2026-03-11 23:41:41
1. Spinoza does not like going to the groomer at any price (NYT). He is a wise dog.
3. One of the real AI dangers.
4. Using LLMs to identify fiscal shocks.
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2026-03-11 19:21:54
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act appears likely to pass the Senate. The bill contains some genuinely good ideas alongside some very popular—but bonkers ideas.
Let’s start with the good ideas.
The bill would streamline NEPA review for federally supported housing, primarily by expanding categorical exclusions. Federal environmental review does impose real costs and delays on housing construction, so reducing unnecessary review is a step in the right direction. The gains will probably be modest—most housing regulation occurs at the state and local level—but removing friction is good.
The bill would also deregulate manufactured housing by eliminating the permanent chassis requirement and creating a uniform national construction and safety standard. The United States once built far more factory-produced housing; in the early 1970s, by some accounts a majority of new homes were factory-built (mobile or modular). Long-run productivity growth in housing almost certainly requires greater use of factory construction. Land-use regulation remains the dominant constraint on supply, but enabling scalable manufacturing is still welcome.
Another interesting provision involves Community Development Block Grants (CDBG). The bill allows CDBG funds to be used for building new housing rather than being largely restricted to rehabilitation of existing housing. More federal spending is not automatically appealing, but the bill adds an unusual incentive mechanism.
The bill creates a tournament for CDBG allocations. Localities that exceed the median housing growth improvement rate among eligible CDBG recipients receive bonus funding. Those below the median face a 10 percent reduction. The key feature is that the penalties fund the bonuses, so the system reallocates money rather than expanding spending.
This is a clever design. It creates competition among localities and benchmarks them against peers rather than against a fixed national target. In effect, the program rewards relative improvement rather than absolute performance—a classic tournament structure. (See Modern Principles for an introduction to tournament theory!).
Ok, now for the popular but bonkers ideas. Section 901 (“Homes are for People, Not Corporations”) restricts the purchase of new single-family homes by large institutional investors. Elizabeth Warren is a sponsor of the bill but this section was driven almost entirely by President Trump. Trump passed an Executive Order, Stopping Wall Street from Competing With Main Street Home Buyers, that cuts off institutional home investors from FHA insurance, VA guarantees, USDA backing, Fannie/Freddie securitization and so forth. The bill goes further by imposing a seven-year mandatory divestiture rule, forcing institutional investors to convert rental homes to owner-occupied units after seven years.
No one objects to institutional investors owning apartment buildings. But when the same investors own single-family homes, it breaks people’s brains. Consider how strange the logic sounds if applied elsewhere:
…a growing share of apartments, often concentrated in certain communities, have been purchased by large Wall Street investors, crowding out families seeking to buy condominiums.
Apartments are fine, hotels are fine, but somehow a corporation owning a single family home is un-American. In fact, the US could do with more rental housing of all kinds! Why take the risk of owning when you can rent? Rental housing improves worker mobility. When foreclosures surged after 2008 and traditional buyers disappeared, institutional investors stepped in and absorbed distressed supply — helping stabilize markets. Who plays that role next time?
Institutional investors own only a tiny number of homes, so even if this were a good idea it wouldn’t be effective. But it’s not a good idea, it’s just rage bait driven by Warren/Trump anti-corporate rhetoric.
What does “Homes are for People, Not Corporations” even mean?–this is a slogan for the Idiocracy era. “Food is for People, Not Corporations,” so we should ban Perdue Farms and McDonald’s?
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2026-03-11 15:20:34
A New Jersey Girl Scout troop has taken cookie sales to new heights, setting up shop right outside a popular cannabis dispensary.
A South Jersey-based troop recently teamed up with Daylite Dispensary in Mount Laurel to sell their beloved cookies at the cannabis shop this cookie season.
“You use cannabis, you get the munchies,” Daylite Dispensary owner Steve Cassidy told NJ.com “There’s a connection between snacks and cannabis and the fact that we don’t have to pretend that doesn’t exist anymore is really awesome.”
Daylite became Mount Laurel’s first dispensary when it opened in 2023. Cassidy said the idea was proposed back in 2024, but it was turned down by Girl Scouts of Central & Southern New Jersey, the Girl Scout council that oversees troops in the region.
When the idea reemerged ahead of this year’s cookie season, the troop was allowed to sell cookies at Daylite on a trial basis, according to Cassidy.
Here is the full story, via someone else.
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2026-03-11 12:32:57
Citi sees Latin America as one of the main winners of the “great trade realignment”
A new Citi report positions Latin America as one of the main winners of what it calls the “great trade realignment”, as global supply chains shift toward a more multipolar structure driven by tariff volatility, AI adoption and nearshoring trends.
Trade flows from Latin America to ASEAN countries surged 82% between 2019 and 2024, while exports from China to the region grew 59% over the same period.
Latin America’s exports to North America also rose 43% in the same period.
Citi highlights the region’s growing role as a vital supplier of critical minerals to Asia’s electronics industry, an agricultural alternative to the United States for products like soybeans, and an increasingly attractive destination for foreign direct investment, which grew 12% in the first half of 2025 against a negative trend in other developed economies.
Here is the link.
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2026-03-11 10:25:24
The Five Tastes: Delicious Recipes for Chinese Flavor, due out this fall. Via Joe Powers in the MR comments section. Hers are the very best Chinese cookbooks and they are also wonderful books more generally. She has been a CWT guest three times now. Let us hope a fourth episode is in order…
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2026-03-11 02:36:47
We examine the historical frequency of stock market booms, crashes, and bubbles in the United States from 1792 to 2024 using aggregate market data and industry-level portfolios. We define a bubble as a large boom followed by a crash that reverses the market’s prior gains. Bubbles are extremely rare. We extend the industry-level analysis of Greenwood, Shleifer, and You (2019) through 2024 and replicate their findings out of sample using Cowles Commission industry data from 1871 to 1938. Booms do not reliably predict crashes, but they do predict higher subsequent volatility, increasing the likelihood of both large gains and large losses.
That is from a new NBER working paper by William N. Goetzmann, Otto Manninen, and James Tyler.
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