What we’re reading (9/16)
“The Housing Theory Of Everything” (Works In Progress). “Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment. Along with Covid, you might include slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic inequality, and falling fertility. These longer-term trends contribute to a sense of malaise that many of us feel about our societies. They may seem loosely related, but there is one big thing that makes them all worse. That thing is a shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live. And if we fix those shortages, we will help to solve many of the other, seemingly unrelated problems that we face as well.”
“U.S. Housing Regulator Proposes Tweaks To Capital Rules For Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac” (Reuters). “The regulator overseeing housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac proposed on Wednesday changes to recently imposed capital and leverage requirements on the pair.”
“Stock Buybacks Beat Capital Spending For Many Big Companies” (Wall Street Journal). “Spending on share buybacks increased much faster than capital expenditures in the first half of the year, after pullbacks in both categories last year amid the pandemic, S&P said in response to a Wall Street Journal data request. Share repurchases at companies in the S&P 500 increased to $370.4 billion, up 29% from the first six months of 2020. Capital spending—which usually goes toward assets such as land, buildings and technology—rose to $337.17 billion, up 4.8% from the year-earlier period.”
“Citigroup, JPMorgan Expect Lower Third-Quarter Markets Revenue” (U.S. News & World Report). “Citigroup Inc expects third-quarter markets revenue to decline by a ‘low-to-mid teens’ percentage from a year earlier and JPMorgan Chase & Co expects a decrease of about 10%, according to executives of the two big banks. The lower revenues are a result of trading that has ‘normalized’ from exceptionally high levels last year, when the pandemic was in full force, the executives said on Tuesday at a virtual investor conference held by Barclays.”
“Hedge-Fund Billionaire Ray Dalio Says Regulators Will ‘Kill’ Bitcoin If It Gets Too Successful” (Insider). “Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, said on CNBC he foresees regulators taking control of bitcoin if there's mainstream success for the cryptocurrency. ‘I think at the end of the day if it's really successful...they will try to kill it. And I think they will kill it because they have ways of killing it,’ Dalio said on CNBC during the SALT conference in New York.”
