Crypto News: Actually, Americans can handle a rainy day

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Americans can handle an emergency.
The oceans need help with urgency.
Housing climbs back with fervency.
Dubai's getting a lot of currency.

There are two types of kids in this world:

Kid #1 will meet a genie that tells them to "make three wishes" and the kid goes "OK, I wish for a puppy, a swing set and a rock tumbler." *Poof!* Those items magically appear, and the genie gets to take an early lunch break or whatever.
If put in the same situation, Kid #2 will immediately ask the genie for "infinite wishes." And if the genie says "no, you're not allowed to wish for more wishes," then the child will get creative and proceed to find a loophole that grants them more wishes. Maybe they tell the genie: "I wish I was allowed to wish for more wishes." Or, "I wish you couldn't count." Or, my personal favorite, "I wish for more genies."

To no one's surprise, I was an "infinite wish" child. Growing up, the When You Wish Upon a Star song was simply a gateway drug that allowed me to dream up more wishes.

The need to have a buffer — whether it be wishes or money or time between meetings — is human nature. Which brings me to the statistic about how most Americans say they don't have enough cash to pay for a $400 emergency expense. Maybe you've heard some variation of it before — Vice President Kamala Harris referenced it just last week. It's one of those classic figures that gets "bandied about for political purposes," Allison Schrager explains. The thing is, it's completely misleading:

Allison says the figure is derived from a Federal Reserve survey that asks people if they would cover a $400 emergency expense using cash or the available equivalent. In 2022, 63% of households said "yes," as shown in the above chart. But it's not as though the remaining 37% of households are a mere hospital bill away from going bankrupt. The survey found that a fair amount of them actually do have the cash, but "they would take out debt in an emergency in order to preserve a cash buffer for other emergencies." Sound familiar? These are "infinite wish" adults! They want to preserve their $400 in order to ensure their future economic stability; to have extra wishes for "what ifs."

"The bottom line is that, if faced with a $400 expense, 87% of all US households could still pay their other bills," Allison says. It's a far cry from the scary statistic we so often hear about. That genie needs to go back into the bottle.

This was my face after reading Mark Gongloff's latest column about how our hot tub ocean temperatures and toxic trash vortexes are slowly destroying the fragile reef ecosystems built by corals:

CORAAAAALLL Source: Pixar

Life on this planet would completely suck without corals, to put it bluntly. Without these reefs, over a quarter of the world's sea life would suffer, and 1 billion humans — who rely on corals and the creatures they support — would lose their food and livelihood as a result. In many ways, reefs are invisible heroes: They protect coastal homes from storms and floods. They provide ingredients used in cancer treatments. They help oceans produce oxygen. "Without coral," the sea "would eventually be starved of fish, forcing farmers to produce more protein on land, a far costlier process. The water would be slimier, choked with algae and jellyfish," Mark writes.

Scientists estimate that more than half of the world's reefs have died since 1950, in large part because humans (read: tourists) have turned the ocean into a cesspool of pollution. Our decision to overfish and dump grotesque amounts of waste into big bodies of water has cost us in more ways than one, Mark explains: "The ocean soaks up atmospheric heat and is slow to let it go," which means that water temperatures are constantly reaching fresh records:

Most of the remaining corals can't survive in water this hot. One study predicts that half of them could be dead by 2035. Soon after that, "our warming path could push them to extinction," Mark writes. But that's the worst-case scenario. "There's reason for hope, and more importantly there's reason for action," Jonathan Cybulski, an ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, told Mark. There's a corny poster in my doctor's office that says something along the lines of, Take care of your body; It's the only one you have! Maybe we should start applying that message to bodies of water, too. Read the whole thing.

My sister and I once had this plant that we were pretty sure was dead. Looking at it, it was just a single stick, standing up in the dirt. Not a leaf in sight. But we were too lazy to de-pot it, so it sat on her windowsill for months. That is, until January, when she sent me this photo:

A feat for at-home horticulture.

Against all odds, the plant — that stick — came back from the brink. And this, my friends, is what Conor Sen is seeing right now in the housing market: a sign of life. "To be clear, I'm not looking for a wave of fresh supply, but any growth right now would be helpful — something we should start to see early next year," he writes. After what felt like an unending housing drought, we now have a glimmer of hope:

By this time next year, we should be seeing a lot more new homes hit the market, now that supply chains have mostly healed. But that won't alleviate all of our housing horrors: "The resale market, which historically accounted for about 87% of all homes for sale and has seen an acute lack of inventory, is where a pickup in new listings would be most welcome," Conor explains.

Luckily, there's signs of green sprouts there, too: A new survey from Zillow found that a little less than a quarter of homeowners are already selling or considering selling over the next three years — the highest percentage since the start of 2021.

"It's going to take years to build enough to bring the housing market back into balance, but for the first time in a while there are reasons to think we're moving in the right direction," Conor writes. For what it's worth, my stick plant now has two leaves. Hey, progress is progress:

Nature is healing.

Remember in January when all those makeup influencers took a trip to Dubai and Beyoncé performed? Or when all those wealthy Russians took their fancy yachts to the UAE to avoid sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine? Well, now Dubai is working to attract wealthy Western hedge-fund types, ensuring that the money keeps on coming. "There's a good chance the Gulf is going to become a test case in the race for rich talent in a world dominated by geopolitics and war," Lionel Laurent writes.

In case you haven't noticed, Bud Light's strugglebus seems to still have a lot of gas in the tank. It's an unusual story, considering most consumer storms would have lost steam by now, Andrea Felsted writes. But no, the beer brand's controversy over its partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney has spiraled out of control, putting AB InBev and its financials in the spotlight. Bud Light is no longer the best-selling beer in the US, after ceding its crown to Modelo. And "with younger people increasingly switching to spirits, brewers need beer to appeal to a broader audience," she writes. It increasingly looks as though tequila spritzers — not domestic beers — are the preferred elixirs these days: