Marketers, manufacturers and even the media have been keeping tabs on all things related to logistics like never before. Coverage of supply chain matters practically doubled in 2020 and media messaging for 2021 spiked towards the end of the year, referring to both bottlenecks and backlogs that created a supply chain crisis that hampered holiday shopping sprees. The hashtag #emptyshelvesJoe trended on […]
There is more than one way to inhabit a city,say these authors. As the future of work is changing, we now find ourselves at a stage where demand for quality, convenience and flexibility in urban living is not being met by traditional inner-city apartment complexes. Long-term ownership doesn’t provide the flexibility required nor do younger […]
Inflation is skyrocketing in practically the entire world. Central banks are getting scared and beginning to announce the end of expansionary measures, also known as tapering. Why do central banks find themselves in a dilemma? Why has inflation risen so much? What is a bottleneck? What does tapering mean and how could it affect us? The objective of […]
On Tuesday, February 1, 2022, the United States national debt surpassed $30tr for the first time. It’s the latest in a series of recent fiscal and monetary benchmarks received with increasing blitheness. I counted only a handful of headlines reporting on it. Two of which, interestingly, were The New York Times and Xinhua, the official press organ of the People’s […]
Does air quality enhancement lead to higher house prices and rents? Our recent study, which is published by Energy Policy (this article is a media summary of the full article of Wang, J and Lee, C L (2021) ‘The Value of Air Quality in Housing Markets: A Comparative Study of Housing Sale and Rental Markets […]
The passing last year of investment great David Swensen was very sad news. We are fortunate that he was a generous sharer of his insight. But we need to be careful to focus on the right lessons from his success. Swensen achieved excellent investment outcomes over his 35-year stewardship of Yale’s Endowment. He generated returns […]
Why property needs to embrace the power of data. Real estate is potentially the biggest untapped data source in the world. Firms accumulate billions of data points at every stage of the development lifecycle, from the breakdown of building materials to the spending patterns of tenants. Fully harnessing this data would create new insights and […]
I was a lousy student in Lyle Bradley’s 10th grade biology class and he was wildly generous to give me a B-minus, given my ineptitude at frog dissection and tree identification, and since then I’ve descended into superstition and mythology and faith in vitamin E, and chicken soup and in the story of Adam and […]
From Ancient Greece to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Faced with the imminent possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine and what appears to be a deteriorating diplomatic stand-off, NATO and other Western allies are again turning to sanctions in the absence of other viable options. Since the Second World War, governments around the world have turned to sanctions […]
Originally published January 2022. As investment managers, we’re used to being accused of seeing the glass as half-empty rather than half-full. It’s not that we’re inherently pessimistic, but our job is to protect our investors’ capital against whatever might go wrong in markets. So naturally we tend to focus more on the risks than the […]
