What I’m Reading
Building Inferno: Three million of California’s 12 million homes are at high risk for wildfires per CalFire. That designation hurts home values, which in turn increases mortgage default risk, according to research by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). If fires continue to cause more damage and insurance continues to get harder to come by, this would damage banks, mortgage holders and markets where mortgages are sold. Reuters
Counter Intuitive: America’s debt pile keeps growing, yet also continues to get cheaper thanks to falling interest rates. Bloomberg
Swamped: Freight railroads and trucking companies that sharply reduced their operations as the pandemic-driven downturn took hold in the spring now are struggling to get workers and equipment in place to handle the surge in imports hitting west coast ports. Wall Street Journal
Double Edged Sword: Tech companies are already cutting the salaries of employees who leave the Bay Area to work remotely from less expensive locales. Bloomberg
Log Jam: A ‘severe’ lumber shortage has added $14,000 to the cost of a new home. Fortune
Held Back: Here are some numbers on just how much remote learning is dragging on the economy compared to prior recessions: Wall Street Journal
A recent analysis by Barclays economist Jonathan Millar and colleagues found that the closures of all schools from September to December 2020 would result in a reduction of U.S. gross domestic product in 2020 on the order of between 0.4% and 0.8%. That compares with an inflation-adjusted GDP decline of 0.1% in 1991 and a slight increase in 2001.
Chart of the Day
WFH was slowly trending higher. Then COVID hit. Now the question is what percentage do not return to the office once this is over.
Source: John Burns
WTF
Getting Board: A 38 year old British woman who married a tree just celebrated her first anniversary. The Mirror
Hanging Out: A naked man was arrested for loitering at a Dollar General store because Florida. The Gainesville Sun
Basis Points – A candid look at the economy, real estate, and other things sometimes related.
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