Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
New federal data shows more homeowners are falling behind on their mortgages in places where incomes are lowest, raising fresh concerns about housing stability. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s mortgage performance portal, which tracks loans that are 30 to 89 days past due, now points to rising early trouble in many lower-income communities. The worry…
America’s housing market is entering a brutal new phase, with banks seizing roughly 40,000 homes in a single month and foreclosure filings climbing for the eleventh time in a row. What looked like a manageable comedown from pandemic-era protections is hardening into a systemic shock that is reshaping neighborhoods, labor markets, and family balance sheets…
Zillow just scored a pivotal courtroom victory that lets it keep tightening control over which homes appear on its platform and how. For homebuyers who treat Zillow as the default gateway to the housing market, that win could mean fewer listings, murkier incentives and a new layer of confusion at a time when affordability is…
Los Angeles and Long Beach now sit in the same conversation as the world’s most punishing housing markets, where a typical paycheck barely dents a typical listing price. International affordability rankings that compare home values to local incomes show both cities clustered near the very top of global unaffordability, alongside other California hubs and long‑time…
Donald Trump is promising to tackle high mortgage costs head‑on, with ideas ranging from a $200 billion push to cut borrowing costs to a new 50‑year home loan. The pitch sounds simple: force rates down fast and give stretched buyers immediate relief. Yet the housing and bond markets are complex, and that is where this…
Peter Thiel is not known for understatement, and his latest warning about U.S. housing is no exception. The billionaire investor argues that the country is drifting into a real estate “catastrophe” that will batter young and lower middle class Americans while delivering a lucrative payoff to older owners. At the core of his argument is…
California’s housing divide is now etched in one striking number: $9,100,000. That is what Gov. Gavin Newsom spent on a Bay Area mansion at a time when the state’s homelessness crisis and affordability crunch remain acute. The optics are jarring, but the purchase also highlights a deeper truth about California real estate: the same market…
In much of urban America, the math on housing has flipped. Monthly payments for a starter home now routinely overshoot comparable rents, turning what used to be a trade off between stability and flexibility into a straightforward cost gap. The result is a generation of would be buyers in big cities who can afford to…
Bill Gates has quietly become one of the most powerful private players in American agriculture, with control of roughly 1 out of every 4,000 acres of United States farmland. He has acknowledged that footprint himself, describing it as less than 0.03 percent of the country’s total farmland, yet large enough to shape local markets and…
After two years of punishing mortgage rates and sticker-shock listings, Zillow’s 2026 outlook finally hints at a market that looks less like a frenzy and more like a negotiation. The company’s economists expect more sales and only modest price gains, which means power is starting to shift back toward buyers in at least some parts…