Hello! Welcome to Slate Money. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios. Hi. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the Young Times and other places. Hello.
Emily, so if you want to sum up this episode, would you say that the first segment is me saying that inequality going down is good, but then the second segment is me saying that inequality is also fine?
Yes. Yes, Felix. That is what I think sums it up nicely. It's very complicated for you.
We are going to talk about inequality. This is the big news that I wrote about this week, which is not really new news.
It's been going on for the past 20 years or so, but inequality, global inequality is coming down. This is good, right? We're going to discuss. There are reasons why some people think it might not be.
We are going to talk about Instant Pot and their bankruptcy. We are also going to talk, and this is really why we all came together today, about posting images of your fabulous beach lifestyle
when you have caused financial harm to other people. Is this insensitive, or is this just what people do these days when they go on holiday at the fruja's on Instagram?
And there's even a sleep plus, which I can highly recommend you listen to all about commercial real estate. If it collapses, will any of us feel it? Or is it just going to be a financial reconfiguration?
It's all coming up on sleep money.
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Okay, so let's start with inequality because Renko Milanovic, he's at City University here in New York.
He is my favorite inequality researcher. Definitely top five.
And he has this big essay in foreign affairs, which came out this week.
And he has crunched the numbers on global inequality and says it is basically the lowest it has been in 150 years.
Which is kind of amazing. And should we be out there celebrating this week?
Yeah, I mean, I think the overall numbers are down.
And just to give listeners a sense of how they're measured.
There's something called the Genie Co-efficient that basically determines inequality on a scale of 1 to 100.
And just for reference in 2000, the global number was 69.
And in 2018 it dropped to 60.
And I'm pretty sure it's below 60 now.
Like this is all pre-pandemic data that Renko is using.
And as we know, the pandemic was a great equalizing force, certainly in the United States, but in other countries too.
So I would be surprised if it hadn't dropped even further over the previous, over the last five years.
Well, I don't think this is good news.
Okay, Emily, let's have your contrarian take.
Well, it's a good news, bad news.
Obviously, I'm not going to be out on a podcast arguing that a reduction in inequality around the world is bad news.
But what's happening at the same time, there's this reduction in inequality around the world, primarily because of China's incredible economic growth over the past two decades.
At the same time, within countries, inequality is actually widening a little bit.
According to what you wrote, Felix, and to the peace and foreign policy, the poor populations in rich Western countries are becoming worse off.
And as the years go on, if things continue a pace, then perhaps like a lower income person in the United States will be worse off than their counterparts in China or other countries.
Let me add a whole bunch of asterisks and footnotes to that, because that's not exactly how I would put it.
The poor in the United States, and I'm not quite so much in Europe, but definitely in the United States, are better off as we know.
Over the course of the pandemic, in a sense, that has been a wonderful force for the reduction of inequality in the United States.
That obviously isn't included in Franco's peace, because he stops in 2018.
So that's the first piece of good news there.
What he is saying is that the poor in the United States, even if they're getting less unequal in the United States, even if they're getting richer in the United States, they're getting richer more slowly than the upper middle classes in China.
And so what they're doing is they're dropping down like the global rankings.
So whereas a poor person in the United States might have been at the 60th percentile, a couple of decades ago, globally speaking, now they might be at the 40th percentile globally speaking.
That doesn't mean they're getting poorer. It just means that the rest of the world is getting so much richer that there are more people in the rest of the world who are richer than poor people in America.
Well, first, I think that the gains by lower income Americans from the past few years are going to be eroded away pretty quickly.
I guess I have a more negative take of that progress than you do, Felix.
But I think I'm also a little bit nationalistic, and it kind of bums me out to hear that the US isn't going to be the richest, most powerful country for much longer.
Because there's so many benefits that are crew to middle class Americans like me from that that I see this as good news, bad news.
Emily likes the unipolar American hegemony.
I mean, look, it's not so bad. It's not so bad that our poorer citizens are relatively rich if you look around the world.
They're still better off than most people. If that's going to change, I feel like that's going to lead to some bad outcomes here in the United States.
Bad things happen once if you were the richest country and you're no longer the richest country, bad things start to happen.
Look at your former country, Felix.
What about it?
It breaks it in. It's not doing great.
Yeah, I feel like Brexit long post-ates the decline of the British Empire.
I feel like the big decline of the United Kingdom from, you know, called it 1914 to 1979, something like that when it just became a lot poorer on the global level and lost its empire.
You know, it did not feel great, but it was, I feel like that kind of humbling reminder that the rest of the world matters is solitary and probably a good thing.
I just don't see Americans being humbly reminded of anything.
The one thing I do want to say, the one thing I do want to say is just to pick up on what you're saying about the increase of inequality within countries.
Basically, what we saw during the Cold War was a significant increase in inequality between countries and a decrease of inequality within countries.
And this was global.
This happened in the United States, but it also happened in China.
It also happened in Russia. It also happened in India.
Basically, everywhere you looked, countries were becoming more equal, but the differences between them were getting bigger and bigger.
And the differences between them dwarfed the, you know, increasing inequality within countries.
And so overall inequality went up.
Both of those things have now reversed.
We have rapidly falling inequality between countries and marginally rising inequality within countries.
And it is not great that inequality within countries is increasing.
But I just want to put that in perspective and say that, you know, if you disaggregate that 60 numbered global journey and you try and sort of break it out into its within country and between country components,
the within country component is 13 and the between country component is 47.
So you want to, like, just put that in perspective that it's the inequality between countries that really constitutes the overwhelming majority of global inequality still.
So there are other measures of inequality besides Jenny that people look at.
And, you know, one, for instance, is supplemental poverty measure, which, you know, we use here.
And by those standards during the pandemic, just the $11 billion in stimulus payments, we had a huge effect on inequality.
We lifted 11 million people out of poverty.
And, you know, that was a measure that was expected to be worse.
And so I don't think that's different.
The supplemental poverty measure, just measures poverty, it doesn't measure inequality.
Obviously, if poverty goes down, that's a sign that inequality is going down.
But yeah, absolutely. If the stimulus reduced poverty and reduced inequality and reduced inequality as measured by Jenny, these are all basically different ways of looking at the same thing.
I would just add that, like I was saying before, yes, the stimulus reduced poverty and poverty went down in the United States.
But I really expected to go back up because the stimulus is gone.
All those benefits are over. People are getting kicked off. Like the Medicaid roles, snap benefits are the supplemental snap benefits went away.
I don't have much reason to believe that that reduction in poverty and one assumes inequality is a permanent reduction.
I feel like it is a permanent reduction for the working poor that the massive increase in wages that we've seen at the bottom end of the income spectrum
is probably here to stay. People who saw their income go up from $7 an hour to $15 an hour are not going to see it go back down to $7 an hour.
And on top of that, a lot of the welfare state benefits that people get indexed links and so with inflation they've been going up as well.
You're absolutely right that some of the excess poverty reduction measures that we implemented during the pandemic are going to go away.
So I wouldn't be surprised to see the poverty rate take up a little, but I really don't think it's going to go back to pre-pandemic levels.
We could bet on that.
But do we want to zoom out because Elizabeth was mentioning before the role Africa could play in whether or not inequality is further reduced going forward or not?
Yeah, there are two big question marks going forward. We know that there has been this massive reduction in inequality over the past 20 or so years.
And a lot but not all of that is the rise of the Chinese middle classes.
The consequence of that is that it's really hard to reduce inequality a lot more by trying to getting richer.
China is going to continue to get richer, but since it's already close to being a middle income country, that isn't going to reduce inequality very much.
If we want to reduce inequality a lot from here, we need to see it in India and we need to see it in Africa.
And India seems to be on the right path economically speaking.
There's this wonderful statistic that back in the late 80s, Germany had 7% of global GDP and India had 3% and then now those two numbers are reversed.
So India is doing better than some people realize, but Africa really isn't.
In terms of economic inequality is really kind of going nowhere and Branco for one is relatively pessimistic, but that's going to change anytime soon.
The one thing I'd mention about Africa is that if you measure things like health outcomes, it's a huge success story.
The number of children who died before their fifth birthday say something like that.
Those things have come down massively, but in terms of actual dollar income, that really isn't showing up and it's not clear when and how that might happen.
Are there any global benefits to China having a more robust middle class?
Are there any global disc benefits? No, it's fantastic.
Yeah, benefits to globally, not specifically to China.
It's amazing. China is the biggest or the second biggest market in the world for name your big global company, GM sells more cars in China than it does in the United States.
Nike, Starbucks, McDonald's, Apple, China is just an absolutely enormous and incredibly fast growing market for all of them.
If you took out the Chinese market, I don't know how many hundreds of billions of dollars would get wiped off of Apple's market cap immediately because that's where the future growth is.
The world's exporters are all wanting to export to China and the growth of the Chinese middle classes is in very large part, a function of the fact that they are making the goods, especially the goods, but even increasingly the digital services
that the rest of the world wants. And we are paying for those and benefiting from them. And yeah, no, it's awesome.
I mean, I agree with your argument. I'm just saying that if you look at what the arguments that particularly Republicans are making in Congress right now about the rise of China, they would prefer a weak economic state because they think that we're too economically interdependent.
Yeah, I don't buy that at all. I do think the geopolitically and in terms of military strength, there is a big rivalry between US and China and there is strategic interest in having a weaker China.
But just on purely economic grounds, that argument makes no sense to me at all.
So I think I understand the implications of why inequality is bad in the United States. And I'm not talking about why poverty is bad.
I don't need to talk that through with anybody. I get it. I hope. But the idea that inequality is bad because it's sort of just bifurcates society and it decreases, I guess, economic growth also.
And I know that inside the US. But when I look so for global, globally, a reduction in inequality, would that mean the same thing? Would be with a reduction in inequality mean that more countries are sort of on more equal footing with each other?
A, would it mean that there's less of that kind of like bifurcation? There's more allegiances cross country allegiances? There's more peace? Are those are those the results, do we think?
So one of the big problems in the rich world politically speaking is inbound migration from poorer countries.
You know, this has been a huge political issue in the United States for the past few years from Central America. It's a huge political issue in Europe from Syria and Turkey and places like that.
And the more equal you are, the fewer economic forces drive that kind of migration, right? A relatively uneducated Nigerian say if they immigrate to Norway can make 18 times as much money as they could in Nigeria.
So there's a huge economic incentive to migrate and those migration patterns cause political backlash domestically in the countries where people are migrating too.
And the more equality you have, the more you get, first of all, migration in the opposite direction, you get people saying, oh, I'm just going to go live in Nigeria because it's fun and it's warm and it's cheap or whatever.
And then also you get people and also you just get less sort of economic incentive to do that migration.
You will still get the global warming incentives, but anything we can do to just put people on a more equal footing with each other has got to be a good thing.
But I want to take a little break here and then after that we'll talk about another little indication of wealth that people are getting upset about.
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So one of the things that inequality causes is jealousy. When we see our peers,
we feel jealous of them and we don't like that. And so this causes headlines.
A few weeks ago, maybe over a couple months ago, Larry Summers called into a Bloomberg TV show from his house in the Caribbean and said something about how the unemployment rate would need to come up.
And this caused all manner of headlines about how like, you know, how dare Larry Summers say that people need to lose their jobs when he's lying on a beach in the Caribbean.
More recently, there was a New York Times article about the founders of three hours capital who similarly like hanging out in Bali and having a nice life.
And people were like, well, how dare you have a nice life because you had a hedge fund that imploded and that caused the crypto winter and lots of people lost lots of money.
And therefore, what the fuck? And I DMed Emily about this and I'm like, Emily, you're going to be totally in favor of people taking vacations, right?
And she was like, no, not at all. And so now I feel like we have a, we have an actual debate.
You misunderstood me. I'm not against people taking vacations. Everyone can take vacation. Of course, of course.
But don't post the pictures. Like, don't do an interview where you say you want people to lose their jobs from the beach.
Like, show a little respect. That is what I'm saying. I'm saying there are, I'm saying that there are rules here.
There are social norms that we should abide by. That when something happens that's serious, like your hedge fund, or I don't even know if three hours capital is really a hedge fund.
But your company implodes and a lot of people lose money as a result. Like, don't post pics on Insta that all the people that lost a lot of money can see of you like living your best life in Bali.
Look, you don't go to a funeral wearing like your brightest flashiest clothes. Like, I don't put on my sequin ball gown, right? And go pay my respects to the dead.
You don't go on Bloomberg in front of a beach backdrop and be like, people have to suffer and lose their jobs.
Like, it's just poor form. That's what I'm saying.
It's insensitivity, but it also reinforces the idea that a lot of people have that, you know, elites live very differently and that they may not be good custodians or the things that they claim to be.
So, particularly when, you know, you have a hedge fund that just went bankrupt and the principles are all sending themselves on the beach. If you were an LP, you would sort of, you would be annoyed by that, I think.
So, can you unpack that a little bit because the LPs inhaled hedge funds and we should explain what that means. That means limited partners, which is basically the investors in the hedge fund.
Let's put to one side the fact that three hours didn't really have investors, but like, let's assume that it did.
Those people would themselves be rich people who regularly take holidays in Bali and have a nice life. So, given that, like, what would their beef be?
Their beef would be that, you know, they're treating the principles as managers. I mean, I've been in LP meetings in my previous life where sea level executives re-yeld that for taking too many vacations or driving a fancy car and a corporate lease.
I think they're just regarded as symbols of, you know, maybe irresponsible excess or in the case of companies that have already failed, maybe a sort of lack of remorse for any bad decision making.
Right. And so, dance, I think, the sort of unspoken thing here, when you see your headlamps in New York Times about, you know, the three-hour-risk capital guys living their rest life in Bali, is this kind of feeling of, if you took a bunch of risks and those risks blew up and you failed, then you should feel remorseful about that.
And if you feel remorseful about that, number one, you should be out there apologizing and saying things like, I will devote the rest of my life to try and make good on the money that people lost, and number two, or you definitely shouldn't be doing, is actually, like, smiling or being happy.
It feels incredibly sort of Calvinist to me, this idea that, you know, once you've caused some harm in the world, then you should not events any happiness or enjoyment.
But I don't know. I mean, that might be, like, the big theme behind it, like, you must suffer for the rest of your days. That's very American, everyone seeking justice in the form of severe punishment for others.
But I think it's more like what we were talking about with inequality. It's just this, like, burning reminder to the people who did lose money, not the LPs, because they're all a bunch of rich guys.
But like, you know, all the little guys who lost money in crypto, they do exist, and they feel bad, and they're not in Bali.
It's kind of just like rubbing in their faces. Like, we were better than you the whole time. We had a plan the whole time. You were suckers, and we weren't. And look at us now. There's an element of that.
And no one's saying you, you shouldn't be happy or going vacation, just like, don't rub it in people's faces. Rich people have known that for a long time. You don't rub it in people's faces.
I mean, that's kind of, like, gone away. And in our time in 2023, where, like, conspicuous consumption is very much fine with everyone, except, I guess, in the world of succession, where everything's beige, or quiet luxury, or whatever.
Still wealth.
Yeah. But I think there's something to be said about that. Don't rub it in everyone's face.
As an English person, I totally understand the impetus here, right? Which is the quiet, non-showy wealth, right? Don't go out there and flaunt your wealth, just, like, quietly enjoy nice things in private.
And then you, you know, you do find yourself on the Riviera sometimes, and you see some Russian who's flaunting everything and driving around in a Ferrari and has a whole bunch of, you know, honked, running models surrounding him. And you're like, yeah, that's,
you know, that's new vote, and you sneer at it. And so I totally understand that impetus, but I think that's a slightly different thing, right? One of them is this, you know, sort of, I don't like,
displays of conspicuous consumption, but I don't think that what we're talking about really here is displays of conspicuous consumption. What we're talking about really here is, you know, in Larry Somers' case, he's doing his work from home thing, in which he does quite regularly when he's at home in Boston, and it doesn't look very conspicuous. And when he's doing it when he's at home in the Caribbean, then it looks more conspicuous, because there's a palm tree behind him.
In the case of the three hours capital guys, you know, they are living relatively low key lives, but it does so happen that they have Instagram accounts. And if you're living a life in Bali, then your Instagram account, again, it's going to have palm trees and beaches and stuff on it.
And I think it's just part of the way that the hour, Quattitian existence is more visible now to the rest of the world because of Instagram and, you know, remote hits on TV shows and that kind of thing, that people get a glimpse into it and they're like, whoa.
Well, I think it's also, it depends on the person doing it, you know, Larry Somers is kind of made a career in the last few years of being consistently wrong about a lot of things.
And one of the criticisms of him is that he's just out of touch with current reality. So when he, you know, is filming from a beach in what looks like vacation and says, you know, we should have higher unemployment, it looks like not just callousness, but a complete misunderstanding of what's happening in the world.
And I think that's part of what people distrust. It's not that he's not a conspicuous consumption guy. He's not backdrop was not gaudy or anything like that. It's just in the context of what he's saying, it feels inappropriate.
Also, you're saying like in these times with Instagram and with TV, it's inescapable, but it's a choice. It's a choice to post to Instagram.
It's a choice to go on TV with that as your backdrop and say that we need to, you know, we need people to lose their jobs. That's a choice that you're making and insensitive.
If I am, you know, the founder of three arrows capital and I have an Instagram account and I'm making lots of money and everyone is looking up to me and I'm a crypto, you know, superstar.
Basically, what you're saying is in the eternal tradition of actually I said former editor in chief Nick Charleston now publisher, the minute that that hedge fund collapses, I should delete my account.
I mean, I think a good PR professional would tell you to do something along those lines, maybe not delete the account, but stop posting from, you know, your beach.
Aren't the rules different for public figures? I think they are.
I feel like there was some actual reporting that went into like finding these pictures. I don't think it was a flaunting so much as it was like, oh, we have found these people in Bali.
I guess, but they they posed for the New York Times and in photos smiling right there for all to see. I'm not saying that they shouldn't they shouldn't have some joy in their lives and happiness, but I just use some judgment and sensitivity.
The one thing I will say about that the three arrows guys in particular is like they really didn't have LPs. They didn't really didn't have investors who trusted them to, you know, make them lots of money and who they treated like suckers to use Emily's term.
They what they did was they borrowed money from large crypto companies and then went bust and weren't able to pay it back.
And the really dumb players here were all of the people like, you know, Genesis or Voyager or Gemini or whoever you want to, you know, call it who lent money to three hours capital on a non secured basis because they were three arrows and obviously they were super successful.
So why would you need security? I mean, that was just idiotic. I don't think it was the three arrows guys who are being stupid. I think it was the lenders.
But the collapse of three arrows is what did lead to crypto winter, which led to all manner of people losing their money of all.
Insofar as chips and size.
And led to some bank collapses too along the way.
I mean, everybody out. I mean, there were repercussions and silver gate and the signature too. I don't know.
Just don't post your beach photos if you just collapse the whole industry. I don't know is that I was really shocked that you took this up as a cause.
So I want to take a quick break, but I also want to stay on this question of judgmentalism.
Oh boy.
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Okay, so this is this is the question and I'm going to talk about a very interesting Amanda Mell piece that appeared in the Atlantic after instant brands filed for bankruptcy.
And instant brands is the parent company of Instant Pot. Instant Pot, which is Instant Pot, by the way, not Instant Pot. Everyone calls it Instant Pot.
It's Instant Pot and it is a pressure cooker that was very popular for a while and then everyone got the pressure cooker and then they didn't need the second one.
And then sometimes they even got a second one and didn't know why and eventually the demand for instant pots went down and the number of instant pots being sold went down.
And this normally would just mean that Instant Pot was making less money than it was before. But somewhere along the way, Instant Pot had been rolled up into this hold co along with Pyrex and various other kitchen brands owned by private equity leveraged up and
the result was that when sales went down, the company filed for bankruptcy and this caused a bunch of people writing on the internet about how private equity is stupid and terrible and they got it all wrong and this is a bad thing.
And I just want to take this opportunity since it's my podcast, at least one third my podcast to say, come on people, this is capitalism and it's best people borrowing money, creating money, investing money, doing R&D, creating new brands, trying to create new brands, brands failing, trying to create growth failing.
And this is good. And the whole point of limited liability companies is that they are what drives the economy and we want people taking these kind of risks and we want people trying to create new brands, we don't want people just sitting there on the Instant Pot making money when sales go up and making less money when sales go down.
We want people trying to do new things in the world and take risks and the people taking the risks here were exactly the people who are best placed to take those risks.
And so far as I can tell, there haven't been any layoffs, everyone's still getting paid in full, all of the vendors are being paid in full, all of the suppliers are being paid in full.
And so you get the people who bought lent money to Instant Brands and now are going to take over the company and you're going to do a debt for equity swap and there's going to be weird things happening to the capital stack.
But that's fine. I don't understand why anything bad or why people think that something bad happens here.
Well, I think there's a, and in most piece, she sort of points to this, there's, there's a consensus that they, you know, expanded some product lines into directions that didn't make sense.
And you know, when recurring criticism of private equity companies when they come in and do this is that a lot of them don't have operational experience to do that sort of thing or they don't have domain experience specifically.
So I don't think the argument is that private equity coming in and doing stuff is bad. I think it's that the specific decisions that this firm made didn't make sense for what the product was and, you know, what it made Instant Pot successful.
I buy that. It's interesting that Instant Pot filed for bankruptcy. I don't know if it's good or bad. I feel like that doesn't, that's not an issue here.
I mean, it's just sort of interesting. And then bigger picture, we could have a conversation about whether private equity is a useful thing or not. And I sort of don't know.
We can have a conversation about whether bankruptcy is a useful thing. Right. And I think clearly it is to having limited liability corporations in chapter 11 is a really useful way of building a vibrant economy.
And it is almost too easy to turn around when the company filing for bankruptcy is owned by private equity and say, oh, let me tell you something about how private equity is actually really stupid, which, you know, if you look at the historical returns to private equity, they're not that stupid.
The historical returns to private equity have been pretty damn good over the past few decades.
Obviously, there are lots of failures along the way, but that's part of the business model. And I think that kind of ability to embrace failure is a good thing.
Yeah, I think you know what it is. I think that when people hear such and such company file for bankruptcy, they're like, oh, no, the worst has happened.
But actually bankruptcy could be like you're saying a very good thing. And recently a few companies have tried to use bankruptcy to sort of like solve their problems.
But maybe that's a separate topic. But I think there is this, there is this notion that bankruptcy is a bad thing and it's, it's not that simple.
There is definitely a notion out there and financial journalists are really bad at communicating this.
That if a company files a bankruptcy, then it's basically that's the end of the company.
And that's absolutely not what's happening in this case. It does happen like the one I always think of is Toys R Us.
That was also a private equity thing. And it filed for bankruptcy and then it just closed. It just liquidated. And there is no Toys R Us anymore.
And that was kind of shocking to me because nearly always when you have a strong grand like that and a going concern, you know, going and a going concern, you can make the case that someone would want to take it over if you manage to get rid of all of the indebtedness and say, hey, I can try and make a go of this.
But they didn't in that case and that was shocking. But in general, if you have a bunch of factories and a bunch of people making instant pots and they're still demand for instant pods, then great.
You just get rid of all of the indebtedness and you keep on going.
I will say that the measure you're using to judge whether or not private equity is good or bad is quite limited.
And we could probably do a whole episode or maybe we could read Gretchen Morgan Stern's new book on private equity to really dig into it.
But like just measuring private equity returns and saying like, it's great.
Kind of diminishes like all the other kind of like social impacts and other impacts.
Sure, sure. I mean, that we can 100% have a have a episode or a segment on private equity.
Is it good or bad? You know, it's a good for employment. Is it good for society? All of that kind of thing.
But this idea that, you know, the strategic decisions that instant brand instant brands made in terms of trying to expand into new devices beyond just the instant pot.
And, you know, they're trying to make mixes and they're already other popular, very other very popular mixes.
And, you know, how could they have been so stupid to think that they could compete with the existing mixes?
You know, this idea of the strategic idiocy on the part of private equity is kind of almost cuts against this idea of, oh my god, that evil geniuses who just try and do financial engineering and fire everyone.
But yeah, I think exactly that idea of taking risks and trying to expand and borrowing money to expand.
And this is the, like, the heart of it is that in capitalism, the way that money is created is when banks make loans.
Like it is banks who create money. That is how money is created.
And so when you have a big company like Instant Pot or Instant Brands borrowing money from banks to invest in trying to create new product lines, that is exactly what creates money.
And you need that to happen in any good working economy.
Yeah, I don't think that people think of private equity, though, as a class that overwhelmingly generates innovation.
You know, I think that's more venture capital. I think private equity has reputation for financial and engineering because that is mostly what happens.
Perhaps, but, you know, it's easy to think of myself a lake and there's lots of private equity companies who seem to be quite good at innovation too.
So Felix out here, defending private equity, defending rich people, rubbing their wealth in your face.
I'm out here, defending private equity, defending rich people, taking holidays. I am just, yeah, exactly.
Next week, by the way, we're going to have Anna Shamansky on the show.
So I will no longer have to be the most red-blooded capitalist on the show.
We can let Anna slot straight back into her traditional role as the red-blooded capitalist.
But for this one, I'm going to, I'll happily take that role.
We should have a numbers round, though. Emily, did you have a number this week?
Yes, Felix, I did. My number is 1.5. That's a percentage, 1.5%.
That is the increase in monthly asking rents nationwide in May.
So in other words, rents nationwide went up 1.5%.
That's months on monthly in May from April?
No, May over last year. So 1.5% in May over May 22.
Okay, so that seems small.
It's a small increase, and people are very excited about it.
They think this is great news because rents and real estate prices have been driving up inflation.
But I just want to say that it still means that rents are going up.
And that for a lot of people who rent, their rents have gone up by insane amounts over the past few years.
It doesn't mean that rents are getting cheaper. It doesn't mean rental prices are getting more affordable.
So explain this. How does it, you're saying like because they've gone up a lot in the past few years
that just the last year doesn't show you the big pictures.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah. We don't have to like celebrate this necessarily.
Or the big picture is...
At least it shows that it's a move very much in the right direction.
If rent is falling in real terms, which it is, if it's only gone up 1.5% a year,
then that's something to celebrate.
Yeah, but it's just asking rents. So in other words, these are rents on apartments that you newly move into,
you know, new leases.
And so it's not looking at everyone else's rents that are renewal rents.
Those are still either the same, the same, or going up because those don't go down.
And most people have had their rents go up a lot, a lot in recent years.
So yeah, it's good news that the pace of growth is slowing, but it's a very incomplete picture.
And I feel like it gets undersold sometimes in the media.
I have a really dumb number, which is 420,000.
I love this number, even though it's dumb.
It is the number of elevators in Greece.
How does Greece have 420,000 elevators?
Apparently, the entire United Kingdom, which has six times the population,
and 15 times the GDP, has 292,500 elevators.
I feel like there's a 420 obsessed donor somewhere who could give you a good conspiracy theory about this.
I need this late money listener to run me the elevator to GDP league table.
And I would be shocked if Greece isn't at the top of this.
Greece has really won the, you know, we're just going to put elevators everywhere, war.
And good for them because elevators, and I have said this many times on the show in the past,
elevators are just the best way of moving people that humanity has ever come up with.
They're amazing and genius and wonderful and energy efficient and brilliant.
And everyone should have more elevators.
And if Greece has lots of elevators, that is fantastic.
Are you sure that 420,000 elevators is a lot?
Like how do you even know how many are there in the US?
This is what we need to find out. We need to have a deep dive on elevators.
Interestingly, the United States under indexes on elevator, on a number of elevators,
because it has so many single story buildings for one.
Also because elevators are incredibly expensive in the United States.
It's much more expensive to install an elevator in the United States,
and it's to install an elevator in Europe.
Because elevators in the United States have different safety standards,
and importantly, a much bigger than European elevators.
The European elevators need to be big enough to fit a wheelchair,
whereas American elevators need to be big enough to fit an entire stretcher.
And that makes them much more expensive and really creates a disincentive to install elevators.
Well, I'm standing by for your elevator chart.
Your elevator data interactive.
I feel like that we cannot have too much elevator content on slate money or basically anywhere.
So if any of you guys know an elevator expert, let me know.
Elevators are much bigger like three or four story elevators.
They're important too.
Elizabeth, what's your number?
My number is 109, 109, and that's a dollars.
And for $109, you can buy a Jensen Huang leather jacket from JacketPop.
And Jensen Huang is the CEO of NVIDIA,
which is now one of the biggest companies in tech, thanks to AI demand.
But this guy is a signature kind of fashion accessory as a leather jacket,
which he's been wearing for years.
And it's not a specific one. He has a whole range of them,
but he's always wearing a leather jacket.
And the same way that Steve Jobs always wore black, Izzy Miyaki,
Turtle Necks, and Mark Zuckerberg's kind of signature item is a Bruno Kitchenally T-shirt.
So now people who idolize Wong are going out and buying Jensen Huang branded leather jackets.
And they're always sort of branded without his permission.
So when you say it's branded, does that mean it's branded like on the web page that's selling it,
or on the actual jacket itself?
No, on the web page that's selling it.
Okay, but it's not like I can look inside the, you know,
in the lining of the jacket, and it's going to say Jensen Huang on it.
I don't think so, but having not bought a jacket,
I can't determine that definitively.
But yeah, I think that's probably it for this week.
We do have a sleep class on commercial real estate,
and if you collapse this, will it make a sound?
Other than that, thanks for listening.
Thanks for writing in on sleepmoney at sleep.com.
Thanks to Shana Ra for producing, and we will be back next week with more sleep money featuring.
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