10 Wednesday AM Reads

My mid-week morning reads: • I went to Mexico to test-drive the cars Americans can’t buy: Mexico is a showroom for electric cars, with a growing fleet of sleek new vehicles from Chinese brands unavailable to Americans. (Washington Post free) • Homeownership Helped Make America. It’s Slipping Away for Millions. The 30-year fixed hit 7.4% on October 8, the highest since November 2023 and up more than a point in a year. Barron’s on the financial tool that made middle-class workers kings of their own castles. Homeownership rates surged in the 1940s and 1950s. But high home prices and interest rates are putting the American dream at risk. (Barron’s) see also The Superrich Are Buying $100 Million Mansions Just to Tear Them Down: In March 2023 William Lauder paid $155 million for Rush Limbaugh’s Palm Beach estate, a 24,000-square-foot house with a Versailles-style salon and a Biltmore-style library. The Journal on the teardown economy at the very top. (Wall Street Journal) • This is a very interesting time for trashy credit (and all those who love it): C-C-Crunch time for credit hedge funds that went hard into junk bonds. (Financial Times Alphaville) • The Market’s Most Reliable Warning Light Is Flashing Red: For the last three years, junk stocks beat quality stocks by the widest margin ever. The opposite normally occurs. (RCM) • A $300 Billion ‘Debt Wall’ Is Looming Over Private-Equity Backed Companies: Software firms account for about a third of the risky corporate loans due in 2028 and 2029 (Wall Street Journal) • Powerful executives cozied up to Trump. Now they fear a reckoning. Firms that aligned with the president are preparing for a political pendulum swing — and a potential barrage of investigations. (Washington Post) see also Midterm Elections: What a Blue Wave Would Mean for AI, Healthcare and Other Industries: Kalshi bettors give Democrats 91% odds of taking the House and 65% for the Senate. Barron’s on what either flip would mean sector by sector. (Barron’s) • Cops left the force. They kept tracking people with a powerful camera network. Police kept access to Flock’s vast surveillance system long after they left the force. Some used it to track the locations of romantic partners. (Washington Post) • Neutrinos Are Everywhere. Now What? Dr. Francis Halzen, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, sheds some light on the mysterious, subatomic particles that whiz through us everyday. (New York Times) • Deep-Red Districts Are Now House Battlegrounds. These Are the Races to Watch.: Mariana Alfaro, Anna Liss-Roy and Eric Lau: Democrats need to net only three seats, and Cook Political Report says the competitive map is reaching into districts once considered GOP locks. (Washington Post) • What Is ‘You Can See Everything’ Really About? Derek Thompson’s reading of the Nathan Fielder film: a strange new genre of rom-com, pairing a performance artist obsessed with knowing the truth about people and a world-famous liar. You Can See Everything is a film about the tension between two modes of deception. Holmes uses deceit to tell big lies, and Fielder uses conceit to tell strange truths. (Derek Thompson) Video of the day: Gillette Is (Finally) Getting What They Deserve… (Bagholder Association) Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview with Robin Wigglesworth; he is editor of FT Alphaville, the Financial Times’ finance blog, which he runs from Oslo with a team of writers in London and New York. He also co-hosts The Story of Money, the FT’s financial history podcast, with Gillian Tett, and writes the Substack Buy The Dip. His new book, “A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World” was just published to outstanding reviews. Polls in the past week suggested that the race was tightening, and prediction markets continued to give him him a 20% chance Source: Bloomberg Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.