What we’re reading (10/19)
“10-Year U.S. Treasury Yield Tops 4.9%” (Wall Street Journal). “Long-term bond yields hit a fresh 16-year high Wednesday, weighing on stocks already pressured by the conflict in Gaza and corporate earnings results. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield rose to 4.902%, the highest closing level since July 2007. The S&P 500 fell 1.3%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 332.57 points, or 1%. The Nasdaq Composite lost 1.6%.”
“A Higher Monthly Payment, But Less Square Footage” (New York Times). “The American home is shrinking. With interest rates rising and mortgage costs with them, homebuilders are pulling in yards, tightening living rooms and lopping off bedrooms in an attempt to keep the monthly payment in line with what families can afford. The result is that new home buyers are paying more and getting less, while far-flung developments where people move for size and space are now being reimagined as higher-density communities where single-family houses have apartment-size proportions.”
“Real-Estate Commissions Could Be The Next Fee On The Chopping Block” (Wall Street Journal). “In recent years, technology has made a host of consumer transactions cheaper—from booking a vacation to buying stocks—but commission rates for selling a home haven’t really budged. That could soon change. A pair of class-action lawsuits challenging real-estate industry rules—including one that went to trial beginning this week—and continued pressure from U.S. antitrust officials are threatening to disrupt a compensation model that hasn’t meaningfully changed in decades.”
“The Author Michael Lewis On The Lessons Of Sam Bankman-Fried” (Vox). “What the tech geniuses do, in my experience, is say a lot of words and they don’t make a lot of sense, or to put it more politely, they’re too smart for me to understand. It’s mostly jargon and acronyms. They don’t want me to understand. They want me to be impressed. Sam was not like that. He was very good at explaining and making sure you understood and allowing you to ask the simple questions. He wasn’t off-putting. I’m with you on the tech genius stuff. I’ve dipped into Silicon Valley and I’ve never really wanted to write about that crowd. He wasn’t that way.”
“The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (Marc Andreesen). “We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. Willing buyer meets willing seller, a price is struck, both sides benefit from the exchange or it doesn’t happen. Profits are the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand. Prices encode information about supply and demand. Markets cause entrepreneurs to seek out high prices as a signal of opportunity to create new wealth by driving those prices down.”
