My morning train reads:
• Commercial Real Estate Is in Trouble, but Not for the Reason You Think: As far as weak spots go, there are reasons for concern. Offices comprise 80% of new delinquencies in commercial real estate loans, and occupancy rates in major cities consistently hover around 50% of capacity. But the towers we once commuted to comprise just a tiny fraction of the overall commercial real estate market. Commercial real estate market is big, diverse, and highly regional, valued at about $20 trillion (Q2 2021). This $20 trillion is fairly evenly spread across its component sectors. (Morningstar)
• How to Invest Like the 1%: In 1989, the top 1% of households in the United States controlled a little less than 23% of the wealth in this country. That number has now reached nearly 32%. By contrast, the bottom 90% have seen their share of wealth drop from 40% in 1989 to 31% today. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• Americans Are Moving Toward Climate Danger in Search of Cheaper Homes: Migration to places at high risk from heat, floods and fires rose over the last two years, a new analysis by Redfin finds.. (Bloomberg)
• A Decade Ago, Jeff Bezos Bought a Newspaper. Now He’s Paying Attention to It Again. The Amazon founder, who purchased The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, has taken a more active role in the paper’s operations this year. (New York Times)
• The Five Things Keeping Us From Going All-Electric: The ‘electrification of everything’ gets talked about a lot these days. But it isn’t going to happen soon. Nor should we want it to. (Wall Street Journal)
• Affirmative action for rich kids: It’s more than just legacy admissions: Chetty and his colleagues provide compelling evidence that fancy schools are promoting a kind of neo-aristocracy, with admission programs that help to perpetuate a family’s class privilege from one generation to the next. (NPR)
• Spouse Out of Town? It’s Time For ‘Husband Meal’ You’ve heard of Girl Dinner. Now, GQ explores what men eat when they’re home alone. (GQ)
• The big idea: Why the laws of physics will never explain the universe: We should think of the cosmos as more like an animal than a machine. (The Guardian) see also Cosmic Paradigm Shift: New Research Doubles Universe’s Age to 26.7 Billion Years ” Our universe could be twice as old as current estimates, according to a new study: A new study proposes that the universe may be 26.7 billion years old, challenging the widely accepted estimate of 13.7 billion years based on the Lambda-CDM concordance model. (SciTech Daily)
• ‘I thought it was over’: Behind Odell Beckham Jr.’s unlikely comeback with the Ravens: “What do you want to do?” she asked him after the game. “If you fall out of love with football, you’re done. You won’t get a good rehab. You have to love it. If you don’t want to play, so be it. No one says you have to play. It’s up to you.” (The Athletic)
• Jim Gaffigan’s Quintessentially American Comedy Gets Darker and Better: He’ll still joke about fast food. But on “Dark Pale,” his 10th stand-up special, his evolution as a comedian is apparent. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Liz Hoffman, Liz Hoffman, the Business and Finance Editor at Semafor. Previously, she was a senior reporter at Wall Street Journal covering finance, investment banking and M&A. Following a string of front-page articles on Goldman Sachs push into Main St, and the travails of the world’s largest VC, she moved to Semafor. Her new book is Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World’s Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink.
U.S. housing market affordability deterioration clashes with the ‘lock-in effect’
Source: Fortune
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