The Economy

https://www.wsj.com/economy/united-...yxl8vtzzc3s&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

 

Wonder what happened to all those homeowners living on 0.01% home equity loans instead of working.

 

Landlords lose SCOTUS challenge to rents hikes on NYC rent-stabilized apartments, vow to keep trying.

 

ACTIVIST JUDGES!

 

Yeah, but then you have to hope your company doesn’t decide that useless buzzwords such as “innovation!” and “collaboration!” are more important than letting employees be productive in Billings, Montana instead of some Midtown Manhattan cubicle with a pool table next to the bathrooms.

 

The salary-by-location model undoes some of those remote work benefits.

 

Economics is about the distribution of limited resources. People have to make economic decisions all the time, what clothes they can buy, what car they can afford.
There is no right to live some place, even if you grew up there. Who gets to decide who deserves to live someplace and at what cost?

 

The Great Compression

Robert Lanter lives in a 600-square-foot house that can be traversed in five seconds and vacuumed from a single outlet. He doesn’t have a coffee table in the living room because it would obstruct the front door. When relatives come to visit, Mr. Lanter says jokingly, but only partly, they have to tour one at time.

Each of these details amounts to something bigger, for Mr. Lanter’s life and the U.S. housing market: a house under $300,000, something increasingly hard to find. That price allowed Mr. Lanter, a 63-year-old retired nurse, to buy a new single-family home in a subdivision in Redmond, Ore., about 30 minutes outside Bend, where he is from and which is, along with its surrounding area, one of Oregon’s most expensive housing markets.

Mr. Lanter’s house could easily fit on a flatbed truck, and is dwarfed by the two-story suburban homes that prevail on the blocks around him. But, in fact, there are even smaller homes in his subdivision, Cinder Butte, which was developed by a local builder called Hayden Homes. Some of his neighbors live in houses that total just 400 square feet — a 20-by-20-foot house attached to a 20-by-20-foot garage.

 

Productivity Is Up, Along With Hopes It Will Fuel the Economy

The last time the American economy was posting surprising economic growth numbers amid rapid wage gains and moderating inflation, Ace of Base and All-4-One topped the Billboard charts and denim overalls were in vogue.

Thirty years ago, officials at the Federal Reserve were hotly debating whether the economy could continue to chug along so vigorously without spurring a pickup in inflation. And back in 1994, it turned out that it could, thanks to one key ingredient: productivity.

Now, official productivity data are showing a big pickup for the first time in years. The data have been volatile since the start of the pandemic, but with the dawn of new technologies like artificial intelligence and the embrace of hybrid work setups, some economists are asking whether the recent gains might be real — and whether they can turn into a lasting boom.