I'm not sure why we should care about the share of money they command, as it could have nothing to do with whether they're dominant or not, depending on how skewed the market it.
PS: to note, I was commenting on the process, but on the deeper point, Dream Unlimited is only one of the company caught in this, so we could have any number of other developpers roped in at a later date. I think we really don't have any idea how widespread the issue is.
Using RealPage software which is a Texas company that gathers information from landlords to then recommend prices that the landlords should then use.
So it’s not so much the company itself optimizing based on its own data but the argument goes, at least per the antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, that the landlords are all colluding together via an intermediary.
If they are really good at colluding, why are prices higher in LA than in Houston?
I think RealPage and similar systems probably add a few percentage points to rents - and if you consider how much money that is across 1000's of renters, it's worth suing them over.
But supply and demand are still the gorilla in the room.
For one, LA is generally a more wealthy area which means it can support higher rents. For another, it depends on the utilization rate of the software in a locale. And finally, let’s say it raises rents by 10% — if rents started out higher in LA they would remain higher.
I really don’t understand your question.
Yes supply and demand are the gorillas, but pricing collusion like this has always generally been illegal regardless of the size of the effect so I don’t understand your point.
Markets are competitive, even with RealPage, so you can't really just "ask as much as people will pay", just like you can't at the grocery store either.
imagine they had 100m in assets. 100m is either 333 houses priced at 300k or 1 building priced at 100m. On top of that, owning 333 houses in 1 neighbourhood is very different to owning 1 house each in 333 neighbourhoods.
All the other comments aside, the idea that less than 0.1% but more than 0.01% is somehow "not a lot" when 100% is an entire country is baffling. You know that even fractional percentages translates to huge absolute numbers when you're starting with millions, right?
If you see "it only inconveniences forty thousand people" and think "well yeah, it's only forty thousand, that's a small number", you don't understand numbers. Even at just over 0.01%, that's five thousand lives being controlled to the point of being held hostage by one company.
No Canadian should accept that as "this is fine and normal and fair".
This is not true, though. The current government is far from fulfilling its campaign promises, at least so far. While inflation has decreased, the country is in a recession and potentially facing a depression. This is not a statement against Milei, but an objective reading of the situation in Argentina.
The fact that economic activity year over year has increased at all (after 7 months with Milei) is just astonishing.
It is astonishing because Milei inherited a deficit of 15% of GDP, so he cut 30% of government spending on the first month to get to fiscal surplus that month. He inherited a broke central bank (-11.8B in reserves) and he's recovered back to -4B (still some way to go). He inherited 50B of debt with exporters (they have "cepo cambiario"/exchange control policies). So even after having to cut down so much, now the economy is starting to recover.
BTW the reason Argentina just can't stand ANY deficit at all is because it creates inflation. It creates inflation because NO ONE loans them money, so the only way to have deficit is to "print money" from thin air.
Milei cut back government spending by 30% from the first month on (that's a 15% gdp of spending cuts in a month), and achieved fiscal surplus/superavit on that month. Contrary to the (very wrong) keynsian economics, deficit spending doesn't promote economic growth and Milei's measures and results demonstrate that actually having a smaller government with surplus promotes economic growth.
For example paying for unemployment benefits and end-of-life healthcare just gets consumed. Similarly increasing military spending and having people just live on bases likely has a very negative ROI (as it removes people from the labor market).
The argument is that the government is in a unique position to fund infrastructure projects and do long-term investment in underfunded sectors. (Very high expected ROI, because - by definition - these are areas where some money goes a long way, that's what underfunded means, right? But simply maintaining a very large welfare state while economic productivity is bad is ... you won't believe it, but it's bad and unsustainable.)
Governments don't know what has positive ROI... because they don't care about it. Private companies would go down if they do projects with negative ROI.
Tell me the incentives and I'll tell you the result.
we should prefer market based solutions when they work, and we should work on making markets applicable to as many problems as possible, and we should definitely keep an eye on the usual regulatory capture problems (revolving door, incumbents lobbying to keep competition out, etc..)
markets work when the playing field is clear and equal. (for example global trade works if the seas are clear of pirates, and when there are mechanisms to keep rate of counterfeiting low enough to have trust between consumers and producers.)
Every function that the government is doing, was done (better) at some point by private enterprises.
About levelling the playing field, the problem is regulation in general. Monopolies are only bad if they are supported by violence=governments (for example you could consider Google a monopoly but it's a market based one). You don't need a lot of competition, just remove all regulatory barriers to entry/exit (note: barriers to exit are also important).
I'd say you don't really understand Keynesian economics, also known as macroecon 101. Nowhere is it claimed that deficit spending promotes economic growth indefinitely and in all circumstances. Deficit spending (or just more spending, whether financed by deficits or not) can, and demonstrably does, temporarily dampen the effects of economic downturns. It can also promote economic growth if investments that are made will enable longer-term growth, e.g. by investing in infrastructure, education or research. Clearly none of that prescribes structural deficits ad infinitum and spending your way to hyperinflation in order to make good on idiotic populist promises, otherwise known as Argentinian macroecon 101 before Milei. The fact that it took chainsaw guy to trick Argentinians into electing someone who implements adult policies is a damning indictment of the average Argentinian voters, so I'd say leave poor John Maynard Keynes out of it, no one in Argentina was listening to him anyway, possibly ever.
I always thought keynes gets a bad wrap because he didnt understand or atleast didnt explain that for his ideas to work the politicians need to be reasonably sure they will be voted out if their deficit spending isnt atleast mostly positive roi stuff or very short duration negative roi stuff, which isnt true unless all voters have real losses when politicians run deficits or decades of negative roi stuff has left a majority of voters sure things cant get better or atleast keep them insulated from the bad down that path.
> Argentina has been in recession for more than a decade.
To the rest of us layman not familiar with your language, they just entered into a recession earlier this year[1]. And on behalf of us laymen, we'd love to know more about the etymology and context of your use of "more than a decade". To the rest of us, that normally means 10s of years, not mere months.
Well, nominal GDP was US $642.5b in 2015 and they haven't recovered yet. And if you measure real gdp (not nominal), even worse. What do you call having lower GDP year after year? I call it recession.
How is that US$642.5b calculated? IIRC in 2015 we had at least two values for the dollar/pesos ratio. The official one was like 10AR$/US$, but you could buy a small amount of dollars at that value. And the street value (so called "blue dolar") was like 15AR$/US$. So which one was used? It's like a 50% difference.
(Now we had like 10 definitions of the dollar/pesos ratio. The official one is 950AR$/US$ but it's almost imposible to buy at that price. To buy dollars, the prices are around 1300AR$/US$ or 1500AR$/US$ depending on the day of the week.)
I just used the data available in Wikipedia. Instead, if we go to official data from Argentina's INDEC (national institute of statistics) we get a more reliable picture. Here [1] we see they show annual GDP (called PIB in Spanish) in constant prices of 2004 (so, they correct it by inflation). In page 6 you can see this image [2], where you see that yes, GDP hasn't really grown at all since 2011 (which is more than a decade ago). And this is aggregate GDP, but population has grown, so GDP per capita has gone down.
In 2015 the situation of the INDEC was strange, the inflation was underestimated [1] and also the dollar/peso ratio was fictional. So take all that numbers with a grain of salt. However I agree that there is (almost) no gro in the GDP in a long time. [2]
Honestly, consider taking a macroeconomics 101 course. I promise, the economic terminology you're throwing around will make a lot more sense, as will Keynes' ideas and how they relate to the way every single mature economy is run since circa the 1940s.
Well, wasn't it Hitler that pulled the US out of the Depression by forcing it to spend 40% of GDP of military?
Keynes just suggested, that there may be better options to end a recession than to fight a war.
Argentina, like most South American countries, has too much red tape, too much bureaucracy, too much corruption, too many people with entitlement. I don't think Keynes has much to do with it. And please spare me the ideas of god' ol Ludwig who has not worked one day of his life in private entrerprises.
people spending is low because people are afraid to spend and\or just do not have money to do anything, most people are barely affording food right now.. also unemployment is increasing..
He made a surplus in the first month because he basically withheld all the money he could and some the he couldn't, to the point that Chubut governor, that is also right wing himself, was threatening to withhold all the oil produced there. Milei lost the battle in courts..
People did not voted in Milei because they liked him or his ideias, they voted against the other candidate that was the minister of economy from the previous president, and that was clearly not making a good job.
Likely anyone running against him would have won, Milei was just luck to be the one.
And Milei is not even the first right wing president in recent times, they had Mauricio Macri that is from a center-right party, in the government from 2015 to 2019. Macri did as poor of a job dealing with the country economic problems as all the left wing governments previous and after.. Milei is managing to do even worst..
My guess is that as happened with Macri in 2019, Milei will is unlikely to be elected for a second term or to elect a right wing successor if he decide to not run again himself..
In fact, i doubt he would win again in a election held today..
"Dolar blue exchange rates are sky rocketing and is more then 4x higher then before Milei.."
That is just false. When Milei took over, the dollar blue was at 1188 pesos, and it's now at 1445 pesos. That's an increase of 21.6% after 7 months, not 300%/4x. By the way in the 7 months previous to Milei, the increase was 160%.
And about poverty, it was already at 50% when Milei took over. But obviously if you're left-leaning you might want to avoid mentioning it...
Protests? Yeah the same people who didn’t protest once in 4 years while the whole country was peaking in poverty? Very trustworthy group to use as a measuring factor of the country’s health. That’s just the unions and groups that were getting money under the table getting scared of having to actually work like everyone else.
I don’t know if you’re aware but the average worker did not join these protests like they did for example in the protests that happened during 2001.
Let’s not forget the country we had in 2023. Milei did not cause all these things. The country was already going HARD in this direction.
The reason people voted Milei is up to each person and what you said in your last paragraphs leaves so much untold that I don’t even know where to begin. Just because he’s not a “K/Peron” president doesn’t group him with Macri. Macri was very weak in all his policies and politics. If you have a very large vector going in one direction, it takes another large vector at a substantial angle to change it. Macri did neither.
I gotta say though, my shitty neighborhood was never better than during the macri times… wasn’t the left with their big present and spending state supposed to use all that money on the people? I rather have Milei not spend it and have surplus and not have to print money all the time than get devaluation and still not see any progress.
My guess is that your source of information speaks wonders of Lula and is very anti Milei, because all the things you quoted don’t imply what you think they imply. There are at least 70 years of baggage behind all that.
Fundsmith for example has beaten the market for a long time (not this year though). I can also mention another Spanish fund that I know: Tercio Capital.
There are some research (instead of cherry picking/anecdotes). I don't have any links right now but basically half of the funds lose compared to the index (by law of nature - averages and all that). Furthermore, taking fees into account, just a few percentages make anything more (over time) - which is probably within scope of randomness.
In general hard working prudent value investors are able to beat the index. It's just that those are very few. I mean Buffet has done it for half a century, that's not a coincidence.
Given the statistics and number of investors involved, it seems like an absolute certainty that a few people would beat the index for the entirety of their lives simply by chance.
Find me the one who knows they got there by chance alone...
It's very easy to create a narrative around random movements. I expect that anyone who is ahead of the market creates such a narrative, and declare themselves a genius. And then half of the geniuses underperform each year, same as every year...
Half will beat index by definition. The key is to beat it including the cost of beating - and we've also seen that the extra value have generally been captured by the fund managers - not the fund buyers.
You must have never lived outside of a city if that is your perception of buildings. Most of the buildings I have seen in the European countryside are made with a significant amount of wood. Even brick and stone buildings will often have a timber structure. Most buildings are not in cities, in general.
Scandanaivans use a particularly large amount of wood, even in their city centers and even for skyscrapers.
I guess it depends on the region. In Italy, the vast majority of buildings, both in the city and in the countryside, are in stone, bricks and concrete. In some mountainous region in the second half of the 19th century there was a mandated reconstruction of old buildings in bricks and stone to prevent fires.
In northern Europe the building style is entirely different and most houses still have a wooden frame.
I believe AAC is really popular in Europe too (which I suppose could just be considered another form of concrete, but it provides decent insulation, making it more suitable to colder climates).
I'd wager that even under that definition most city houses in Europe house more than one family. At least in continental Europe, I am not so sure about Britain. But most of Europe doesn't have extensive single family home suburbs in the way the US has.
Good grief, which part of Europe are you from ... Concretia?
Even in the UK we describe our normal building habit as "sticks n bricks" and there are a lot of sticks. Under my feet, right now, there are wooden joists and a plywood subfloor. I live on a hill. Some ground floor (first floor) rooms have solid conc. sub floors but the other half has the usual (1930s) two foot cavity, involving brick piers on conc raft and wooden joists to slap the floor across.
We still have a large stock of wattle and daub cottages with thatched roof too.
Every other country in Europe I have ever visited has rather a lot of wooden buildings in it too. I lived in West Germany for some years, for example.
Sticks and bricks lends itself to an environment with plenty of mud and fewer trees. It is quite brittle so no earthquakes thank you. The UK's largest recent earthquake was basically a knee trembler.
Modern German buildings are mostly concrete blocks/CMUs with concrete subfloors and wood mostly used to carry the roof. But of course that's a somewhat recent development, sometime in the first half of the 20th century. Before that there was a lot of brick with wooden floors, and before that either stone with wooden subfloor or wooden frames filled with clay.
Of course this is somewhat region dependent, and wood is definitely making a comeback again
I have never heard the phrase 'sticks n bricks'. That is technical parlance. Nobody in the history of Eastenders has used that phrase.
It is true that there are wattle and daub houses but it is the one thatched roof cottage that you notice next to the busy A road, not the thousands of semis in the neighbouring estates.
In Glasgow there are large parts of the city where only some doors are made of wood. Everything else is concrete, steel, plastic and glass. These are 'closes' (apartments) which is different to the English 'close' (street). I am not sure wood would work for 'closes'.
London has a lot of wood, but so much of London might as well be from Orwell's 'Down and Out in Paris and London'. Landlords do not spend money so those sash windows and wooden floors are there for an eternity. West Germany has far better housing stock with details such as windows that close.
That's actually part of the history of the new world. One of the primary uses of wood in Europe throughout the colonial period was boat-building. As such, one of the primary exports of early settlers and colonial corporations in the British colonies was timber, for boats. Eventually, it led to an indigenous boat-building industry, and from that, American mercantilism.
Depends where in Europe. I'd say in Northern Europe, especially in Scandinavia wood is more frequently used when building homes.
In other places the roof structure is often made of wood. And although technically it's not part of the building, concrete forms used for foundation/walls are mostly made of OSB/plywood.
Norway. At least most buildings where people live. That’s not exactly the same statement that most people live in wood buildings, since more people can live in a single concrete block. But I would venture that at least half the population lives in wooden buildings.
Not all but many of small houses are wood and 50% of the Swedish population lives in these houses[1], some of the bigger houses are wood as well. Construction relies heavily on wood. This was not my experience in many other countries, even when there was wood in the vicinity. I think the readily availability of spruce and pine is one reason. It would be interesting to know statistics from Denmark because in the south of Sweden wood is that used as much.
You can see this in the tradition of constructing fences as well, if there is a lot of wood people use lots of it. In the south near Denmark the tradition is to use as little as possible.
Few buildings in Europe are today solely made from wood, but nearly every building will be part wood. From the frame on which walls and floors are built up with other materials up to the roof where for most houses the very structure is made from wood, it's clear wood is one of the most essential building components. To be honest I struggle to think of any building I've ever seen that has no wood - except for semi-subterranean structures or those built out of natural structures I can't think of any.
In Spain I can tell you that wood is very rarely used except in a decorative fashion. My mom is an architect and will often look down on the fact that most North American single family homes, and even more complex buildings like five-over-ones, use wood structurally.
Reinforced concrete is almost two hundred years old by now [0]. How many people live in homes built over one hundred years ago? Not only have many of those old homes been replaced, but the population is much larger now.
the arch is almost 2500 years old now, and although you do normally use timber beams (or bamboo) to build one, they aren't part of the final structure
vaults, domes, and flying buttresses extend the arch principle to enclose large spaces. there are domes still standing made from unreinforced concrete that are 2000 years old
In England we definitely use wood in pretty much all houses. The roof trusses, the partition walls, the floorboards, beams to hold the ceiling/upstairs, fixtures (kitchen and bathroom fitted cabinets), doors etc.
I would guess the person you’re responding to doesn’t mean the hidden bits, as I’ve spent time in Spain and definitely come across wood in new buildings.
A potential reason for less obvious wood, Spain has less requirement for insulation than the UK and would benefit from slimmer walled, brick/concrete houses with no wooden partitions holding insulation for cooler temperatures during their peak heat.
Indeed, my parents' UK 1785-ish built house is mostly stone, but it has 3 big salvaged wooden beams (salvaged from shipwrecked masts) running through the frame.
I have lived in multiple houses and flats in different parts of England, and all but one had wooden floors. I am pretty sure all but that had used in roofs and possibly some other places. The same is true for most houses I have been in.
