Crypto News: Just wait: The housing market is cooling off

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The housing market smells like melty cheese.
ESG has plenty of problems.
Japanese kids learn how to be adults at a young age.
Stock pickers are good at their jobs, for once.

Why do we keep burning our mouths on hot cheese??? Illustration: Jessica Karl

You've been here: It's Saturday night and the line for the local pizzeria is comically long. You finally get seated, only to realize your waitress is somehow in charge of 40 other tables, each with equally ravenous customers. Eventually, you place your order and try to distract everyone by scrunching up straw wrappers and dropping tiny bits of water onto them until they're writhing like worms. After the awe of that wears off, you start folding paper napkins into tiny triangles for flick football.

Decades later, your boiling-hot pizza(s) arrive. Driven by hunger and the scents of oregano, mozzarella and tomato, you grab a slice and shove it in your mouth. In your initial euphoria, you don't even register the roof of your mouth being incinerated. But soon you realize you most certainly have burned your lips, tongue, fingers and somehow forehead on this pizza slice. For days after, you pay for your impatience whenever taking a bite of food or sip of coffee. And yet! You never learn your lesson. Week in and week out, you go back to the same pizzeria and burn your palate on pools of hot cheese.

Conor Sen, who is probably above burning his mouth on pizza, has long said consumers should beware of burning their wallets on the hot housing market. Housing, just like pizza, needs time to cool. If you're ready to buy, Conor encourages you to resist pulling the trigger now, because:

We're at the tail end of a super-strong period for housing. If you haven't manifested your suburban fantasy by Memorial Day, there's zero need to rush.
For the first time since March 2020, the housing market is softening like a nice room-temp camembert.
Long-term interest rates are actually headed downhill, which is just showing up in mortgage rates.

At this point in the pandemic-inflation-time-continuum, many Americans haven't even been seated in a booth yet, much less ordered their pizza. "If you've been outbid on homes for the past two years, I understand the instinct to snap up the first opportunity now that the market is finally settling down," Jonathan Levin tweeted. But maybe wait a few more weeks (I know, an eternity in pizza years) to secure your dream pad. If you manage to hold out, maybe the backyard will even come with one of those fancy pizza ovens, so you can avoid scorching your mouth in public.

Whenever there's a buzzword on Wall Street, a lot of companies can't help but insert themselves into the discussion by jumping on the performative bandwagon. The blockchain? Let's invent our own cryptocurrency! Black Lives Matter? Let's diversify the models on our Instagram feed! ESG? Let's do a collab with that hydroponic garden startup! Meme stocks? Let's have our CEO call out the Reddit crowd and say 'HODL' at least five times. Oh, and make sure he's not wearing pants!

At the end of the day, these are still ruthless, capitalist companies. Many don't actually care about metal straws or saving the turtles; they only want to weaponize these trends to help boost their bottom line. This can lead to what we call "greenwashing," and the SEC wants to do something about it. Sadly, Aaron Brown argues the commission has its approach backward: "The best thing for the SEC to do is get out of the way of innovators, not add new layers of regulation to impede them," he writes.

Allison Schrager goes a step further, saying the virtue economy should see itself out the door. The days when ESG funds outperformed the S&P 500 are long gone, and when individual investors try to separate "good" companies from morally corrupt ones, they cut off opportunities and hurt their bottom line. It's also easier said than done. Take hydrogen: Once a poster child for ESG, now we know it might actually make climate change worse.

As a child, I was fascinated by an absurd show called "Kid Nation." The producers dropped 40 kids, ages 8 to 15, off in Middle-of-Nowhere, New Mexico. They had 40 days to hunt for food, create shelter and form a functioning society, sans parents. To me, it was a dream. No bedtime! No teachers! No need to brush my hair! But perhaps it wasn't so enthralling to adults: It only ran for one season.

In Japan, the phenomenon of kids doing adult things onscreen has been a smashing success. A long-running show called Hajimete no Otsukai (My First Errand) — now available on Netflix as Old Enough! — "features preschoolers running errands by themselves," notes Gearoid Reidy. It may strike some viewers as putting toddlers at unnecessary risk. But Gearoid suggests the show is at root about making kids conform to a rigid, risk-averse society. As those norms change, Japanese fans might want to take a different kind of inspiration from kids willing to leave their comfort zones.

Wait, since when did stock pickers become actually good at … picking stocks? Last year, only 15% of active managers beat the S&P 500. This year, a whopping 70% are slaying the game. But Nir Kaissar says their good fortune won't last for long.

American factory floors were a ghost town even before Covid-19 arrived on the scene. Brooke Sutherland says the industrial sector can get workers back by taking their well-being into account.

Red-flag laws work: In Connecticut, one life is saved for every 10 to 20 protection orders issued. — Bloomberg's editorial board

Vladimir Putin's KGB training turned him into the unpredictable and dangerous nightmare he is today. — Andreas Kluth

Results for the U.K.'s Great Mix-and-Match Vaccine Experiment are in: Patients jabbed with a cocktail of AstraZeneca and Pfizer are winning. — Therese Raphael and Sam Fazeli

Compromised as it is, the EU's new ban on Russian oil imports is the right move. — Clara Ferreira Marques and David Fickling

If Watergate happened today, would Richard Nixon's presidency somehow survive? — Jonathan Bernstein

Wash your Bitcoins with this one weird (tax) trick. — Alexis Leondis

Younger generations of teachers are getting the short end of the pension stick. — Erin Lowry

The once-in-a-lifetime meteor shower was pretty meh.

Jill and Joe Biden coined a new term for mobile marital spats: "fexting."

Elon Musk doesn't know how to do basic code.

Ford's electric pickup truck is also a backup home generator.

The Gnomeboys of TikTok are aiming for world domination.

To Jake Gyllenhaal, home smells like pasta pomodoro and garbage.

Forget Tom, Jerry's biggest fear was probably a banana. (h/t Scott Duke Kominers)

Scientists are building an insanely powerful hurricane simulator.

Notes: Please send pasta pomodoro and feedback to Jessica Karl at jkarl9@bloomberg.net.

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