Despite the doom and gloom, CRE prices have actually started to increase.
“Except for office prices, the nationwide CRE crisis is beginning to abate, with national CRE prices looking good, as well as apartments, retail, and industrial.“
Most indicators of health are still negative though.
The overturning of the so-called Chevron doctrine has huge far-reaching ramifications (Claude.ai summary via MR) in how the US writes, interprets, and implements administrative laws.
Here is a great detailed analysis (before the ruling) of its implications and path forward.
Everything but healthcare has seen very sharp cutbacks.
“What international comparisons tell us is that these cuts in public spending have moved the UK to the bottom of the G7 in terms of spending and taxation.“
“Hourly earnings growth slowed to 3.13% in May, recording the lowest level since June 2021 (2.90%).“
“One-month annualized hourly earnings growth was 2.11%, more than one percent below the year-over-year rate and the lowest level since November 2020 (1.74%).“
One thing we highlighted before for hyperscalers is how power efficiency (PUE is the ratio of total power consumed to the amount of power consumed by IT equipment) has flatlined.
“So I tried just to put together this chart to show how different the GPU package is between 2015 & 2024. So of course, the B100 chip, the GPU introduced a few months ago, and this is not enough because Jensen has already introduced the next generation of GPU last week” (h/t The Transcript).
“Two things on remote jobs is really fascinating right now. So pre-pandemic, there’s — at any given time, there’s 15 million, 20 million jobs that are posted on LinkedIn actively. And pre-pandemic, it was roughly 2% of all jobs on the platform were remote jobs. If you go back 2.5 years ago, it peaked. 20%, 21% of all jobs on LinkedIn were remote jobs, which is pretty insane to see that jump from 2% to 21%. And now that number is back to 8%, so it kind of peaked up and now it’s starting to come back down again. So we pay a lot of attention to kind of how the labor market is shifting through remote work, and it seems like that trend is coming down” Linkedin CEO.
Many people talk about the absolute value of PE dry powder. Indeed this hit a record last year of $2.2 trillion – fundraising continued (at a slower pace) against a dramatic slowdown in dealmaking.
However “Dry-powder inventory (the amount of capital available to GPs expressed as a multiple of annual deployment) increased from 1.1 years in 2022 to 1.6 years in 2023 but remains within the metric’s normal historical range“.
“Decisions made in the next decade are more highly levered to shape the future of humanity than at any point in human history.“
“Technological transitions are packaged deals, e.g. free markets and the industrial revolution went hand-in-hand with the rise of “big government” (see Tyler Cowen on The Paradox of Libertarianism).“
“Natural constraints are often better than man-made ones because there’s no one to hold responsible.“
A nice report on investing in sports teams, leagues, and related businesses from JPMAM.
Why now? Historically ownership of sports teams in the US was for the ultra-wealthy, but this is about to change.
“Forbes also constructs a valuation index for each league. As shown below on the left, these indexes have substantially eclipsed the S&P 500 since 2005. To be clear, sports teams are much more expensive than equities: most teams are now valued at 5x-12x sales compared to ~3x sales for the S&P 500.”
