-Cola Spiced

to be discontinued

Coca-Cola Co. is discontinuing its newest “permanent” flavor a little more than seven months after putting it on the market. The beverage giant said Wednesday that Coca-Cola Spiced and Coca-Cola Spiced Zero Sugar will be phased out and replaced with a new flavor that will be introduced next year. Coca-Cola Spiced went on sale in the U.S. and Canada on Feb. 19. At the time, the company said it would be the first new permanent addition to its North American portfolio in three years. Coca-Cola didn’t elaborate Wednesday on what went wrong, but it might have been the name. Coca-Cola Spiced doesn’t have much heat; it mostly tastes like raspberry.

X releases first

transparency report

Social media platform X published its first transparency report Wednesday since the company was purchased by Elon Musk two years ago. It shows the company has removed millions of posts and accounts from the site in the first half of the year. X suspended nearly 5.3 million accounts in that time, up from the 1.6 million accounts the company reported suspending in the first half of 2022. The social media company also “removed or labeled” more than 10.6 million posts for violating platform rules. Nearly 5 million of those posts were categorized as violating its “hateful conduct” policy.

New-home sales

dropped in August 

Sales of new homes in the U.S. pulled back in August after a sharp increase in the prior month, as buyers remained patient amid steadily declining mortgage rates. New single-family home sales decreased 4.7% last month to an annualized rate of 716,000 after rising at the fastest pace since early 2022, government data showed Wednesday. The median sales price, meantime, decreased 4.6% from a year earlier to $420,600. That marked the seventh straight month of annual price declines, extending what was already the longest streak since 2009. It mainly reflected fewer sales of homes priced above $500,000.

Refinance requests

rise as rates fall

Applications to refinance mortgages surged for a second week as more Americans capitalized on the cheapest borrowing costs in two years. The Mortgage Bankers Association’s refinancing index jumped 20.3% in the week ended Sept. 20 to the highest level since April 2022, the group said Wednesday. The contract rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage eased 2 basis points to 6.13%, the eighth straight weekly drop and the longest stretch of declines since 2018-2019. That helped boost the group’s home-purchase applications index by 1.4% last week to the highest level since early February. The fifth straight weekly advance in the measure points to burgeoning demand in a housing market that’s gradually finding some footing.

— Bulletin wire reports