Very clear return to private debt growth over the last few months. It's all for homes / property obviously - I mean, what else would you invest in? [🧵 1/n]

Started off in the UK and was highly successful. High satisfaction among parents and significantly improved air quality.

Choosing between private finance for infra at 8% and public at 4% might seem like a no-brainer. But if your objective is hiding public debt and helping rentiers to suckle on the public teat, things look different I guess. Hell, get the pricks together for a champers and canapés conference.

getting what done? he's not doing anything.

Few mortgage graph weekend out-takes [🧵1/n]
Mortgage payments hit a ridiculous $25bn in the fourth quarter of 2024. That's about 60% of total NZ wages earned. We currently have $370bn of housing loans (do the math on the fortnightly payment!)

Flights in the Caribbean turning away from Starship flight 8 debris.

The man is human pollution, America's id. The international community is going to rally against this country to make sure we're hurt for decades because of all of this and we'll have deserved it.

Why are small businesses ok? These people are one of the most pro trump voting groups, the literal vanguard of fascism.

Weekly jobs 🧵
We are starting to get a decent picture of how the jobs year started. We are tracking around 30,000 below last year's job numbers (pretty close to 2023 levels). That's despite an increase of around 35,000 in the working-age population. [1/n]

China Developers Buy Land at 20% Premium in Bet on Market Bottom Chinese state-backed developers are starting to buy land at a premium again after the government eased limits on home prices to revive a slumping market that’s been a drag on the economy for more than...

Bloomberg: "The number of land parcels that sold for at least 20% above the asking price accounted for 37% of deals this year, compared to just 14% for all of last year and 4.6% in 2023. Seven out of the 10 transactions this year involved state buyers."

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Good morning. Someone is always going to make money on housing. I would rather see developers get rich building new places for people to live than the status quo, in which property owners accumulate massive amounts of unearned wealth from housing scarcity.

Trump pardoned the sentence of arguably the single biggest drug trafficker in American history on his second day in office!

Govt are getting excited about lower interest rates and publishing some truly misleading nonsense. My adjusted design is messy, but the numbers and text better reflect the reality. Couple more importants things on this subject... [🧵 1/3]

The next labour government needs to empower the commerce commission to prosecute people like this.

Mayor Wayne Brown slams Destiny Church ‘thuggery’ after protest at Auckland pride event Video showed Destiny Church members pushing past library staff at a stairwell, despite requests for them not to enter the drag king story time event.

Violent religious sectarians force entry to local government facility

Police must charge them as a deterrent and provide future such events with security. It should not fall to librarians to physically defend themselves

www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/3605...

a graphic showing who bought the startups - mostly og companies

"Oil and gas companies are the most active acquirers of climate tech startups. According to research by Sightline Climate, Shell made the most acquisitions globally between 2020 and 2024, buying up 8 companies. That was followed by BP, which snapped up 7"

sifted.eu/articles/cli...

Top US Election Security Watchdog Forced to Stop Election Security Work The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has frozen efforts to aid states in securing elections, according to an internal memo viewed by WIRED.

Last night, we broke the news that the top US election security watchdog has frozen all of its election security work and is reviewing everything it has done to help state and local officials secure their elections for the past eight years. https://wrd.cm/3QkfGh3

Chinese exporters brace for 'rat race' in shift away from US Jeremy Fang, a sales officer at a Chinese aluminium products maker, is trying to export more to markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America to offset the U.S. tariffs' impact. The problem, he says, is that his competitors have the same idea.

1/7
This Reuters article describes a process that my friends and former students who own or run manufacturing companies in China have been telling me about for years.

www.reuters.com/business/chi...

'For the sake of democracy': Sydenham rezoning vote back with council A block of prime industrial land on the edge of central Christchurch might be opened up for residential development, after new information came to light.

We made an OIA request to understand why some councillors were excluded from voting on Plan Change 14. Turns out, some of them weren't! So upzoning of Sydenham is back on the cards next week!

www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/3605...

Just got a tip from a guy at the FAA. You'll never believe who is still getting new government contracts while all the contracts at the Department of Education and USAID and other agencies are being nuked from orbit.

www.inquirer.com/columnists/a...

How a Canadian scientist and a venomous lizard helped pave the way for Ozempic - National | Globalnews.ca In 1984, Dr. Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist from the University of Toronto, discovered a hormone that helped pave the way for popular diabetes drugs such as Ozempic.

This is the most relevant article to NIH and research cuts I’ve seen.

Imagine if this was today , how many people would be saying “Why are we studying Gila Monsters and their impact on diabetes ? That’s wasted money !”

globalnews.ca/news/9793403...

Screenshot of Fox score chyron in Super Bowl 59.

New Fox chyron is excellent.

Team names: huge.
Score: huge.
Logos: none. Colors say enough.
Needless chrome: none.
Timeouts remaining: prominent but not distracting.
Down and yards to go indicator: conveys which team has the ball.
Typography: classic, legible, bold, timeless.

Outstanding design.

Supersizing vehicles offers minimal safety benefits — but substantial dangers The safety benefits of larger vehicles top out quickly once curb weights exceed the fleet average, a new IIHS study shows.

This will surprise many Americans:

According to a new study, gigantic SUVs are no safer for occupants than merely big SUVs.

"For vehicles that weigh more than [~4,000 lbs, the fleet avg], there’s hardly any decrease in risk for occupants associated with additional poundage."

What will happen: Musk will use control of the federal payments system to deny money to blue states, creating budget crises and austerity in them. They will then say the problems caused by this represent the failure of profligate Democrats and the media will parrot these lies.

The Collapse of USAID Is Fueling Human Trafficking and Slavery at Scammer Compounds The dismantling of USAID by Elon Musk's DOGE and a State Department funding freeze have severely disrupted efforts to help people escape forced labor camps run by criminal scammers.

The dismantling of USAID by Elon Musk’s DOGE and a State Department funding freeze have severely disrupted efforts to help people escape forced labor camps run by criminal scammers.

I can't get over how weak so many capitalists are when the backbone to a lot of their profits -- federal investment and safety nets -- are being gutted. Probably aligns with the death of long term value plays as everything descends into rents and looking for exit liquidity.

"His comments seemed to indicate that Mr. Trump wanted to find a new homeland for the Palestinians rather than reconstruct Gaza" is an insane way to describe what would be one of history's greatest programs of ethnic cleansing.

Upzoning works research shows (again)🏠

A new Auckland study shows that allowing denser development boosted housing supply by 23.7% and kept prices 15–21.2% lower than they would’ve been without reform.

More homes. Lower prices.

How do we kill the myth of crazed NZ Govt C*VID stimulus spending? All the data to test the assumption that we went nuts relative to other countries is easily available now. Let's have a look at a few angles... [🧵1/n]