What we’re reading (1/16)
“Wall Street Thinks U.S. Homes Are Overpriced” (Wall Street Journal). “House hunters don’t need to be told that property is too expensive right now. But Wall Street has an idea by just how much. The stock market is pricing portfolios of American homes at a hefty discount to what houses are changing hands for in the open market. Shares of single-family landlords Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent are trading at 35% and 20% discounts to their net asset values, respectively, according to real-estate analytics firm Green Street. Invitation Homes’ stock has traded at a particularly large discount to NAV since interest rates began to rise in early 2022, but the gap has widened by 10 percentage points in the past year.”
“She Is In Love With ChatGPT” (New York Times). “ChatGPT, which now has over 300 million users, has been marketed as a general-purpose tool that can write code, summarize long documents and give advice. Ayrin found that it was easy to make it a randy conversationalist as well. She went into the ‘personalization’ settings and described what she wanted…And then she started messaging with it.”
“So Long, Net Neutrality, And Good Riddance” (Marginal Revolution). “One of the longest, most technical and, as it turns out, most inconsequential public-policy debates of the 21st century was about net neutrality. Now that a federal appeals court has effectively ended the debate by striking down the FCC’s net neutrality rules, it’s worth asking what we’ve learned. If you have forgotten the sequence of events, here’s a quick recap: In 2015, during President Barack Obama’s presidency and after years of debate, the Federal Communications Commission issued something called the Open Internet Order, guaranteeing net neutrality, which is broadly defined as the principle that internet service providers treat all communications equally, offering both users and content providers consistent service and pricing. Two years later, under President Donald Trump, the FCC rescinded the net neutrality requirement. It was then reinstated under President Joe Biden in 2024, until being struck down earlier this month. The actual reality has been somewhat different. Bandwidth has expanded, and Netflix transmissions do not interfere with Facebook, or vice versa. There is plenty of access to go around. That has been the case during periods with net neutrality and without. So one lesson of the net neutrality debate comes from economics: Supply is elastic, at least when regulation allows it to be.”
“The Surprise Winner Of The TikTok Ban” (Slate). “Press coverage of the potential winners of TikTok’s American demise has tended to focus on Meta and Google. That’s with fair reason: Instagram and YouTube would jockey for TikTok users (and creators) whose app was shut off. But the biggest beneficiaries might be the internet privacy and security firms that offer VPNs. After all, you could either find a new platform or, for a few dollars per month, maintain access to the one you already love. VPNs are likely to see an enormous influx of new sign-ups.”
“UnitedHealth Charged Cancer Patients 5000%, Bombshell FTC Report Claims” (Newsweek). “The FTC report found that from 2017 to 2022, three PBMs—UnitedHealth Group's Optum, CVS Health's CVS Caremark and Cigna's Express Scripts—marked up prices at their pharmacies by hundreds or thousands of percent…A spokesperson for Cigna's Express Scripts told Reuters that the report's findings were misleading and that the calculations are based on a subset of medications that represent less than 2 percent of what the company spends on medications in a year.”
