When your ideology states that climate change is the most important thing facing the world and some pesky pandemic has the poor judgement to interrupt The Cause, you need to act fast. There must be something that connects the pandemic back to my virtue signaling venture, thought the novelist and vegetarian activist Jonathan Safran Foer, […]
The S&P 500 has dropped considerably since the advent of COVID-19 although well off the lows. Although the economy is slowly starting to open up, it seems inevitable that we will have at least a short-term recession. This differs from past recessions such as the “Great Recession” because it has been an “engineered” recession to try to […]
The National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF) tracks the performance of over a half trillion dollars of commercial real estate in the US. Because the properties are marked to market every quarter for financial reporting, NCREIF can provide quarterly returns as a benchmark for institutional investors as well as other trends from the database. The […]
(Article originally published Summer 2018) Why agility is key for investors in dealing with new uncertainties Seattle is the only market I’ve ever seen advance from secondary to primary market status. There are a few other secondary cities that are nipping at its heels, led by Austin, Denver and Nashville in the U.S., and Sao […]
On November 1, 2005, President George W. Bush held a press conference in which he called for draconian measures and $7.1 billion in spending to stop the spread of H5N1 Avian flu, which was then starting to cause some panic. “The president said that the threat of a global outbreak should be taken seriously in […]
After decades of predictions, warnings, wagers, prophecies, and what must be many trillions of dollars expended upon short sales, long puts and written calls, hedges and directional bets of every sort: the long-awaited “big Kahuna” – a crash in equities markets – came yesterday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 2,997 points to 20,188: […]
No one can accurately predict how long the Coronavirus will last or when effective vaccines can be rolled out, so all we can do is speculate, based on some logic and our past experience with SARS, which seems less serious and less deadly than this new potential pandemic. Logic and history suggest that the most […]
It may be early days in the Democratic primary race, but Bernie Sanders is now the favourite to win the party’s nomination and set up a Trump-Sanders presidential election. As the prospect of Sanders winning becomes ever more real, some commentators are downplaying his socialist credentials, painting the veteran Senator as no more than a moderate social democrat. “Memo […]
Introduction The world can be viewed through the lens of economics and real estate markets in that whatever we do requires space, and whenever processes change it has both positive and negative impacts. You show me a more productive industry and I’ll show you unemployed workers looking to transfer towards better opportunities. What is striking is […]
In the 34 months since November of 2016 the U.S. unemployment rate has declined -1.2% through August 2019. Across the counties that President Trump campaigned in, the average decline has been roughly -1% (through July 2019). In Pennsylvania, county level unemployment rates have declined an average of -1.5%; in Texas the decline has been -1.9%; Alabama […]
