Weekly News (October 1, 2024)

Mortgage Interest Rates Review

United Mortgage Nation  10/01/2024

 New-Home Sales Declined by 4.7% In August

 8월 신축 판매, 4.7% 감소  

WSJ     9/26/24(Thu) 

• Sales of new homes in the U.S. fell less than expected in August.
• The Census Bureau reported sales of new single family houses at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 716,000, down 4.7% from an upwardly revised 751,000 in July. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal expected sales would decline to 700,000 in August.
• Inventories at a 7.8 months’ supply are “still elevated but down from the peak of well over 8 months earlier in the year,” suggesting that “builders are making progress but have considerably more work to do,” Stanley said.

U.S. new-home sales

Mortgage Rates Reach 2-year Low

 모기지 이자률 2년만에 가장 낮은 이자률로…. 

WSJ     9/27/24(Fri) 

• Mortgage rates slipped to their lowest point in two years. 
• The average rate on the standard 30-year fixed mortgage edged lower by one basis point to 6.08%, according to a survey lenders released Thursday by mortgage-finance giant Freddie Mac.  That is the lowest level since September 2022. 
• Lower rates could draw some would-be buyers and sellers from the sidelines of the market, which had become less affordable than just about ever in recent years. 
• But mortgage rates are still roughly about double what they were at the start of 2022, before the Fed started its campaign to curd inflation.     

Average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage

WSJ  9/27/24

Landlord Settles Unfair Tactics Case

               불공평한 건물주, $48M 벌금…

WSJ  9/25/24(Wed) 

• Invitation Homes has agreed to pay $48 million in a settlement with FTC, which alleged that one of the country’s largest owners of single-family homes engaged in deceptive business practices, like unfairly withheld renters’ security deposits, charged them hidden fees and rented out houses in poor condition.
• Invitation Homes was founded in 2012 and owned by Blackstone until becoming a public company in 2017.  They own some 85,000 rental houses nationwide.
• In August, the DOJ was joined by eight state attorneys general in suing RealPage, a software company used by some of the country’s largest apartment landlords, over an alleged conspiracy to coordinate rent increases nationwide.

Powell Says the Fed Sees No Reason to Rush Rate Cuts

  연준 의장 입장은 이자룰 감소를 서두를 필요는 없어… 

WSJ     10/01/24(Tue) 

• Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said officials would continue to reduce interest rates from a two-decade high to maintain solid economic growth, but they didn’t currently see a reason to lower rates as aggressively as they did at their most recent meeting.
• “Overall, the economy is in solid shape; we intend to use our tools to keep it there,” Powell said Monday at a conference in Nashville. Because officials have a relatively favorable economic outlook, “this is not a committee that feels like it’s in a hurry to cut rates quickly,” he added.
• Consumer spending and economic output have expanded steadily, but labor market data have shown a pronounced cooling trend.

Humanoid Robots Are the Next Threat From China

“인간 로봇” 이 중국으로부터의 다음 위협  

WSJ    9/27/24(Fri) 

• Hollywood in the 1970s and ’80s often imagined a world where technology is so evolved it is almost human, from “Star Wars,” in which R2-D2 and C-3PO are not just tools but also friends to humans, to “The Terminator,” in which an assassin-robot is disguised as a human. 
• Elon Musk claimed at a shareholder meeting in June that Tesla will deploy more than 1,000 Optimus humanoids to work on the factory floor next year. 
• Other developments by Boston Dynamics, Figure, Amazon, and Chinese-based Unitree Robotics assure that the technology is here to stay. But the real race over this technology isn’t between private companies. It’s between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party.
• Humanoid robots will have both defensive and offensive national-security implications. The U.S. military is exploring ways to incorporate humanoids into modern warfare, but China has already deployed armed robotics to the battlefield. 

Open AI expected $100B revenue in 2029

오픈 AI 매출 기하급수적으로…

Korea Times     10/1/24(Tue) 

• Open AI, the developer of ChatGPT anticipates the expansion of revenue within a few years. 
• According to NYT on 29th, Open AI expected $3.7B this year which is double the last year’s revenue of $1.6B.
• With this pace, also they are expected to achieve the revenue of $100B in 2029.  The main source of revenue is $20/month subscription fee for ChatGPT – individuals and businesses. 
• At present, weekly subscription of ChatGPT is about 200M which is doubled in 9 months. 

The Billionaire, Age 27, Powering the Boom in AI

               27세 젊은이, AI 기술로 억만장자

WSJ  9/21/24(Sat) 

• Alexander Wang became one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaire by building a sprawling army of more than 100,000 contractors, who perform the grunt work that powers the modern AI.  His office takes 180,000 sf in San Francisco where used to be Airbnb offices. The company is valued at $14B.
• Sitting behind computers in cities across the world, his startup Scale AI’s workers type out the stories, label the image, and craft the sentences that furnish chatbots with the text they need better to understand human speech patterns.  Dubbed data labeling, their tasks range from composing haikus and summarizing news articles to writing stories in languages like Xhosa or Urdu.  Scale AI provides them to the customers like Google and Meta, to train their AI models, with the goal of teaching them how to converse in more helpful and natural ways. The worker is paid, averaging $8/hour.