Thursday morning news drop
There’s a big shift hitting the housing market The rush of buyers into the housing market during the pandemic absolutely crushed housing inventory—the number of homes on the market—with that figure falling for 12 consecutive months. By April, housing inventory was down a staggering 53% from a year earlier. However, the trajectory has flipped: For two straight months the number of homes for sale has gone up. Homes listing on realtor.com rose 3% in May, then again by 9% in June. Now, new home sales are falling—their pace in June was the slowest since the onset of the pandemic. Every indication is that the market is shifting a bit in buyers’ favor. Why the sudden cooling? Home shoppers are finally showing some reluctance to pay top dollar. (Fortune)
Will the Pandemic Productivity Boom Last? Fewer workers are making more stuff. If it lasts, that’s big news for the economy of the 2020s. (Upshot)
Want to Improve Your Career? Become an Uncertainty Killer Reduce uncertainty for others as much as you can. Become an uncertainty killer. That’s it. I guarantee that if you can make other peoples’ lives more certain, they will sing your praises. You will build trust at every turn and create allies wherever you go. People may even publicly call you “a machine” and impart positive attributes to you that you may not actually have. (Of Dollars And Data)
Inside The Coronavirus Haul Of A Wall Street Whiz Kid “Crisis Investing: How To Maximize Return During Market Panics,” which showed that the best time to deploy money into the market was when high yield spreads were above 600 basis points, a gauge of extreme fear. Rasmussen’s new fund called the Verdad Opportunity Fund, which would draw investors’ capital when junk bond spreads blew out to such levels, and invest in small, undervalued companies. (Forbes)
Why Xi Jinping Waited Years to Launch His Crackdown on Tycoons: As China investors search for clues about which industries might be next in President Xi Jinping’s crackdown, they’re also pondering another question: Why now? U.S. tensions, Xi’s bid for third term help explain timing ‘The crackdown is just the beginning — it’s the prelude’ (Bloomberg)
Is Taiwan Next? In Taipei, young people like Nancy Tao Chen Ying watched as the Hong Kong protests were brutally extinguished. Now they wonder what’s in their future. (New York Times)
There’s an Earthquake Coming! The newest warning systems give users ten seconds’ notice. What can be done in that time? (New Yorker)
How Your Cup of Coffee Is Clearing the Jungle It seemed like an easy crime to stop: protected Indonesian rainforest, cut for coffee farms. But a globalized economy can undermine even the best-laid plans. (New York Times)
