Category: Politics, Religion & Money

Whenever Michael Lewis has a new book out, I buy it immediately. His last book turned out to be an unintended prequel to his latest book. The Fifth Risk explained, in unsettling detail, how Donald Trump undermined, and even dismantled, the federal government’s various science-related agencies. The Premonition covers the risk made real, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The CDC completely failed to do its job, and the blame is entirely on Trump.

It’s interesting that Lewis refers to the real people he features as being “characters.”

A discussion on NPR’s The Pulse of the imagined condition suffered by Charles McGill, played by Michael McKean in Better Call Saul.

Anyone hoping to have hip replacement surgery done in India will have to look elsewhere.

A few posts ago I commented on a report of institutional investors getting into residential real estate. Before that trend they were into mortgage-backed securities, and we know how that turned out. But now it’s actual property that big money is after, and it’s not just in the luxury market. The acquisitions go all the way down to the lowest rung of home ownership — trailer parks — as covered in a recent article in The New Yorker.

It’s one thing for individuals to try their hand at flipping houses, but now big money institutional investors are getting into the “we buy junk houses” business. This will distort residential real estate markets, especially for first time home buyers.