💰 5 Fact Friday: When Politics Skew The Data

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REAL ESTATE
1. 50-Year Mortgages Won’t Fix The Housing Crisis 🏚️

The housing market is broken. Prices are up 56% since 2020. Monthly payments have surged 80% in five years. And the average cost of owning is now 40% higher than renting. So what’s the fix?

Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, says: Just stretch the loan to 50 years.

In theory, it sounds simple. Spread payments across a longer timeline, lower monthly costs, and help more buyers get into homes.

Does it make homes more “affordable”?

Kind of. A $400,000 loan at 6.3% over 30 years costs $2,480 per month. Stretch it to 50 years, and the payment drops to $2,200 — a $280 monthly savings.

But over time, the borrower would pay $425,000 in extra interest. And that assumes the exact same interest rate, which is not realistic.

Longer loans = higher rates

At present, 30-year rates are about 0.7% higher than 15-year ones. So it is safe to assume that 50-year mortgages would demand even higher rates.

Just a 0.5% increase over the 30-year rate would eliminate more than half of the potential savings of a 50-year mortgage.

Equity builds painfully slowly.

With a 6.3% mortgage rate, a 30-year borrower will have paid off nearly 18% of the principal after 10 years.

If we assume a 6.8% mortgage rate, a 50-year borrower will have paid off less than 4% of the principal in 10 years.

That difference matters if you want to refinance, sell, or avoid being underwater during a downturn.

This reduction in home equity also increases the overall risk in the mortgage system. It is one of the reasons regulators capped mortgages at 30 years after the 2008 financial crisis.

You probably won’t invest the difference.

Sure, you could extend your mortgage and invest the savings. If history is any guide, it would likely be a profitable trade.

But if you’re opting for a 50-year mortgage today, odds are you’re just struggling to get in the door — not trying to beat the market with borrowed money.

Here’s the kicker: it fuels demand.

Zillow estimates the U.S. is short 4.5 million homes, and experts believe it could take a decade or more to close the gap.

A 50-year mortgage might help more buyers qualify, but it doesn’t build a single new home. More demand without more supply? That just pushes prices higher.

So while a 50-year loan might look like a lifeline, it’s really just a demand booster in a market starving for supply.

After the lukewarm reception, Bill Pulte appears to have already moved on. His next pitch? Portable mortgages.

The details still need to be worked out, but this idea at least aims to fix the right problem. Letting homeowners bring their current mortgage rate to a new property could break the lock-in effect and enable millions of buyers to move.

MARKETS
2. Hiring Slows, Layoffs Rise, Wages Cool 🔦

No jobs report? No problem... sort of.

Thanks to the government shutdown, the October labor report may never arrive — in a twist that caught even Wall Street off guard.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the shutdown made it “extraordinarily difficult” for government economists to collect and process the data necessary for the October CPI and jobs reports.

So what do we have instead? A patchwork of private data sources.

Truflation pulls from over a dozen public and commercial sources to generate a real-time measure of the total employment picture.

Other providers offer narrower views into specific trends, such as payroll activity, job postings, hiring announcements, and resume changes.

Here’s what the alternative data is telling us:

Hiring is slowing.

• ADP: just 42K private sector jobs added in October.

• LinkUp: net job losses last month.

• Indeed: job postings are at their lowest since 2021.

• Even holiday hiring plans are tracking below pre-pandemic norms.

Workers are staying put.

• Revelio: Attrition rates continue to fall.

Layoffs may be rising.

• October saw 153K announced job cuts, the highest Q4 tally since 2008.

• The Chicago Fed estimates unemployment hit 4.4%, a 4-year high.

Wages are cooling.

• Indeed and ADP both show softening wage growth across the board.

The official numbers may be missing, but the signals are clear.

Hiring is slowing, layoffs are picking up, and wage growth is cooling. For now, alternative data is filling the gap, and it’s painting a picture of a labor market under stress.

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ECONOMY
3. Sampling Bias Is Warping The Data 🤔

Speaking of data... availability is not all that matters. Quality matters too. In other words, data is only useful if it actually reflects reality.

The University of Michigan’s latest consumer survey showed sentiment hitting a 3.5-year low.

Not exactly a shocker when you consider what’s been going on: a historic government shutdown, grounded flights, disrupted SNAP benefits, and furloughed workers.

The vibes? Understandably bad.

But Fundstrat’s Tom Lee says there is more to the story, and maybe the data itself is part of the problem.

For years, the University of Michigan targeted a roughly 50/50 split of Republican and Democratic respondents to produce a representative sample. But that mix has quietly changed since early 2024.

As you can see in this article, the latest survey is composed of 65% Democrats and 35% Republicans.

Since political affiliation now heavily shapes economic expectations, that imbalance produces skewed sentiment readings and potentially misleading signals for markets.

Here is one example Lee points to: one year from now, Democrats expect inflation to rise to 5.3%, while Republicans expect it to fall to 1.5%.

This illustrates the broader issue.

If investors rely on flawed survey data, they risk reacting to noise instead of signals. And if sentiment no longer tracks the real economy, it’s not worth much.

Personally, I have been discounting survey-based data in favor of ‘hard data’ for some time (even though that too has limitations). This latest shift in survey composition is simply one more reason to do so.

PERSONAL FINANCE
4. Why $2K Checks Are A Long Shot 🤞

With tariffs under review in the Supreme Court, Trump recently floated the idea of sending Americans a $2,000 “tariff dividend.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent initially hinted this could come in the form of a tax cut. But in recent interviews, he confirmed that actual cash payments are on the table for families making under $100,000.

But don’t start mentally spending that windfall just yet.

Déjà vu?

Stimulus checks fueled a post-COVID spending boom… and contributed to a multi-year inflation problem. While the inflation rate has cooled, prices never reversed. A new round of payments could easily reignite the fire.

Math is hard.

The Treasury is on pace to collect $400 billion in tariff revenue per year, a record high. But that is still short of the $450 to $600 billion needed to fund $2K checks for most households.

To make this work, the government would need higher tariffs, fewer recipients, or more debt. Ugh.

Lower earners could benefit.

Tariffs are a regressive tax (they hit low-income consumers hardest). So refunding the money to that group could help balance that out.

But for middle- and high-income households? They’d foot the bill with no refund.

We’ve heard this before.

Trump previously teased a “Doge dividend” that never materialized. This latest proposal may be more about building support for tariffs than a firm policy plan.

So what’s the real chance?

Here’s what prediction markets say:

• Kalshi: 4% chance of a $1,000 dividend this year

• Polymarket: 7% chance of a $2,000 dividend this year

• Polymarket: 28% chance of a $2,000 dividend by Q1 2026

So don’t spend that bonus check just yet. It may be a long wait — if it comes at all.

TRIVIA
5. Which iPhone 17 Color Is the Fan Favorite? 🎨

For the first time since 2013, the new iPhone lineup skips a black or near-black option. Instead, the 17 Pro and Pro Max come in three bold new colors.

Which one do you think is the most popular so far?

Take your guess:

• ⚪ Silver

• 🔵 Deep Blue

• 🟠 Cosmic Orange

👉 Tap to Reveal the Answer → 

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