June 24 2024
‘Silver Tsunami’; Trump-Biden fundraising; The Rent is too Damn High I; The Rent is too Damn High II; atomic bribery
FLASH Terrorists attack southern Russian churches and synagogues
1 America’s ‘Silver Tsunami’ Crisis Just Beginning
2 ELECTION 2024 Trump fundraising surges after conviction, erasing gap with Biden
3 Home prices rose to new record in May
4 Home ownership unattainable to all but affluent
5 Russia uses nuclear energy know-how too woo others
6/24/1964 FTC mandates cigarette warning labels
see ad astra on x @greg_loving
FLASH Terrorists attack southern Russian churches and synagogues
1 America’s ‘Silver Tsunami’ Crisis Just Beginning
Americans are getting older. By 2032, about a quarter of the US population will be over 65, up from 10% in 1970. And while it’s true that people are both living and staying healthier for longer, many will eventually need someone to care for them. A report by Wells Fargo in March estimated that an additional 1.7 million people will need some form of elder care in a decade. This is hard on families for so many reasons — emotional, logistical — but today I’ll focus on the economic ones. First, the good news: The rise in the need for elder care means there will also be an increase in the number of elder care jobs available. The Department of Labor projects that the elder care industry will add 22% more jobs by 2032, and the majority of them will probably go to women. (Currently 82% of home health and personal care aides are women.) Now the bad news: the pay for elder care is notoriously low, with a median salary of just $33,530 per year. That’s less than what preschool teachers ($37,130) and secretaries make ($46,010), and roughly on par with that of a childcare worker. The rise in demand has led to an increase in wages, but the pay is still pretty bad. That’s why, much like child care, the elder care industry is beset by staffing shortages and a high turnover rate. Also like child care, elder care is incredibly expensive. Genworth, a provider of long-term care insurance, estimates that last year the median cost of a private room in a nursing home was almost $117,000 a year — a 10% jump from three years ago. Nursing home costs have risen 6% and in-home elder care shot up 11% in the past year, according to the latest numbers reported in the consumer price index. As demand for elder care rises, so will the cost.
Article Source: Bloomberg
2 ELECTION 2024 Trump fundraising surges after conviction, erasing gap with Biden
Donors channeled tens of millions of dollars to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee immediately following his May 30 conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, all but erasing the massive fundraising advantage that President Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee once held. Biden and his allied groups have raised more money than Trump and his allies over the course of the general-election contest. But the surge in post-conviction donations to Trump’s effort — captured in part in May reports filed to the Federal Election Commission on Thursday — has the potential to dramatically reshape the presidential race.
The full picture of the financial strength of each campaign’s effort will not be clear until later this summer, when their allied committees are required to file reports. But at the end of May, the Trump campaign and the RNC had a combined $171 million in cash on hand, surpassing the Biden campaign and the DNC’s combined total of $157 million, according to reports filed late Thursday.WaPo
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss were refunded after their Bitcoin donations to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign exceeded the maximum amount allowed under federal law. The billionaire twins, who clashed with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg over ownership of the social network, now run Winklevoss Capital Management and are large investors in Bitcoin. Both said they donated the equivalent of $1 million of the cryptocurrency to the presumptive Republican nominee — which would exceed the maximum $844,600 that the Trump committee can legally accept per person.Bloomberg
Article Source: WaPo and Bloomberg
3 Home prices rose to new record in May
Home prices rose in May to a new high, with low inventory continuing to spur bidding wars among home buyers in some markets. The national median existing-home price in May was $419,300, a record in data going back to 1999, the National Association of Realtors said Friday. Prices aren’t adjusted for inflation. That was up 5.8% from a year earlier. Those high prices, paired with elevated mortgage rates, have limited the number of sales this spring—typically the busiest season for home buying.
Article Source: WSJ
4 Home ownership unattainable to all but affluent
In past decades, it was common to find a house that cost roughly three times a buyer's annual income. But that ratio has skewed sharply since the COVID-19 pandemic, with home prices up a whopping 47% since early 2020. Median home sales prices last year were about five times the median household income, according to tabulations in a newly released report by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, and there are signs it could get worse. The double whammy of high prices and high mortgage rates has "left homeownership out of reach to all but the most advantaged households," says Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at the center. The report finds that in nearly half of metro areas, buyers must make more than $100,000 to afford a median-priced home; in 2021, that was the case in only 11% of markets.
Article Source: NPR
5 Russia uses nuclear energy know-how too woo others
Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear giant, is building the first nuclear power plant in Bangladesh. At an estimated cost of about $12bn, it is one of the largest ever infrastructure projects in the nation of about 170mn people. With the aim of bringing the country’s share of electricity generated by nuclear power from zero to 10 per cent in less than 10 years, Rosatom is doing “amazing work”, says Sama Bilbao y León, director-general of the World Nuclear Association (WNA). Bangladesh’s government says the 2,400MW plant, expected to begin trials this year, will address power shortages and blackouts crippling Bangladesh’s otherwise fast-growing economy, including its garments export sector. But, for Moscow, the project serves another purpose: to bind the two countries together for decades and expand the Kremlin’s influence in Bangladesh, as it has done with other nations that do not have their own nuclear capacity. Throughout Vladimir Putin’s more than two-decade-long rule, gas and oil have been his most important geopolitical bargaining tools until the invasion of Ukraine changed the landscape. The EU’s shift away from Russian energy, coupled with the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, deprived the Kremlin of its most important export market and leverage. Sanctions have so far not hampered the nuclear energy sector, which can create long-lasting political ties and disrupt western efforts to isolate Putin’s regime. Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia already accounted for about half of all international agreements on nuclear power plant construction, reactor and fuel supply, decommissioning or waste management. Its main competitors in the nuclear power sector — China, France, Japan, South Korea and the US — accounted for about 40 per cent combined. Despite sanctions on its economy, Russia continues to be an unrivalled exporter of nuclear power plants. It is involved in more than a third of the new reactors being constructed around the world at the moment, including in China, India, Iran and Egypt.
Article Source: FT
6/24/1964 The Federal Trade Commission announces that cigarette makers must include warning labels about the harmful effects of smoking
Sources
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/23/world/europe/russia-attack-dagestan.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-06-20/aging-us-population-rising-costs-caution-elder-care-affordability
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/20/trump-conviction-fundraising-campaign-donations/; https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-21/winklevoss-twins-refunded-after-trump-crypto-gift-exceeded-limit
4. https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/home-prices-hit-a-record-high-4028acf2?st=df4gihob2rc5v00&reflink=article_copyURL_share
5. https://www.npr.org/2024/06/20/nx-s1-5005972/home-prices-wages-paychecks-rent-housing-harvard-report
6. https://www.ft.com/content/7110fc18-5a31-4387-9f4c-0cc5753d050a?segmentId=b0d7e653-3467-12ab-c0f0-77e4424cdb4c
Thanks for reading!
