Tag: Demographics

Demographics | Oil & Gas Production

FT – China’s falling birth rate threatens economic growth – Sun Yu 1/19/20

FT – Italy’s collapsing birth rate rings demographic alarm bells – Miles Johnson 1/16/20

WSJ – Daily Shot: eia – US Shale Production by Region 1/20/20

WSJ – Daily Shot: Gas Production by Country 1/20/20

Graphics: Interest Rates, Wealth, Inequality, Healthcare Costs, Energy Outlook & South Korean Demographics

Lots of graphics today. Enjoy.

INTEREST RATES

WSJ – Daily Shot: German Govt Bond Yield Curve 11/6/19

WSJ – Daily Shot: US Govt Bond Curve 11/8/19

WEALTH AND WEALTH INEQUALITY

WSJ – Daily Shot: statista – Citizen Wealth by Country 11/5/19

WSJ – Daily Shot: BBC – Highest Gini Index Scores within OECD 10/29/19

Bloomberg – Richest 1% of Americans Close to Surpassing Wealth of Middle Class – Alexandre Tanzi and Michael Sasso 11/9/19

US HEALTHCARE COSTS

Bloomberg – U.S. Needs to Cure the Health-Care Cost Disease –  Noah Smith 11/8/19

OPEC ENERGY OUTLOOK

Bloomberg – OPEC Looks Ahead and Sees Oil’s Plateau – Nathaniel Bullard 11/8/19

SOUTH KOREAN DEMOGRAPHICS

WSJ – South Korea Is Having Fewer Babies; Soon It Will Have Fewer Soldiers – Dasl Yoon and Timothy Martin 11/6/19

Teenage Drug and Alcohol Use in the US & More about Demographics

Despite what you see on TV, through streaming, or in the movies, teenage drug and alcohol use in the US is actually down…with the exception of marijuana.

WSJ – Daily Shot: NYT – Teenage Drug & Alcohol Use 8/1/19

And while I know I had the chart from Pew Research on population projections in 2020 and 2100 (report is from June 17, 2019), it’s worth pointing out the sheer change in populations by 2100. Seriously.

WSJ – Daily Shot: Pew Research – Biggest Gainers & Losers in Population by 2100 8/1/19

Population Projections and the US Housing Divergence

WSJ – Daily Shot: Pew Research – World Population Projections in 2100 07/30/19

Bloomberg – America’s Housing Affordability Crisis Spreads to the Heartland – Prashant Gopal, Reade Pickert, and Noah Buhayar 7/29/19

Low mortgage rates and thriving employment should be the recipe for a strong housing market. Instead, they’re deepening America’s affordability crisis.

What began on the coasts, in areas like New York and San Francisco, is now radiating into the nation’s heartland, as well as to cities from Las Vegas to Charleston, South Carolina. Entry-level buyers are scrambling to purchase homes that are in short supply, sending values soaring.

Expectations that the Federal Reserve will reduce interest rates this week will do little to change the sober reality: For many, prices have risen much faster than incomes, pushing homeownership out of reach for a new generation of hopeful buyers. That’s cooling the market, with the 2019 spring season shaping up as the slowest for sales in five years, according to CoreLogic Inc.

“All signs point to a housing market that should be doing really well and it’s not,” said Danielle Hale, chief economist for Realtor.com. “The No. 1 constraint, despite low mortgage rates, is that people can’t find housing that they feel is affordable.”

Recent months have shown a growing divergence between the high and low ends of the U.S. market. Prices in the bottom third jumped about 9% in June from a year earlier, compared with 1.1% growth for the top third, data from Redfin show. Meanwhile, sales for lower-priced homes plunged almost 20% as buyers struggled to find properties in their range, according to Zillow.

There are some signs of a pickup in the market. Contracts to buy previously owned homes rose 2.8% in June from the previous month, exceeding economists’ forecasts, the National Association of Realtors reported Tuesday.

Still, the outlook is particularly bleak for first-time buyers. The number of new homeowners created in the second quarter was the lowest since 2006, and just a third as many as a year earlier, the Census Bureau reported last week. Black homeownership fell to the lowest level since at least 1970.

The housing recovery that began in 2012 has been unequal from the start. About 6 million Americans lost homes in last decade’s crash and needed time to rebuild their credit. Private equity firms such as Blackstone Group Inc. swept in to buy foreclosed properties at deep discounts and rented them back to many of those displaced former homeowners.

Now those people are back in the market, along with the bulging population of millennials eager for their first crack at homeownership. But many of the properties they want have already been picked over. Builders have focused on wealthier buyers willing to pay bigger price tags, and now some areas have too many expensive homes, and not enough where they’re needed.

Affordable homes disappeared first in technology and financial hubs like Silicon Valley and New York, where buyers with big paychecks pushed up prices. Now values are flattening after many would-be homeowners have been forced to the sidelines. In some areas, demand has also been hit by a pullback in foreign buyers and new federal limits on property-tax deductions – as well as fears that a recession may be around the corner.

US Municipal Pension Gaps

Image is from a few days ago, but telling.

WSJ – Daily Shot: WFC – State & Local Govt Pension Fund Status 7/18/19

And if you’re in an interactive mood, Visual Capitalist posted a very neat tableau interactive that illustrates how Americans differ by Age.

This one is differences by Owning or Renting.

May 17, 2018

Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice

FT – How the west should judge a rising China – Martin Wolf 5/15

  • “Advanced countries are hobbled by their inability to manage their own affairs.”

Japan

FT – How Japan’s ageing population is shrinking GDP – Valentina Romei 5/16

  • “With a rapidly ageing population and a shrinking workforce, Japan is one of the world’s oldest societies. Now analysts fear that these demographics are hampering economic growth.” 
  • “Japan’s economy contracted by 0.2% in the first three months of this year over the previous quarter, ending eight consecutive quarters of growth, Japan’s longest period of uninterrupted growth since 1989. It is now the only major economy to start 2018 with a shrinking economy.” 
  • “With the second-weakest performance of major economies last year — Italy had the poorest — Japan is now set to be the slowest growing of the G7 economies this year.”
  • “Japan cannot keep up with the growth rates seen in other advanced economies because ‘Japan’s demographics weaken its GDP growth,’ said Rob Carnell, head of research and chief economist for Asia-Pacific at ING. ‘A rapidly ageing population and shrinking labor force are hampering growth,’ warned the IMF in its latest country’s report.” 
  • “In a separate document, the IMF calculated that ‘the impact of ageing could potentially drag down Japan’s average annual GDP growth by 1 percentage point over the next three decades’.”
  • “Since Japan’s population began its decline in 2010, the country’s population has shrunk by about 1.3m people.”
  • “By 2065, the UN expects Japan’s population to fall by an additional 28m people, corresponding to a 22% drop. Over the same period, the population in advanced economies is expected to rise by 3%.”
  • “Not only is Japan’s population shrinking, but it is also ageing rapidly.”
  • “A shrinking population means a smaller domestic market with fewer people buying goods and services.” 
  • “In 2016, there were about 2,300 fewer kindergartens than seven years earlier as the number of pupils dropped by 18%. Nearly 2,000 primary schools have been shut over the same period while the number of children of primary school age dropped by 8%.”
  • “Far fewer houses are being built as the population, and demand, falls.” 
  • “The shrinkage in Japan’s population means that even with flat productivity growth there would be ‘steady declines in GDP output from one year to another,’ said Mr Carnell. Assuming all other factors remained similar, an economy with an expanding population would see positive GDP growth. ‘A better way of looking at Japan would be as per capita GDP,’ added Mr Carnell.” 
  • “When looking at GDP growth rate per person of working age — which takes into account ageing trends as well as population shrinkage — Japan is in fact the second-best performing G7 country after Germany over the past 20 years.” 
  • “Unless demographic trends are corrected, this is unlikely to be the last time Japan will see negative GDP growth, analysts say. But, given its shrinking labor force, its economy is performing strongly, they add.”

South America

FT – Kellogg latest company to pull out of Venezuela – Gideon Long 5/15

April 20, 2018

If you were only to read one thing…

WP – Too Many Men – Simon Denyer and Annie Gowen 4/18

  • “Nothing like this has happened in human history. A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.”
  • “The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations.”
  • “Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as well. Barely recognized, the ramifications of too many men are only starting to come into sight.”
  • “’In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,’ warns Li Shuzhuo, a leading demographer at Xi’an Jiaotong University.”
  • “Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex. China’s official one-child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this imbalance, as millions of couples were determined that their child should be a son.”
  • “India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males, according to its most recent census. The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous. The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution. Officials attribute this to the advent of sex-selective technology in the last 30 years, which is now banned but still in widespread practice.”
  • “In the two countries, 50 million excess males are under age 20.”

Perspective

WSJ – Daily Shot: howmuch.net – Home Insurance Cost in Every State 4/19

WSJ – Daily Shot: howmuch.net – Health Insurance Rates by State 4/19

Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice

BuzzFeed News – This PSA About Fake News From Barack Obama Is Not What It Appears – David Mack 4/17

  • “Oscar-winning filmmaker Jordan Peele has a warning for viewers about trusting material they encounter online.”

Visual Capitalist – America: An Economic Snapshot of Every U.S. State – Jeff Desjardins 4/19

Wolf Street – Subprime Carmageddon: Specialized Lenders Begin to Collapse – Wolf Richter 4/8

  • “The subprime auto lending business is highly cyclical. For example, according to Bloomberg, citing Moody’s data, 41 subprime lenders filed for bankruptcy during the subprime auto loan bust between 1997 and 1999.”
  • “But unlike subprime home mortgages, subprime auto loans won’t take down the financial system. About 25% of the auto loans written are subprime. For new cars, it’s about 20%. Of the $1.11 trillion in total auto loans outstanding at the end of 2017, about $280 billion were subprime – less than a quarter of the $1.3 trillion subprime mortgages before the financial crisis. Even if the total subprime portfolio produced a net loss of 50%, the losses would amount to only about $140 billion.”
  • “And there are other differences: Vehicles are quickly repossessed, usually after three months of missed payments. Even in bad times, there is a liquid market for the collateral at auctions around the country, and vehicles can be shipped to auctions with the greatest demand. The results are that lenders don’t end up holding these vehicles and loans on their balance sheet for years, as mortgage lenders did with defaulted home mortgages and homes.”
  • “But subprime will take down many more of the specialized lenders. And the survivors will tighten lending standards. This will prevent more car buyers from buying a new vehicles. Many of them will be switched to older used vehicles. Or they hang on to what they have.”
  • “So automakers get to grapple with the loss of these customers. When you lose a significant portion of your customers due to credit problems, it hurts. And this is where it adds to ‘Carmageddon.’ Investors and creditors, including PE firms, get to grapple with losses and bankruptcies. But given the limited magnitude of subprime auto loans, and the limited impact on the banks, the Fed will brush it off and continue its monetary tightening, and no one will get bailed out.”

Markets / Economy

FT – Sentiment sours for big brand consumer staples – Chloe Cornish 4/18

WSJ – Demand for Batteries Is Shrinking, Yet Prices Keep On Going and Going…Up – Sharon Terlep and Nicole Friedman 4/16

Tech

WSJ – Daily Shot: Bloomberg – IMF Says the Global Smartphone Boom Has Reached Its Peak – Andrew Mayeda 4/19

Britain

Bloomberg Businessweek – Britain Targets Russian Billionaires – Henry Meyer, Yuliya Fedorinova, and Irina Reznik 4/11

  • “As the U.S. goes after a handful of Russian oligarchs with its latest round of sanctions, the U.K. is under pressure domestically and from abroad to tighten controls and shed its reputation as a place to launder corrupt money. The U.K. National Crime Agency estimates that more than £90 billion ($127.5 billion) of such money enters the U.K. each year, feeding a vast industry of property companies, lawyers, bankers, and accountants. A lot of that comes from Russia, and ends up in high-end real estate. About a fifth of suspicious property purchases from 2008 to 2015, £729 million worth, were made by Russians, according to anticorruption watchdog Transparency International. ‘In terms of the levels of financial flows that go through London, it’s likely that it’s one of the biggest hubs of money laundering in the world,’ says Ben Cowdock, the group’s lead researcher on dirty money in the U.K.”

March 23, 2018

Perspective

WSJ – Daily Shot: Cost per Unit – Penny and Nickel 3/22

Maps on the Web: Reddit – Literal Meaning and Origin of US State Names 3/21

Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice

FT – Anti-Semitism in the age of Donald Trump – Edward Luce 3/21

  • “The west’s largest taboo is creeping back from the fringes, most remarkably in the US and UK.”

Grub Street – The Last Conversation You’ll Ever Need to Have About Eating Right – Mark Bittman and David Katz 3/18

Markets / Economy

Bloomberg – Cheerios Maker Is the Latest Victim of U.S. Trucker Shortage – Craig Giammona 3/21

Cryptocurrency / ICOs

FT – Swiss authorities tread wary path through ‘Crypto Valley’ – Ralph Atkins 3/19

Japan

Bloomberg Businessweek – Japan’s Prisons Are a Haven for Elderly Women – Shiho Fukada 3/16

  • “Every aging society faces distinct challenges. But Japan, with the world’s oldest population (27.3% of its citizens are 65 or older, almost twice the share in the U.S.), has been dealing with one it didn’t foresee: senior crime. Complaints and arrests involving elderly people, and women in particular, are taking place at rates above those of any other demographic group. Almost 1 in 5 women in Japanese prisons is a senior. Their crimes are usually minor—9 in 10 senior women who’ve been convicted were found guilty of shoplifting.”
  • “From 1980 to 2015, the number of seniors living alone increased more than sixfold, to almost 6 million. And a 2017 survey by Tokyo’s government found that more than half of seniors caught shoplifting live alone; 40% either don’t have family or rarely speak with relatives. These people often say they have no one to turn to when they need help.”

 

March 22, 2018

Perspective

NYT – The Population Slowdown in the Outer Suburbs of the East and Midwest – Robert Gebeloff 3/21

Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice

A Wealth of Common Sense – Headline Risk – Ben Carlson 3/21

Bloomberg Gadfly – The Saudi Aramco IPO Math Problem: Cash > Barrels – Liam Denning 3/15

  • “Getting to a $2 trillion valuation requires some heroic assumptions.”

Bloomberg View – Before You #DeleteFacebook, Try Taking Control – Barry Ritholtz 3/21

  • “A precept from the 1970s, said originally about television (back when TV was free), is applicable to technology and media: If you are not paying for a product, then you are the product.”

FT – Hard-headed deterrence is the antidote to Putin’s poison – Philip Stephens 3/14

FT – The low-paid workers cleaning up the worst horrors of the internet – Gillian Tett 3/16

  • “A new film (The Cleaners) tracks outsourced workers in grim little cubicles watching the depravity that exists online.”

NYT – Trump Hacked the Media Right Before Our Eyes – Ross Douthat 3/21

  • “…the business model of our news channels both assumes and heightens polarization, and that it was ripe for exploitation by a demagogue who was also a celebrity.”

NYT – Fox News Analyst Quits, Calling Network a ‘Propaganda Machine’ – Michael M. Grynbaum 3/20

NYT – Toys ‘R’ Us Case Is Test of Private Equity in Age of Amazon – Michael Corkery 3/15

Pragmatic Capitalism – Why are Money Managers Paid so Much? – Cullen Roche 3/20

  • “Salesmanship. The answer is salesmanship. I’ve been in this business long enough to know that asset management is mostly about selling the hope of superior returns in exchange for the guarantee of high fees.  The problem for the average person is that they don’t actually know enough about the asset management business to quantify whether their investment manager is worth the fees they pay. And in fairness, a big part of that is due to the fact that you have to compare yourself to a counterfactual that doesn’t exist since paying 1.6% per year to invest in a crappy active mutual fund is probably a better result than sitting in cash all the time because you’re too scared to get fully invested. Investment managers, as expensive as they are, at least keep you in the game and you need to be in the game to score any goals.”

Rational Radical – Royal commission shatters housing bubble façade – Matt Ellis 3/21

  • Commentary on the Australian Housing market (read bubble)

The Verge – China will ban people with poor ‘social credit’ from planes and trains – Sean O’Kane 3/16

  • “Starting in May, Chinese citizens who rank low on the country’s burgeoning ‘social credit’ system will be in danger of being banned from buying plane or train tickets for up to a year, according to statements recently released by the country’s National Development and Reform Commission.”
  • “With the social credit system, the Chinese government rates citizens based on things like criminal behavior and financial misdeeds, but also on what they buy, say, and do. Those with low ‘scores’ have to deal with penalties and restrictions. China has been working towards rolling out a full version of the system by 2020, but some early versions of it are already in place.”
  • “The new travel restrictions are the latest addition to this growing patchwork of social engineering, which has already imposed punishments on more than seven million citizens. And there’s a broad range when it comes to who can be flagged. Citizens who have spread ‘false information about terrorism,’ caused ‘trouble’ on flights, used expired tickets, or were caught smoking on trains could all be banned, according to Reuters.”

Wolf Street – Then Why Is Anyone STILL on Facebook? – Wolf Richter 3/20

Markets / Economy

WSJ – Daily Shot: Nomura – Valuations of FANG-type stocks 3/20

WSJ – Daily Shot: Bianco Research – Breaking Down US Household Retirement Assets 3/21

Energy

WSJ – Daily Shot: Venezuelan Crude Oil Output 2/28

Finance

FT – John Paulson takes an axe to his struggling hedge fund – Robin Wigglesworth 3/16

  • “Struggling hedge fund magnate John Paulson has taken an axe to his once-imperious firm, with several top executives departing in a ‘rightsizing’ this week after a string of heavy losses.”
  • “Mr Paulson rose to fame after the crisis, when Paulson & Co made billions of dollars from predicting the US housing crisis and astute bets on complex credit derivatives. The hedge fund firm’s assets under management hit a peak of $38bn in 2011.”
  • “But since then Paulson & Co has suffered a string of losses across most of its hedge funds, with its flagship merger arbitrage fund — Mr Paulson’s specialty — losing 18.1% and 23% in 2016 and 2017, respectively, according to the performance update of a mirror fund offered by Schroders.”
  • “Paulson & Co’s assets have now shrunk to about $9bn, of which two-thirds is Mr Paulson’s own money, and this week the hedge fund manager let a string of employees go.”
  • “Since making one of the biggest financial hauls in the industry’s history — Mr Paulson personally made almost $4bn from the financial crisis — the firm has made a series of ill-fated investments, such as on healthcare stocks, banks and gold and by betting against German bonds.”
  • “The most high-profile recent mis-step was a big bet on drug maker Valeant Pharmaceuticals. Paulson & Co is the drug maker’s single biggest shareholder, but the stock has tumbled from a high of $262.50 in 2015 to just $16.80 this week — a loss of more than 93% over the period.”
  • “Paulson & Co’s biggest public holdings, according to regulatory filings, are pharma companies Mylan, Shire, Valeant and Allergan, as well as an exchange-traded fund that tracks the price of gold. The gold ETF has lost about 32% of its value since the hedge fund’s investment peaked at $4.6bn in 2011.”

Health / Medicine

WSJ – Daily Shot: AEI – Geographic Variation in the Cost of the Opioid Crisis – Alex Brill 3/20

Other Interesting Links

FT – Wine’s Wild West: a tasting tour of Arizona – Horatia Harrod 3/16

  • “In Scottsdale’s bars and out on the state’s grassy uplands, an industry wiped out by Prohibition is being revived.”

March 21, 2018

Perspective

AEIdeas – Creative Destruction, the Uber effect, and the slow death of the NYC taxi cartel – Mark J. Perry 3/17

WP – Toys R Us’s baby problem is everybody’s baby problem – Andrew Van Dam 3/15

  • “There are endless reasons a big-box toy store would collapse during a retail apocalypse — and Toys R Us acknowledged a number of them in its most recent annual filing: the teetering tower of debt incurred by its private-equity owners, competition from Amazon, Walmart and Target.”
  • “They even wrung their hands about app stores, labor costs and potential tariffs raising the costs of the imported goods they sell.”
  • “But one risk stood out. Toys R Us said there just weren’t enough babies…”
  • “It may not have been the biggest existential threat confronting Geoffrey the Giraffe (the store’s mascot), but it’s the one with the broadest implications outside of the worlds of toys and malls.”
  • “Measured as a share of overall population, U.S. births have fallen steadily since the Great Recession. They hit their lowest point on record in 2016 — the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has comparable data.”
  • “Even adjusted for the aging population and declining share of women of childbearing age, U.S. fertility rates are at all-time lows.”
  • “That’s problematic for Toys R Us, which also operates the Babies R Us stores. The company claims in its annual report that its income is linked to birthrates, and it appears to be right.”
  • “There are, to be sure, numerous other factors at play. The same economic forces that encourage people to have children may also encourage them to splurge on toys, for example.”
  • “But it’s nonetheless apparent that Toys R Us’s fortunes rise and fall with the population of its target market.”
  • “And that’s why the company’s demise should worry the rest of us. Toys R Us focuses on kids, so it’s feeling the crunch from declining birthrates long before the rest of the economy. But it’s just a matter of time before the trends that toppled the troubled toy maker put the squeeze on businesses that cater to consumers of all ages.”
  • “Eventually, unless the country does something significant to encourage larger families or immigration, that narrowing base of the population pyramid will crawl upward.”
  • “In the end, Toys R Us will just have been the first of many businesses of all descriptions facing the same hard demographic truth: Economic growth is extremely difficult without population growth.“

Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice

Bloomberg – How Amazon’s Bottomless Appetite Became Corporate America’s Nightmare – Shira Ovide 3/14

Bloomberg Quint – The World Economy Risks Turning Too Hot to Handle as G-20 Meets – Enda Curran and Rich Miller 3/15

CNN Money – Amazon didn’t kill Toys ‘R’ Us. Here’s what did – Chris Isidore 3/15

Economist – Malaysia’s PM is about to steal an election – Leaders 3/10

  • Impunity…

FactsMaps – US News – U.S. Best States Overall Ranking – 2018

FT – Fresh blood: why everyone fell for Theranos – Andrew Hill 3/18

FT – Saudi Aramco: sand trap – Lex 3/12

  • “Justifying a $2tn valuation for the state oil company requires hard persuasion.”

Maps on the Web – Average ACT score by US State – Reddit 3/19

NYT – Big Sugar Versus Your Body – David Leonhardt 3/11

Markets / Economy

Economist – America’s companies have binged on debt; a reckoning looms 3/8

  • “The total debt of American non-financial corporations as a percentage of GDP has reached a record high of 73.3%”

WalletHub – Credit Card Debt Study: Trends & Insights – Alina Comoreanu 3/8

Real Estate

Business Insider – American homes are more affordable than they’ve been in 40 years – but that could change sooner than you think – Tanza Loudenback 3/19

  • “‘Thanks to low mortgage rates, buying a home is actually more affordable now than in the past 40 years,’ Alexandra Lee, a housing data analyst at Trulia, told Business Insider.”
  • “Mortgage interest rates hit 16.6% in 1981 in response to massive inflation in the US. In 2016, interest rates fell to about 3.5%, and they’re about 4.5% right now.”
  • “Trulia found that the typical household in 1980 could afford only about three-fourths of the median home price, compared with the median household in 2016, which could afford a home 1 1/2 times the median home price.”
  • “Twenty-two US metros crossed the threshold from unaffordable to affordable over the past four decades, according to the data. The markets that are too expensive for the average buyer now, including San Francisco, Seattle, and San Jose, California, were always too expensive.”
  • “Trulia ultimately found that Americans’ homebuying power has strengthened in the past 40 years.”
  • “Take Salt Lake City, for example. From 1990 to 2016, home prices increased 53%, but the affordability index jumped to 131 from 122. That is because interest rates dropped to 3.4% from 10% during that time. Homeownership in Salt Lake City became even more affordable over the 26-year period — and the case appears the same for many of the largest US metros.”
  • “Only the Denver, Miami, and Portland, Oregon, metro areas dropped in affordability during that time, Lee said.”
  • “By the end of 2017, a monthly mortgage payment on the median home in the US required just 15.7% of the typical household income, according to a report by Trulia’s parent company Zillow. Back in the late 1980s and 1990s, a mortgage payment took up 21% of the typical American’s income.”
  • Granted, coming up with a down payment on a house these days is no easy task.

Effect of interest rate rises are starting to bite.

CNBC – Mortgage refinances fall to decade low – Diana Olick 3/14

  • “Interest rates for home loans have risen each week this year, so each week homeowners have had less incentive refinance their mortgages.”
  • “Higher interest rates caused applications to refinance a home loan to fall 2% for the week and 18% from a year ago, when rates were lower. The refinance share of all mortgage applications fell to 40%, the lowest since 2008.”
  • “Housing is more expensive today than it has been in a decade, and a decade ago credit was a lot easier to get. The average monthly mortgage payment is now up nearly 13% from a year ago, according to Realtor.com — a combination of higher home prices and higher interest rates.”

Economist – Asian and European cities compete for the title of most expensive city – The Data Team 3/15

  • “Singapore remains the most expensive city in the world for the fifth year running, according to the latest findings of the Worldwide Cost of Living Survey from The Economist Intelligence Unit.”

FT – WeWork is ‘victim of own success’ as office rivals gather – Aime Williams 3/12

  • “A wave of lease purchases by flexible workspace providers is driving commercial demand in leading cities.”

Honolulu Star Advertiser – Mayor signs bill temporarily banning permits for new ‘monster houses’ – Gordon Y.K. Pang 3/13

  • “Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell signed into law today a bill imposing a moratorium of up to two years on building permits for ‘monster’ houses, giving the city Department of Planning and Permitting time to come up with permanent rules to deal with the growing phenomenon.”
  • “DPP will, for the most part, not approve building permit applications during the moratorium for houses that cover more than seven-tenths of a lot under Bill 110 (2017). For example, a 5,000-square-foot lot could not have a living space that’s 3,500 square feet or larger.”
  • Another instance of a market where housing prices have gone well beyond what local incomes can support. As a result, people come up with ‘work-arounds’ which tend to overburden the local infrastructure and upset neighborhoods, resulting in blunt regulatory reaction. Honolulu is not unique to this problem.

WSJ – The Next Housing Crisis: A Historic Shortage of New Homes – Laura Kusisto 3/18

  • “America is facing a new housing crisis. A decade after an epic construction binge, fewer homes are being built per household than at almost any time in U.S. history.“
  • “Home construction per household a decade after the bust remains near the lowest level in 60 years of record-keeping, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.”
  • “What makes the slump puzzling is that by most other measures, the American economy is booming. Jobs are plentiful, wages are on the rise and the stock market is near record highs. Millennials, the largest generation since the baby boomers, are aging into home ownership.”
  • “A combination of tightened housing regulations, a lack of construction labor and a land shortage in highly prized areas is driving the crisis, according to industry experts.”
  • “Even during the deep recession of the mid-1970s and the downturn in the early 2000s, builders put up significantly more homes per U.S. household than they are constructing now, in the ninth year of an economic expansion. Only at the bottom of the 1981 and 1991 economic downturns were per-household construction levels near what they are now, according to Jordan Rappaport, an economist at the Kansas City Fed. He says the only period when the U.S. might have built fewer homes by population was during World War II.”
  • “The National Association of Home Builders estimates builders will start fewer than 900,000 new homes in 2018, less than the roughly 1.3 million homes needed to keep up with population growth. The overall inventory of new and existing homes for sale hit its lowest level on record in the fourth quarter of 2017, at 1.48 million, according to the National Association of Realtors.”
  • “That, in turn, is pushing up prices at what economists say is an unsustainable pace. The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index rose 6.3% in 2017. That was roughly twice the rate of income growth and three times the rate of inflation.”
  • “Builders cite numerous factors contributing to the construction slump. A decades long push for young people to go to college has driven down trade-school enrollment, depriving builders of skilled labor. Declining numbers of immigrant construction workers have sapped builders of unskilled labor.”
  • “The construction workforce in the U.S. declined to 10.5 million in 2016, from 10.6 million in 2010, when the real-estate market was near bottom, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by Issi Romem, an economist at BuildZoom, a startup that tracks construction data for building contractors.”
  • “Nationwide, membership in the National Association of Home Builders peaked at 240,000 in 2007, then dropped to 140,000 in 2012, where it has remained throughout the recovery.”
  • “Builders in far-flung exurbs are encountering stiffer resistance from young buyers even as prices ratchet higher for land closer to cities. Economists say that in many large metropolitan areas, suburbanization might simply have reached its limits, as potential buyers increasingly reject long commutes. During the 1950s, buying a home in a new suburb, where land was plentiful and cheap, often meant driving half an hour to a job in the city. Today, commutes from new developments can be several times that long.”
  • “’There’s a tremendous mismatch between the places where people want to live and the places where it’s easiest to build,’ says Edward Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University who studies constraints on housing supply.”
  • “But building remains below historical averages, and economists say it is unlikely to return to those levels before the next recession.”
  • “’It’s hard for me to see on single-family how you can build your way out of this,’ Mr. Rappaport says. ‘Even with these heroic efforts’ to overcome barriers to building new housing, he says, there is little chance ‘that you’re going to get a new stream of single-family homes that can relieve demand.’”
  • “Coastal cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Boston have taken criticism for their restrictive building codes, which make it more difficult to create enough housing to keep up with population growth.”
  • “Even metropolitan areas with more permissive approaches to building are lagging behind their historical construction levels. Housing permits in Memphis, Tenn., were 44% below their historical average in 2017, according to the latest Census figures analyzed by real-estate data firm Trulia, while permits in the Minneapolis metropolitan area were 16% below average.”

Finance

FT – Private equity groups are calling the shots – Javier Espinoza 3/14

  • “In business, the mantra goes, the customer is always right and should get the best deal.”
  • “The opposite is happening in private equity where investors, including large pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds and family money, face unfavorable fund terms and, in all likelihood, lower returns.”
  • “Private equity firms are clearly calling the shots and that is illustrated by the record amount of money they are turning away.”
  • “Huge institutional investors have so much money burning a hole in their pockets (Singapore’s GIC alone has $100bn of assets under management) they are under enormous pressure to find a home for this cash somewhere.”
  • “Hence their willingness to commit their cash to funds even if managers cut or reduce the so-called hurdle rate, which is the return that is guaranteed before a buyout group can claim a share of the profits. The industry standard is a preferred return of 8% on deals.”
  • “Advent International, the Boston and London-based group, raised eyebrows in 2016 when it announced it was closing a mega $13bn buyout fund without offering minimum returns to its investors. Last year, CVC, the former owner of F1, also said it was cutting its hurdle rate from 8% to 6%. The buyout firm also scrapped early-bird discounts given to new investors.”
  • “Rather than take their money and run from unfavorable terms, investors have doubled down on these private equity funds, which raised record amounts of cash in their fastest time ever. Advent had set out to raise $12bn and received more than $20bn of interest from investors. CVC raised €16bn but closed the door on billions more because demand was close to €30bn.”
  • “Rubbing salt into the wound of poorer terms, private equity managers are also warning them that returns should come down.”
  • “’The investors have accepted the idea of lower returns as OK,’ said the head of a private equity group. ‘It used to be that investors would earn 20% net internal rate of returns. Now they are happy with 14% or 15% net internal rate of returns.’”

Cryptocurrency / ICOs

Visual Capitalist – The Rising Problem of Crypto Theft, and How to Protect Yourself – Jeff Desjardins 3/20

Tech

WSJ – The Battery Boost We’ve Been Waiting for Is Only a Few Years Out – Christopher Mims 3/18

Health / Medicine

NYT – How to Stop Eating Sugar – David Leonhardt 3/18

China

Bloomberg – Xi Gives Stark Taiwan Warning in Hands-Off Message to Trump – Keith Zhai, Peter Martin and Dandan Li 3/20

NYT – Hard-Charging Chinese Energy Tycoon Falls From Xi Government’s Graces – Alexandra Stevenson 3/14

  • The tycoon: Ye Jianming. The company: CEFC China Energy.

India

Bloomberg Gadfly – Ambani’s Jio Triple Play Deserves to Upend This Cozy Club – Andy Mukherjee 3/20

Russia

NYT – Russian Election: Videos Show Possible Fraud – Camilla Schick 3/20

  • Did Putin really need the help?…