What we’re reading (2/6)
“Housing Market Shows Signs Of Thawing” (Wall Street Journal). “Falling mortgage rates are beginning to stir demand in the housing market. The average 30-year home loan rate has come down by just about a full percentage point from a 20-year high above 7% in November, largely in response to signs that the Federal Reserve is nearly finished lifting rates. That has brought some new buyers into the market.”
“Musk’s Twitter Has Just 180,000 U.S. Subscribers, Two Months After Launch” (The Information). “Around 180,000 people in the U.S. were paying for subscriptions to Twitter, including Twitter Blue, as of mid-January, or less than 0.2% of monthly active users, according to a document viewed by The Information. The tiny number signals the challenge Elon Musk faces in turning the subscription product into a major source of revenue.”
“Is The Economy Kind Of Good Now?” (Vox). “It might be time to open up a perhaps surprising possibility here, at least if you’ve been paying attention to the chatter around high-profile layoffs and a potential recession. The economy seems like it’s … kind of in a pretty decent spot.”
“Hot January Jobs Report Presents Puzzle for Investors” (Morningstar). “The January jobs report showed the opposite of what many investors and economists had expected: Instead of an economy heading toward a recession, the job market carried on at a confoundingly strong pace.”
“Google Unveils Its ChatGPT Rival” (CNN Business). “Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said in a blog post that Bard will be opened up to ‘trusted testers’ starting Monday, with plans to make it available to the public “in the coming weeks.’ Like ChatGPT, which was released publicly in late November by AI research company OpenAI, Bard is built on a large language model. These models are trained on vast troves of data online in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts.”
