What we’re reading (12/22)
“Homes Sold In November At Fastest Pace In 10 Months” (Wall Street Journal). “Existing-home sales, which rose in November to the highest seasonally adjusted annual rate since January, are on track for their strongest year since 2006 as low mortgage-interest rates and a robust job market drive up demand.” [Note: emphasis added.]
“Idle Now, Pay Later” (City Journal). “Younger workers opting to work less or to put in only the minimum effort may pay a future price in terms of stagnation or downward mobility. Workers receive the most pay raises in their twenties and thirties. This is also when people acquire the skills and contacts that pay off for the rest of their careers. One’s early years are not an ideal time to stay away from work, even considering the challenges that today’s younger workers face.”
“How the 2020s Economy Could Resemble The 1980s” (New York Times). “[U]nderstanding the history of how the economy went from bust to boom in the early 1980s offers a surprising model for optimism about how the American economy could progress in the next couple of years. All it would take is for the Federal Reserve to pull off a delicate economic pivot that is the mirror image of the one it managed four decades ago.”
“If The Economy Is Doing So Well, Why Does It Feel Like a Disaster?” (Time). “The chasm between how our public understanding of what’s going on economically and what our numbers say is not just a feature of our present. At few points in the past twenty years have Americans felt good about the future for very long. At no point since the bursting of ‘90s tech bubble and the subsequent recession of 2000 have American felt as good about the economy as they did throughout the 1990s, and the high point after twenty years of ups and mostly downs was January of 2020, when confidence about the economic future reached about where it was in early 1990s.”
“Financial Regulator Takes Aim At ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Credit” (Washington Post). “Twenty percent of Americans said they had used a BNPL payment plan in the previous 12 months, according to a poll over the summer by SurveyMonkey. More than half of those making less than $50,000 a year said that they are interested in using the service because they would not have been able to afford their purchases otherwise, the SurveyMonkey poll found.”
