1. Largest Fed Pause Rally in History Before 50 bps. Cut
2. Will Lower Rates Spark Small Caps?
R2K streak. The Russell 2000 has now risen for 7 days in a row, a feat accomplished only 27 other times while also trading above the 200SMA. Forward returns have been mixed.
Gold vs. first cut. “After a cut, there has only been one time, 1998, when gold has trended significantly lower after a rate cut throughout the next year, and even then, close to the one-year mark, it surged as the Dot Com crash started.”
8. 30-Year Mortgage Getting Close to Breaking 6% Mark
9. American People Dislikes Federal Government, Advertising and Pharma
10. The Daily Stoic
As we work and achieve, we pile up titles and money. We accumulate assets and influence. We build a life, as they say. And a life is made up of things: Our job. Our house. Our car. Our relationships. Our reputation. Looking around at what we possess, what we’ve poured so much sweat and blood into, is an immensely rewarding experience. As Margaret Atwood writes in a beautiful poem, The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage you stand in the centre of your room, house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there, and say, I own this, But the Stoic knows that we never really own anything. All that we possess in this life, Marcus Aurelius says, even life itself, is really ours only in trust. We are renters. Our lives are here on loan…loans that can get called in at any time. We can be fired. Someone can dislodge our seemingly dominant market position. A loved one can leave. People die. That’s why Margaret Atwood warns against the pride and satisfaction of surveying one’s possessions. The moment you do that, she says, nature rebels. Almost out of spite, they feel the need to rebuke you for your pride. No, they whisper. You own nothing. You were a visitor, time after time climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming. We never belonged to you. You never found us. It was always the other way round. None of us own anything. Everything is constantly in flux. What we have today may be gone tomorrow—we ourselves may be gone tomorrow. Understand that. Appreciate everything accordingly. Be grateful and humble…or life will rebuke you. Fate will remind you who is in charge and nature will reclaim what is hers.
Once, it was Julian Robertson, the founder of Tiger Management, who got to play godfather to a generation of hedge fund stars. Now, it’s Ken Griffin’s Citadel and Izzy Englander’s Millennium Management who are taking up that role — whether they want to or not. With the multistrategy hedge fund titans closed to outside cash amid a dearth of talent able to manage their money, Citadel and Millennium traders are seizing the chance to go it alone. And investors are backing them with an avalanche of assets.
The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances of $766,550 or less decreased to 6.15% from 6.29%
Applications to refinance a home loan jumped 24% from the previous week and were 127% higher than the same week one year ago.
Applications for a mortgage to purchase a home increased 5% for the week but were still 0.4% lower than the same week one year ago.
Total mortgage application volume rose 14.2% last week compared with the previous week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s seasonally adjusted index. Last week’s results included an adjustment for the Labor Day holiday. The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances of $766,550 or less decreased to 6.15% from 6.29%, with points increasing to 0.56 from 0.55, including the origination fee, for loans with a 20% down payment. That is the lowest rate since September 2022 and is 116 basis points lower than it was the same week one year ago. “Application activity was up significantly last week, as market expectations of a rate cut from the Fed pulled mortgage rates lower,” said Joel Kan, an economist with the Mortgage Bankers Association.
9. The Federal Government Owns 27.4% of the Land in America. 80% of Nevada and 62% of Alaska….
10. Baby Boomer Housing Market Statistics
List with Clever
More than half of boomers who currently own a home (54%) never plan to sell it and hope to live in it for the rest of their lives.
90% of boomer homeowners have concerns about homeownership as they age, with maintenance/upkeep issues and rising costs the most common.
Nearly two-thirds of boomers who own homes (65%) expect to profit more than $100,000 when selling their home, while 40% expect to clear $200,000 or more.
More than three-quarters of boomer homeowners (76%) say owning a home is the primary reason they’re financially secure.
Almost half of current boomer homeowners (46%) would consider themselves failures if they didn’t own a home.
Fewer than half of boomers (47%) required a double income to purchase their home.
Half of boomers who have owned a home (50%) bought their first one for $75,000 or less, while almost two-thirds (64%) paid less than $100,000.
42% of boomers believe younger generations had an easier time than they did buying a home in their 20s.
Only 6% of boomer homeowners say their biggest challenge when buying their first place was that homes were too expensive.
When factoring in inflation, just half of boomers (50%) believe they would still be able to afford a home today.
Among boomers who have never owned a home, two-thirds (66%) say they regret never achieving that milestone.
Nearly two-thirds of this group (63%) say they simply couldn’t afford to buy a home.
About half of boomers who once owned a home but don’t now (47%) wouldn’t recommend homeownership to younger generations, but barely a quarter of current boomer homeowners (27%) feel this way.
Boomers view themselves as the generation least responsible for the affordable housing crisis, a view held by 41% of respondents.
69% of boomers feel the government should do more to help first-time home buyers afford a house.
About two-thirds of respondents (65%) believe America would be a better place to live if more people prioritized homeownership.
87% of boomers think buying a home was part of the American dream when they were younger, but only 73% think it still is.
57% of boomers believe younger generations could afford homes if they tried harder, and 64% believe younger generations could be homeowners if they were more responsible.
Tom Lee Fundstrat If the Fed does indeed cut rates at the FOMC on Wednesday, as widely expected, the bearishly inclined are warning that this could actually be bad for stocks. They note (correctly) that historically, stocks have fallen half the time immediately after the Fed makes its first cut of a cycle. However, Head of Data Science “Tireless” Ken Xuan and his team took a deeper look historical cycles and came to a different conclusion. Examining the last 11 Fed “first cuts,” Xuan found that five of them took place with a recessionary backdrop. The other six came during a non-recessionary, “no landing” scenario such as the one in which we currently find ourselves. The difference in historic post-cut win ratios between the two categories is significant and best illustrated by our Chart of the Week.
9. Loan to Value of American Mortgages….Low Leverage
If people are already in a home they have a lot of equity. That’s proven in this chart which shows that the Loan-to-Value ratio for mortgages is 48%. That’s down from 70% just over 10 years.
10. Know Thy Time: Peter Drucker’s Strategy to Become More Effective -Darius Foroux
The reason I research productivity is simple. I think that a productive life equals happy life.
Also, if you’re more productive than average people, you’ll advance faster in your career. You learn more. You do more. And eventually are rewarded more.
Now, productivity is a very generic term. Personally, I prefer to use the word effectiveness.
Because productivity doesn’t necessarily mean that you get the right things done. It just means you get a lot of stuff done. But that’s not what matters.
Effectiveness, however, refers to getting the right things done. It’s basically a polite word for “getting shit done.”
And if you want to do your job well, earn money, live a meaningful life, learn skills, you HAVE to get shit done.
Results matter the most. You might work for 50 hours a week, but if you don’t experience any growth personally, emotionally, financially, you’re not effective. People often ask me, “where do I begin?” To answer that question, I want to share one exercise that I use with companies and people who hire me to improve their effectiveness.
It’s an exercise that I picked up from Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive. To me, Drucker is the first and best thinker when it comes to effectiveness for knowledge workers.
Much of the books, articles, productivity tools, and productivity apps you see these days are all in a way influenced by Drucker.
For instance, the term “deep work” (coined by Cal Newport) is currently very popular. But if you read The Effective Executive, which is written in 1967, Drucker talks about the same concept.
He says that if you want to get things done, you have to allocate large chunks of (uninterrupted) time to your work. Drucker says: “To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.”
As you can see, my appreciation for Drucker goes deep. That’s why I read much of his work, and also apply it in my life and work. What you will find next is a simple exercise from The Effective Executive (which I modified slightly to make it easier) that you can apply to become more effective.
Step 1: Know thy time I often hear people saying: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I keep procrastinating.”
My question is: “Do you know thy time?” If you don’t measure your time, it’s tough to stop procrastination or improve your productivity. Because if you want to manage your time better, you have to know where it goes first.
Your memory is not sufficient. If I asked you what you were doing exactly one week at this time, would you have an answer? There you go.
How do you know your time? Keep an activity log.
Before I even have a real session with clients, I often ask them to keep an activity log for two weeks. An activity log is exactly what you imagine — an hour by hour record of what you’re doing throughout the day.
The specific method you use for your activity log doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you want to keep a record for at least two weeks. Preferably, you want a whole month of recorded activities.
I just keep a pen and a notepad on my desk and every hour I write down the time and what I’ve done during the past hour. It’s important to keep the notebook visible, so you don’t forget.
Step 2: Identify the non-productive work This step is actually very simple. I just have one question for you: “Go through all the recurring activities in your log one by one. What would happen if you would stop doing them?”
If the answer is: “All hell breaks loose.” Don’t change anything. But if your answer is: “Nothing would happen.” You’ve hit gold. We all do activities that have ZERO return. I call those activities time-wasters.
Step 3: Eliminate the time-wasters Boom. That’s it. Know where your time goes. Identify the critical tasks from the trivial tasks in your life. And cut the trivial, time-wasting, tasks.
“That simple?” Yes.
If you want to be a super-effective person, you regularly keep a log. You don’t have to keep a log for 365 days a year.
Instead, do two stretches of two-three weeks a year. That’s enough to keep track of your time and identify new time-wasters.
Also, the additional benefit of such a simple exercise is that it forces you to think about your daily routine.
Often, we start time-wasting activities, and they become habits. And if you don’t become aware of the pointless behavior, it’s difficult to break those bad habits.
I’ve found this exercise to be one of the most powerful things in productivity.
Start now. Your activity log probably looks something like this:
(insert time) — Read Darius Foroux’s article about keeping a time-log and started my own time-log.
(insert time) — Turned off my phone and got back to (whatever you were working on).
(insert time) — Browsed the news, Facebook, Instagram. And watched YouTube videos. (Be honest with yourself. Shit happens).
(insert time) — responded to emails.
Great. I’m happy to see that you started. Now keep going for another two weeks.
Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8.
The more elite the college, the more lenient the standards. At Yale, for example, 80% of grades awarded in 2023 were As or A minuses. But the problem is also prevalent at less selective colleges. Across all four-year colleges in the U.S., the most commonly awarded grade is now an A.
Some professors and departments, especially in STEM disciplines, have managed to uphold more stringent criteria. A few advanced courses attract such a self-selecting cohort of students that virtually all of them deserve recognition for genuinely excellent work. But for the most part, the grading scheme at many institutions has effectively become useless. An A has stopped being a mark of special academic achievement.
If everyone outside hard-core engineering, math or pre-med courses can easily get an A, the whole system loses meaning. It fails to make distinctions between different levels of achievement or to motivate students to work hard on their academic pursuits. All the while, it allows students to pretend—to themselves and to others—that they are performing exceptionally well. Worse, this system creates perverse incentives. To name but one, it actively punishes those who take risks by enrolling in truly challenging courses.
All of this contributes to the strikingly poor record of American colleges in actually educating their students. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa showed in their 2011 book “Academically Adrift,” the time that the average full-time college student spent studying dropped by half in the five decades after 1960, falling to about a dozen hours a week. A clear majority of college students “showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing,” with about half failing to make any improvements at all in their first two years of higher education.
In one of the oldest jokes about the Soviet Union, a worker says “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” To an uncomfortable degree, American universities now work in a similar fashion: Students pretend to do their work, and academics pretend to grade them. It’s high time for a radical reboot of a broken system.
The yen carry trade set off volatility earlier this month…Yen chart 50day thru 200day to upside.
8. Why Do Americans Love Housing?
9. Demand for Wireless Data Hits Record Highs -Chartr Blog
If you’ve tried to buy any kind of electronic good recently you’ve probably found a version that can connect to your phone and has an app that you need to download (which is usually terrible), with everything from smart watches, to smart light bulbs, to smart fridges, to self-driving cars now connected to the internet. Indeed, companies continue to produce connected versions of devices which, for years, functioned well without them. But, in fairness to the people behind those products, all of the evidence shows one thing: that America loves being online and staying connected.
Indeed, according to wireless industry association CTIA’s annual survey, Americans used 100.1 trillion megabytes of wireless data in 2023, nearly double the traffic that was driven in 2021 and more than the amount used in all the years from 2010 to 2018 combined. That’s a lot of watching, scrolling, working, texting, and — realistically — even more watching.
The good news is that all of that mobile connectivity is a lot cheaper than it used to be. According to the report, Americans now pay $.002 per MB of wireless data — a 97% decrease from a decade prior and a 50% decrease since 2020, when the average cost of consumer goods and services began to soar. The uptick has been driven in large part by the rollout of 5G, which the CTIA estimates to be used by almost 40% of all wireless connections today. The rise in wireless data usage comes amidst an ongoing standoff in Congress over how to find new spectrum, per Reuters.
10. Larry Silverstein Spent Years Tussling With the City to Rebuild the World Trade Center. Now He’s Ready to Talk About It
WSJ By Yascha Mounk
Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8.
The more elite the college, the more lenient the standards. At Yale, for example, 80% of grades awarded in 2023 were As or A minuses. But the problem is also prevalent at less selective colleges. Across all four-year colleges in the U.S., the most commonly awarded grade is now an A.
Some professors and departments, especially in STEM disciplines, have managed to uphold more stringent criteria. A few advanced courses attract such a self-selecting cohort of students that virtually all of them deserve recognition for genuinely excellent work. But for the most part, the grading scheme at many institutions has effectively become useless. An A has stopped being a mark of special academic achievement.
If everyone outside hard-core engineering, math or pre-med courses can easily get an A, the whole system loses meaning. It fails to make distinctions between different levels of achievement or to motivate students to work hard on their academic pursuits. All the while, it allows students to pretend—to themselves and to others—that they are performing exceptionally well. Worse, this system creates perverse incentives. To name but one, it actively punishes those who take risks by enrolling in truly challenging courses.
All of this contributes to the strikingly poor record of American colleges in actually educating their students. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa showed in their 2011 book “Academically Adrift,” the time that the average full-time college student spent studying dropped by half in the five decades after 1960, falling to about a dozen hours a week. A clear majority of college students “showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing,” with about half failing to make any improvements at all in their first two years of higher education.
In one of the oldest jokes about the Soviet Union, a worker says “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” To an uncomfortable degree, American universities now work in a similar fashion: Students pretend to do their work, and academics pretend to grade them. It’s high time for a radical reboot of a broken system.
3. Sentiment Hit Bearish Levels in Last Week’s Sell Off -Investor Intelligence
Investor Intelligence
“Bulls are leaving the building: II bears are rising as bulls drop to lowest level of 2024. S&P 500 has struggled to make sustained upside progress over the past decade when the Bull – Bear Spread has been less than 20%.”
ZeroHedge Uranium stocks jumped in the early US cash session after Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed the government to review possible measures to restrict exports of strategic raw materials, such as nickel, titanium, and uranium, in retaliation for Western sanctions.
In markets, uranium stocks, such as CCJ, UEC, URA, and URNM, jumped between 5% and 7%.
WSJ Between 2012 and 2022, the number of students graduating with bachelor’s degrees in nuclear engineering in the U.S. fell by 25%, according to the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, with the class of 2022 seeing only 454 students graduate with a degree in the field.
At the same time, the nuclear industry is facing a maturing workforce, with 17% of workers in the industry over the age of 55 and 60% aged between 30 and 54, according to the 2024 U.S. Energy and Employment report. The report also highlighted that 23% of workers were aged under 30, compared with 29% for other energy workers. By Yusuf Khan
7. Job Openings Still in Excess of Available Workers
From Advisor Perspectives Blog
Demographic Deficits by Carl Tannenbaum of Northern Trust Recent work from the McKinsey Global Institute clearly illustrates this progression. The 2008 Global Financial Crisis left many out of work, and the slow recovery from that episode kept ratios of job openings to job seekers very low. But starting in 2015, labor market capacity began declining. The pandemic years created a rude interruption, but the long-term trend has been re-established.
In several large countries, job openings are still well in excess of available workers. McKinsey finds that skills mismatches do not explain much of the gap; job vacancy rates are highest in occupations that are at the lower end of the wage scale, and should therefore be within the reach of most of those seeking work.
BY JOE REEDY LOS ANGELES (AP) — The NFL averaged 21.0 million viewers per game during the league’s opening week, making it the most-watched Week 1 on record.
The league and Nielsen said Wednesday morning that the per-game average on TV and digital platforms was a 12% increase over last year. Nielsen began electronic measurement of viewing in 1988.
All told, 123 million people saw at least part of one game, its highest total for an opening week since 2019.
“A great start with the viewership. It was great to be back and a lot to be excited about,” said Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s executive vice president of media distribution.
10. Larry Silverstein Spent Years Tussling With the City to Rebuild the World Trade Center. Now He’s Ready to Talk About It
Inc.com
In his new book, the veteran real estate developer recounts the decades spent trying to reclaim the NYC skyline after tragedy.
BYSAM BLUM, SENIOR WRITER @SAMMBLUM He’s one of the lucky ones: Larry Silverstein narrowly skirted disaster on September 11, 2001.
As the property developer has recounted numerous times over the last 23 years, the terrorist attacks that brought down the Twin Towers occurred just a few weeks after Silverstein Properties signed a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center in New York City.
That morning, he was supposed to be eating breakfast at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower. But before he left, his wife Klara reminded him he was due uptown for a dermatology appointment.
Unimaginable chaos and tragedy ensued. Terrorists hijacked two commercial airliners and flew one into each of the towers. The tallest buildings in New York eventually collapsed, laying in a gargantuan heap of smoldering rubble, and Silverstein made it his remaining life’s mission to rebuild them swiftly. Silverstein’s efforts to rise from the detritus of Ground Zero are recounted in his new book, The Rising: The Twenty-Year Battle to Rebuild the World Trade Center.
It’s a story rife with political infighting among a rotating cast of 21st-century New York powerbrokers. Across the mayoral administrations of Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio, and governorships of George Pataki and Andrew Cuomo, the book casts Silverstein as the hero who sought to heal deep national wounds and bring the NYC skyline back to life. Others criticized
Silverstein for tussling with insurance companies and accused him of profiteering during an emotionally charged era in U.S. history. Silverstein, now 93, sat down with Inc. to discuss the new book and where he thinks the commercial real estate market is headed from 2024 onward–an era that is far different from the one that saw rebuilding efforts begin. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity).
Why does the book describe rebuilding efforts as a “battle?” There was no shortage of naysayers, people telling me this would never happen. After 9/11, they said nobody would ever want to go back down here. People would leave their residences. People would leave their commercial spaces. And that’s exactly what happened. Lower Manhattan was an unmitigated disaster. I also came to the realization that the insurance companies were not going to pay me their obligations under the policies, for which I paid some significant premiums. And they said totally flat out building back here would never succeed. Therefore don’t bother, and forget about getting compensation from them. They even offered me some kind of monetary advantage if I just picked up and left. And I said, “I’ve been a New Yorker all my life. You just expect me to just walk away from my obligation to New York? I can’t do that.” So I said, “Everybody has their price. My price is: Get on with the rebuilding and do it as quickly as possible.” So we ended up with five years of litigation. That was a terrible time.
Why was there no time to wait in the rebuilding process? We needed to bring energy back to Lower Manhattan. I had acquired the site for the original 7 World Trade Center from the Port Authority in 1981; it was the last building to come down on 9/11. And under that building was a Con Edison substation that provided all electricity to Lower Manhattan. Eugene McGrath, who was the CEO of Con Edison, called me and said, “We’ve got to get the substation rebuilt as quickly as possible, because we’re now supplying Lower Manhattan with emergency generators; they’re constantly subject to failure.” In order to get power back to Lower Manhattan, we had no time for plans, no time for specifications, no time for contracts, no time for agreements, no time for anything. I mean, we had to start building, literally, on a handshake. [Editor’s note: Inc. and its parent company are tenants in the rebuilt 7 World Trade.]
Given everything that went into the rebuilding process, how do you feel looking up at the World Trade Center buildings today? When the buildings had collapsed, there was nothing there. There was massive debris, terrible, terrible smog, terrible smoke, terrible fumes rising, and the odor of burning flesh. It was just horrible. But in the most amazing turn of events, people started coming down to Ground Zero days after the attacks, to search for missing people. First from New York, but then from around the country, to try to help rescue people who they assumed could still be alive, but who they had no relationships with. They were just human beings, trying to help other human beings. And so, thinking about that, and then looking out at what we’ve been able to create to replace the Twin Towers, gives me a feeling of accomplishment. I was enormously hopeful that we could build something vastly superior to what had been here, originally.
How has the WTC, lower Manhattan area changed since 2001? Before 9/11, there was nothing here. After six o’clock at night, it was dead. You could roll a bowling ball down Wall Street and hit nothing. Nobody around: no cars, no vehicles, no trucks, no cabs. It was a dead community. Now, It’s bustling with human beings. It’s the number of people down here visiting, walking through the Memorial Park. I can tell you, 27 percent of the people who work down here live down here. It’s the highest work-to-residence ratio in the entire United States.
What’s going on with 2 World Trade Center, which is the last building slated for construction? Keep an eye on the press. That’s a no comment from us.
The pandemic cratered demand for commercial office space. Plus, we have a housing crisis in this country. How can we use unoccupied office space for people who need a place to live? Part of working in the business today is the realization that some of the buildings are no longer functional as office space. The Rudin family built 55 Broad Street, maybe 70 years ago, and it became the headquarters building for Goldman Sachs. But Goldman left for a bigger office, and the family couldn’t find a corporate tenant. So what we ended up doing is buying the building from the Rudins with the thought of converting it from office occupancy to residential. Frankly, if we are successful in converting 55 Broad Street–and I think we will be–I could see us doing the same with many other commercial buildings. It’s something that will affect New York in a very positive way. In the future, it’ll change neighborhoods very significantly, and create a better environment.
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