My back-to-work morning train WFH reads:
• Real Estate Vultures Eye Middle-Class Enclave of Ravaged LA: Speculators call home owners, agents in the wake of the fires Neighborhood northeast of LA was a haven for Black families (Bloomberg)
• The 10 Bestselling EVs of 2024: Many EVs saw significant sales increases in 2024, but none of the traditional automakers could come even close to the numbers put up by Tesla. (Car and Driver) see also The Car Market’s Hottest Deal: The Cheap EV Lease. Easier access to a $7,500 federal tax break has helped fuel the leasing boom (Wall Street Journal) see also Tesla is and isn’t America’s top choice for electric vehicles: It’s got the biggest EV market share in the US but few EV buyers say it’s their top choice. (Sherwood)
• More Men Are Addicted to the ‘Crack Cocaine’ of the Stock Market: Gamblers Anonymous meetings are filling up with people hooked on trading and betting. Apps make it as easy as ordering takeout. (WSJ)
• You Have NASA to Thank for Wireless Headphones and Vacuum Cleaners: The space agency’s Spinoff project displays the countless everyday technologies that were spurred by space-related research.. (Wired)
• All those 2025 mortgage rates forecasts are now wrong: Most forecasters got the mortgage trends for 2024 wrong; in the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage neared 8%, the highest level in decades. Mortgage market observers expected that rates had reached their peak and would generally decline in 2024, stabilizing at perhaps 6% or lower. Unfortunately for homebuyers in 2024, mortgage rates have stayed higher for longer than anyone expected. Freddie Mac Mortgage rates averaged 6.72% across the calendar year 2024. (Housing Wire) see also Is There an Insanity Premium on Interest Rates? Something strange is happening in the bond market. (Is it Trump?) (Krugman Wonks Out)
• ‘Karma is real:’ Threats over California fire aid reshape disaster politics: There is growing unease among other blue-state Democrats that threats to condition disaster assistance will not be unique to California. (Politico)
• New Swiss Re study: Waymo is safer than even the most advanced human-driven vehicles: The study compared Waymo’s liability claims to human driver baselines, which are based on Swiss Re’s data from over 500,000 claims and over 200 billion miles of exposure. It found that the Waymo Driver demonstrated better safety performance when compared to human-driven vehicles, with an 88% reduction in property damage claims and 92% reduction in bodily injury claims. (Waymo)
• 2024 Brought the World to a Dangerous Warming Threshold. Now What? Global temperatures last year crept past a key goal, raising questions about how much nations can stop the planet from heating up further. (New York Times)
• Jokers everywhere: There’s a lot of finger-pointing already and the fires aren’t even close to being contained. Getting to the bottom of the pile to find the ball when this is over (sorry to even minimize the current moment with a “when this is over”) is gonna be an ugly mess of scratching, eye-gouging, and nut punches. (Moon Tower) See also what the fuck are we doing anymore? yes this is about social media yes this is about social media. (The Late Review)
• How two gun-friendly senators are turning the tide on gun safety: Legislation, which impressed leading gun-safety groups and advocates focuses on the engineering of guns. It would limit the rounds their magazines can contain and require those magazines to be permanent. Also crucial is making “lethal conversion devices like bump stocks and Glock switches” unlawful. The goal: to make it impossible to convert lawful firearms into what effectively become fully automatic weapons like machine guns, which have been subject to stringent limitations since 1934. (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Jonathan Clements. He has been a personal finance reporter at the Wall Street Journal for over twenty years and has written more than 1,000 columns. Last summer, Jonathan received a terminal diagnosis and announced it at his site. DON’T MISS his discussion of why “Dying is hard work” and what we all need to understand about money, life satisfaction, and planning.
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