Why Real Estate Gloom May Be Overdone
This week, we’re talkin’ Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac say they’re buying mortgage bonds in “large quantities,” but their own monthly filings say the buying peaked in April. Washington has added almost $17 trillion of debt since Covid. Inflation is not going away as long as fuel prices are high, and commercial lenders appear to be pulling back. Yet the real estate “distress wave” looks far smaller than the headlines suggest, Nashville’s unemployment rate is among the lowest of any big metro in the country.
Same lesson all the way through: the news is built to startle you. The data is built to inform you.
Let’s get into it.
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Today’s Interest Rate: 7.48%
(👇 .09% from this time last week, 30-yr mortgage) (Mortgage News Daily)
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The Macro Check: Five Quick Numbers on the Economy
- -Jobs are stalling. The economy added just 29,000 jobs in September, unemployment ticked up to 4.2%, and July and August were revised down a combined 60,000 (BLS).
- Inflation is mostly fuel. August CPI ran 3.4% year over year, but core CPI, which strips out food and energy, was 2.4%. Energy prices were up 16.3% (BLS). September CPI comes out this Wednesday, October 14, at 8:30 a.m. ET, and it may decide what the Fed does in December.
- -The Fed appears to be on pause, not done. After raising its target range to 3.75% to 4.00% in September (FOMC minutes via Securities.io), prediction markets put the odds of a hold at the October 27–28 meeting near 83%, but the odds of a hike at the December 8–9 meeting near 75% (DefiRate, Kalshi and Polymarket average).
- -Consumers are glum and expect more inflation. The University of Michigan’s sentiment index fell to 46.3 in its early October reading, down 13.6% from a year ago, with one-year inflation expectations at 4.7% (Advisor Perspectives). The New York Fed’s survey put one-year expectations at 3.9%, the highest since May 2023 (New York Fed). Remember: consumer surveys are often reflective of political feelings. Consumption, savings and credit are all functioning fantastically.
The Weekly 3 in the News:
1) High rates are turning would-be buyers into renters. Zillow’s September report showed home sales down 5.6% from August and newly pending sales down 11.2%, while the typical rent rose 2.7% from a year ago to $1,932 (Zillow), the fastest rent growth since April 2025 (Scotsman Guide). The typical mortgage payment now takes 34.3% of median income, versus 26.3% for rent, and Zillow’s chief economist said marginal buyers find the savings from renting “too good to pass up” (Zillow). For landlords, that may be the most bullish line in the report: every buyer who stays a renter another year is demand that never shows up in the sales numbers, the flip side of the market I described in The Housing Market Is Frozen, Not Broken.
2) HUD opened a path for factory-built apartment buildings. On October 7, HUD released a seven-step plan to modernize the manufactured-housing code, including a performance-based federal code for factory-built buildings with five or more units that HUD says could create a national pathway for multifamily construction (HUD; HUD action plan). In 2023, a new manufactured home cost about $87 a square foot versus about $166 for a site-built house, excluding land (Census data via the Manufactured Housing Institute), roughly half (calculated). There is no timeline, and rule-writing could take more than a year (HousingWire). If even part of that cost gap carries over to small apartment buildings, it supports the point I made in If You Can’t Build It, You Lose It: the cheapest unit is the one that can get approved.
3) Almost every kid in America now owns stocks. If you have kid, go claim their investment account now! The Treasury auto-opened “Trump Accounts” for more than 60 million children on October 1, invested in low-cost U.S. stock index funds that can’t be touched until 18, and U.S.-citizen children born 2025 through 2028 get a $1,000 government deposit once the account is claimed (U.S. Treasury; IRS). In the first week, families claimed only about 164,000 of them (Bloomberg Law). That matters because today the top 10% of households own about 88% of U.S. stocks and the bottom half owns 0.6% (Federal Reserve; bottom 50%; top 10% calculated), so a generation that turns 18 owning a slice of the market is a real shift. Historically, $1,000 left in U.S. stocks for 18 years grew to a median of about $3,177 after inflation, and it beat inflation in 99% of those stretches since 1871 (calculated from Robert Shiller’s data); if you have a child or grandchild, claim the account this week. Don’t make this political; get your kids owning a piece of the US economy today through the official app at TrumpAccounts.gov.
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Fun Stuff Happening in Nashville This Week:
- Cheekwood Harvest Nights, Thursday, October 15. The gardens stay open late with illuminated scarecrows, a jack-o’-lantern topiary, garden games, pumpkin-carving demonstrations, food trucks and cocktails, with the jazz sextet The Accords playing this week. (Cheekwood). Get Thursday’s tickets here.
Your mortgage rate is built from two pieces. The first is the 10-year Treasury yield. The second is the spread, the extra yield investors demand to hold a mortgage bond instead of a Treasury, which has historically run about 1.6 to 1.8 percentage points (HousingWire). Both pieces depend on the same question: who is buying the bonds?
Mortgage-Bond Buying has Quietly Stopped
In January, the White House directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities (HousingWire), and each company has room to hold up to $225 billion (National Mortgage News). On September 18, FHFA Director Bill Pulte said they were “beginning to buy even more, large quantities, as we speak” (Scotsman Guide).
Their own monthly filings tell a different story. Fannie’s agency mortgage securities rose from $71.5 billion at year-end to $110.5 billion in April, then slid to $99.8 billion by August (Fannie Mae). Freddie’s went from $44.6 billion to $55.6 billion by February and have sat near $55 billion since (Freddie Mac). Combined, that is roughly $39 billion of net buying in eight months, about a fifth of the directive, and $11.6 billion below the April peak (calculated).
The flows explain why. From January through April, Fannie’s portfolio bought $115.9 billion and sold $64.1 billion. From May through August it bought $90.2 billion but sold $83.8 billion, with another $8.7 billion paying off, so the portfolio shrank (calculated from Fannie Mae; figures cover the whole retained portfolio, loans included). A lender group has written to Pulte and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent asking why Freddie’s holdings haven’t grown since February, estimating full participation could cut spreads 10 to 12 basis points (Scotsman Guide).
Why slow down? I can’t prove motive, so treat this as a hypothesis: both companies are being readied for a possible public offering, and Bessent has said an offering depends on spreads holding steady or narrowing (National Mortgage News). Loading up on long bonds with the 10-year above 5% may not be what an IPO-bound balance sheet wants. Meanwhile the spread widened to 2.12 points from 1.98 the week before (HousingWire).
The Treasury Supply That Keeps Growing
On the other side, Washington has never had more bonds to sell. Total federal debt was $23.41 trillion on February 28, 2020, and $40.31 trillion on October 8, 2026 (U.S. Treasury), up $16.9 trillion, or 72% (calculated). The last trillion took just 154 days (PrimeRates, citing Treasury).
The bill has arrived. In fiscal 2026, net interest on the debt was $1,143 billion, up 11%, while the Defense Department spent $916 billion (Congressional Budget Office). Washington now spends about $227 billion more on interest than on the military, roughly $3.1 billion a day (calculated).
Why this matters for interest rates
Put the two together. More Treasury supply means investors may demand more yield to hold it, which pushes up the 10-year. A government mortgage buyer that steps back, while the Fed lets its own mortgage bonds roll off by $15 to $18 billion a month (Wolf Street), leaves fewer hands for mortgage bonds and a wider spread. Most coverage blames 7.5% mortgages on the oil shock, which I wrote about in The Fed Is Fighting a Gas Pump, Not Inflation. That is most of it, but the bond buyers appear to be part of it too.
The money is real. On a $400,000 loan at 7.48%, every 20 basis points of spread adds about $55 a month, or roughly $19,800 over 30 years (calculated). On a $750,000 apartment loan, the same 20 basis points adds about $1,236 a year and can drop a 1.25 debt-coverage ratio to about 1.23 (calculated), right at many lenders’ minimum. Run your next deal at today’s rate in DealLab, and treat any drop as a bonus.
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The $757 Billion Wall: Real, Concentrated, and Mostly Apartments
If you read only the headlines this month, you would think the apartment market is breaking. Commercial mortgage-backed security delinquencies hit 8.02% in September, the highest since 2020, and the multifamily slice reached 8.04%, up from 6.59% a year earlier (Trepp via Scotsman Guide). Bank repossessions of properties were up 42% from a year earlier in August (ATTOM via HousingWire). Commercial real estate lenders are the gloomiest they have been in three years, with the industry’s sentiment index down 17.5% to 83.3 (CREFC via Scotsman Guide).
All true. And behind it sits the number that worries lenders most.
The Biggest Piece of the Maturity Wall Is Apartments
About $757 billion of apartment debt comes due from 2026 through 2028, including nearly $300 billion this year alone, right after a record $310 billion matured in 2025 (CRE Daily, citing The Wall Street Journal). Over the next decade the total tops $1.8 trillion (CRE Daily).
The math behind the worry is simple. Many of these loans were written in 2020 and 2021 at roughly 3%. Today the same borrower may be quoted something near 6%, about double (CRE Daily). Picture a $10 million interest-only loan. At 3%, the interest is $300,000 a year. At 6%, it is $600,000 (calculated). The building didn’t change. Its rent may have gone up a little. Its debt cost doubled.
At the same time, the value the lender will lend against has shrunk. Green Street estimates apartment values are more than 20% below their 2022 peak (CRE Daily, citing Green Street). So an owner refinancing today can face a smaller loan, at a higher rate, on a property worth less than when they bought it. Many have to write a check to close the gap, sell, or hand the keys back. One industry report estimates that nearly half of apartment properties may struggle to secure refinancing at sustainable terms (The Kaplan Group via Multi-Housing News). Trepp found that about 3% of non-extendable loans maturing this year are already in distress, the highest share in five years (CRE Daily, citing Trepp).
That is the scary version. Now read the ledger.
How to Read a Delinquency Number
A quick decoder first, because these numbers get thrown around loosely. A delinquency rate is the share of loans, by dollar balance, that are behind on payments by some threshold: 30 days for most CMBS figures, 60 days for the Fannie and Freddie figures below, 30 days or more past due, or non-accrual, for the Fed’s bank data. Different lenders also hold very different loans. CMBS tends to take larger, shorter-term and often floating-rate deals. Fannie and Freddie mostly finance stabilized properties with fixed-rate debt. Banks sit in between. So a CMBS rate and a Fannie rate are measuring different slices of the market, not the same thing in different places.
The Distress Is in the Securitized Market, Not the Bank Books
The multifamily CMBS delinquency rate was 3.30% in August 2024 (Trepp via Multi-Housing News). In September 2026 it was 8.04%, more than double in about two years (calculated), and slightly above the overall CMBS rate of 8.02%. Apartments also ran above the overall rate in April, at 7.71% versus 7.54% (Trepp via MBA Newslink). For a property type that used to be the safe corner of CMBS, that is a real shift.
Now look at everyone else who lends on apartments.
- Fannie Mae: 0.57% of multifamily loans seriously delinquent in August, down from 0.68% a year earlier (Fannie Mae).
- Freddie Mac: 0.64% delinquent in August, up from 0.48% a year earlier (Freddie Mac).
- Banks: 1.41% of multifamily loans delinquent in the second quarter, down from 1.47% in the first (CRED iQ analysis of FDIC data via Multifamily Dive).
Definitions differ by source, so don’t compare the decimals too finely. The pattern is the point: the agencies that finance most apartments are under 1%, the banks are under 1.5%, and CMBS runs above 8%.
The banks are worth a closer look, because they are where small investors borrow. Their multifamily books aren’t shrinking; they’re growing. Banks held a record $665.3 billion of multifamily loans in the first quarter, up 4.1% from a year earlier (CRED iQ via CRE Daily). That is not what lenders do when they think a sector is about to collapse. To be fair, the same data showed delinquent bank multifamily balances at their highest since 2011, and the 1.47% rate tied the high of this cycle (CRE Daily). A cycle high that is still under 1.5% tells you how low it started.
Zoom out further. Across all commercial real estate, bank delinquency was 1.53% in the second quarter of 2026. At the depth of the financial crisis, in the second quarter of 2010, it was 8.76%. In early 1991 it was 11.99% (Federal Reserve via FRED).
And size it. MSCI estimates $27.8 billion of multifamily debt in current distress and another $115.3 billion in potential distress. Together that is about 5.7% of the roughly $2.5 trillion multifamily debt market (Jay Parsons, citing MSCI and the Federal Reserve). Put another way, about 94% of apartment debt isn’t flagged by MSCI as distressed or potentially distressed (calculated).
You may see a much bigger number elsewhere. CRED iQ put distress at 13% of the multifamily CMBS loans it tracks this fall, more than double the 6% it measured in February (CRED iQ via Commercial Observer). Both can be true. The 13% counts loans CRED iQ classes as distressed, largely delinquent or in special servicing, within CMBS only; the 5.7% measures distress against all apartment debt. One is the riskiest corner; the other is the whole house.
The Fundamentals Underneath
The buildings themselves look healthier than the loans. RealPage reported national effective rents up 0.9% year over year in the third quarter, the first positive reading since the second quarter of 2025, with occupancy at 95.4% (RealPage). Deliveries over the past year were 318,000 units against 304,800 absorbed, the narrowest gap in years (RealPage). That is consistent with what I argued in The Apartment Recovery Is Real: the supply wave has crested. The distress we see appears to be a capital-structure problem, deals financed with cheap short-term debt at peak prices, more than a demand problem. The renters are there. The math on the loan isn’t.
Even the scariest new stories fit that pattern. Two apartment loans made in early 2025, The Abington in Memphis (384 units) and Cypress Village in Missouri (330 units), are already in special servicing, and notes on the two loans point to insurance problems, tax-abatement issues and property-condition citations (Multifamily Dive). Those are operator and underwriting failures specific to those buildings, not a collapse in renter demand.
The Memphis loan is worth a moment for Tennessee investors. Payment-in-lieu-of-taxes deals, often called PILOTs, can make a property pencil by cutting its tax bill for a set period. They also come with conditions. If an operator falls out of compliance, or the abatement ends, the tax line can jump and the deal that worked on paper stops working. I’m not saying that is what happened at The Abington; notes on the two loans flag PILOT issues among several problems, without saying which loan. I am saying it is a line to read twice in any Tennessee deal that depends on one.
What This Means If You’re Buying
A maturity wall is a forced-seller event, and forced sellers are where good deals come from. Owners who can’t refinance and can’t raise more equity have to sell, and special servicers have to sell too. They sell to buyers who can close. If you have dry powder and fixed-rate financing lined up, this may be the window Warren Buffett appeared to be positioning for, as I wrote in Warren Buffett Just Bet Big on Real Estate.
Three rules I’d use. Underwrite at today’s rents, today’s insurance and today’s rate, not the seller’s pro forma. Ask when the current loan matures and what the owner owes, because that tells you how motivated they are. And check the tax-abatement and insurance history before you bid. The Abington is a reminder of what happens when nobody does.
Why 2026 Isn’t 1991 or 2010
The two peaks on the bank chart came from very different problems. The early-1990s spike followed the savings and loan crisis, when lenders had poured money into speculative commercial building. The 2010 peak came after the financial crisis, when values fell and credit froze at the same time. In both cases the trouble showed up across the whole lending system, not in one corner of it. Today, at 1.53%, bank delinquency is about double its pre-pandemic level of roughly 0.7% but nowhere near either peak (Federal Reserve via FRED), and banks are still adding apartment loans. That doesn’t make it safe. It makes it different: a problem concentrated in particular loans, bought at particular prices with particular debt, rather than a system-wide failure.
The Steelman: The Case That the Wave Is Just Getting Started
1)) The wall is mostly still ahead. Nearly $300 billion matures this year and roughly $457 billion more in 2027 and 2028 (calculated from CRE Daily). If the 10-year stays above 5% and values stay 20% off their peak, more of those loans may fail to refinance, and today’s 5.7% could grow. Delinquency is a lagging number: it shows the loans that already failed, not the ones about to.
2)) Freddie’s number is climbing. Freddie Mac’s multifamily delinquency has risen from 0.42% in February to 0.64% in August (Freddie Mac). Still low, but moving the wrong way for six months.
3)) Bank numbers may be flattered. Delinquent bank multifamily balances reached their highest since 2011 in the first quarter (CRE Daily), and banks can extend and modify loans rather than mark them delinquent. Lenders often call it “extend and pretend.” Low bank delinquency may partly reflect patience, not health. Small and regional banks, which tend to make the smaller loans individual investors use, may be the most exposed.
4)) CMBS is the canary. CMBS loans are marked first because they have the least flexibility. In past cycles, trouble there showed up before it showed up elsewhere, and multifamily CMBS has more than doubled in two years.
Where I land: points one and two are the real risks, and I don’t want to wave them away. The test I’d use: if Freddie’s rate passes 1% and bank multifamily delinquency rises for two straight quarters, the problem is spreading beyond CMBS and I’m wrong. Until then, I read this as a concentrated refinancing problem sitting on top of healthy demand, and concentrated problems create buying opportunities for patient investors with clean balance sheets.
------Nashville: Record Low Unemployment!
Here is a number you won’t see in a national headline: Nashville’s unemployment rate was 2.9% in August, versus 3.4% for Tennessee and 4.1% for the country (BLS via FRED, smoothed seasonally adjusted; Tennessee; U.S.). That is 1.2 points below the national rate (calculated), and the gap has held through the whole national slowdown.
Jobs are plentiful, and folks continue to move here to grab those gigs.
On the not-seasonally-adjusted basis BLS uses to rank metros, Nashville came in at 3.1%, tied with Raleigh. Among the 56 metros with a million or more people, only Cleveland (1.8%) and Honolulu (2.9%) were lower (BLS; BLS metro rankings; ranking among large metros derived). The national rate on that same basis was 4.3%. The metro had 1,200,300 nonfarm jobs in August, up 0.7% from a year earlier (BLS).
Why does this matter so much for landlords? Jobs are rent. In my book, The 5 Ways Real Estate Investors Make Money and Build Wealth, cash flow is one of the five, and cash flow starts with a tenant who has a paycheck. A metro where almost everyone who wants a job has one is a metro where tenants renew, rents get paid and vacancy stays manageable, even while national paychecks trail prices. It is the core of the case I made in The $6.6 Billion Bet on Nashville, and the September employer news has not changed it. Starbucks is still building out its $100 million downtown hub, with up to 2,000 jobs planned over five years (The Post Millennial), a project I covered in Starbucks Just Bet $100 Million on Nashville.
Strong Jobs, Softer Buildings
The commercial side is more mixed. Office vacancy held at 17.7% in the third quarter, but net absorption slowed to 152,000 square feet from 346,000, and leasing fell to 850,000 square feet from 1.46 million (CBRE). Industrial delivered 3.83 million square feet while absorbing 2.74 million, so vacancy rose 40 basis points to 5.4% (CBRE). The good news there: industrial space under construction fell to 5.13 million square feet from 8.49 million in the second quarter (CBRE), so the supply pipeline is shrinking.
And some big projects are slipping. Fallon’s planned 600-room East Bank hotel won’t be ready for the 2030 Super Bowl, with construction now eyed for around July 2027 (WSMV), and Giarratana’s 33-story 901 MLK tower, first targeted to start in late 2023, is now looking at 2027 (Nashville Post). That is likely what 7.5% money does to a pro forma, though neither developer has said so. It is also why the existing buildings in this city may hold their value: the next wave of competition keeps getting pushed out.
And the Rents?
Here is the fun part. Strong jobs haven’t pushed Nashville rents up yet, because the city is still digesting the apartment wave. Yardi Matrix put the average asking rent at $1,681 in its September report, down 0.9% from a year ago, while 14,622 units were still under construction. The encouraging detail: new starts were down 48% (Yardi Matrix). Apartment List’s October report shows the city of Nashville down 2.3% year over year, while suburban Murfreesboro is up 3.8% (Apartment List).
Around Town
The data-center fight moves to zoning. Last week a federal judge dismissed most of DC Blox’s lawsuit over Metro’s data-center moratorium, sending the project near the Nashville Zoo to the Board of Zoning Appeals after December 1 (Axios Nashville). I made the case for data centers as good neighbors in A Louisiana Teacher Just Got a $50,000 Bonus... From a Data Center. Nashville’s Mayor Freddie is making a huge mistake here.
BNA keeps breaking records. Nashville International carried a record 26.7 million passengers in its latest fiscal year, up 7.7%, and Air France will start nonstop service to Paris on May 14, 2027 (Axios Nashville). Direct flights to Europe are one more reason companies put offices here, and one more reason short-term rental demand downtown may hold up.
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My Skeptical Take:
Be grateful you live in today’s world.
But I watch the news today and it’s bums me out.
Mortgage rates are near 7.5%. Gas costs too much. Inflation is running ahead of paychecks again. Those are real problems, to be sure, and I’ll keep writing about them every week.
But we are swimming in information and lacking in wisdom.
The news is not there to inform you; it’s there to startle you. Matt Ridley makes the same point in The Rational Optimist, noting that, for example, random violence makes the news precisely because it is so rare. A skeptic’s job is to check the long-run data, not just the headlines. And the long-run data says this: we are living in the most prosperous, safest, most abundant time in human history.
Ridley’s book is full of examples that make the point better than I can. Here are a few:
- -Necessities. In 1900 the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today it’s just $37.
- -Light. In 1800, an hour of work at the average wage bought 186 lumen-hours of light from a tallow candle. Today it buys about 8.4 million, roughly 45,000 times more light for the same hour of work (CEI).
- -People are more prosperous. Since 1800 the world’s population grew sixfold, while average real income rose more than ninefold and life expectancy more than doubled (spiked review).
- -Folks live like kings of old. Compared with 1955, the average person in 2005 earned nearly three times as much in real terms, ate a third more calories, buried a third as many children and could expect to live a third longer (spiked review).
- -We continue to progress. Over those 50 years, real income per person fell in only six countries. Infant survival fell in none (spiked review).
- -Lifespans. Life expectancy was about 28 in classical Greece and Rome and about 30 in medieval Britain. In the 1920s, demographers predicted it could never top 65 (The American Conservative review).
- -What “poor” means in America. Among Americans officially classed as poor, 99% have electricity, running water, flush toilets and a refrigerator, 71% have a car and 70% have air conditioning (spiked review). Plus, hundredsw of restaurants waiting to cook almost any cuisine on earth, and grocery stores stocked with food from six continents, keeping near everything always in season. A century ago, even the richest people on earth could not fathom having this abundance.
- -Global poverty. The share of the world in absolute poverty fell to about 18%, half what it was 50 years earlier (spiked review).
- -Old age got better, not just longer. U.S. disability rates for people over 65 fell from 26.2% to 19.7% between 1982 and 1999 (The American Conservative review).
- -Cleaner, too. U.S. carbon monoxide emissions from transport fell 75% in 25 years (The American Conservative review).
- -The Sun King’s kitchen. Louis XIV had 498 people cooking his dinner. But this pales in comparison to the selectiono at the average US grocery store (PBS NewsHour).
- -Mexico vs. 1955 Britain. The average Mexican today lives longer than the average Briton did in 1955 (Cato review).
- -Nepal vs. 1951 Italy. Infant mortality is now lower in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951 (Cato review).
- -Saving land by farming better. We farm about 38% of the earth’s land. At 1961 crop yields, feeding today’s population would take about 82% (Cato review).
- -Pessimism is old news. Adam Smith noted that hardly five years went by without a book or pamphlet announcing the nation’s decline. In 1830 the poet Robert Southey argued people were worse off than a thousand years before (Cato review).
The below-average individual has more than the richest of the rich of just 100 years ago. But, we should always strive to improve. It’s on us to take action.
So today, I challenge you to…
If you have kids or grandkids: claim their Trump Account at TrumpAccounts.gov. It takes minutes, and for children born 2025 through 2028, an unclaimed account won’t get the $1,000 seed (U.S. Treasury). This is not political, much like a Roth IRA isn’t; which is named after the Senator who wrote the enacting legislation.
If you own rentals: protect your good tenants. Paychecks are tight, and keeping a reliable renter at a modest increase likely beats chasing the last dollar of rent. I’m focusing on improving my curent rentals this year to keep vacancy near 0, as I look for my next deal.
If you’re buying: underwrite at today’s rate, today’s insurance and today’s rent. Lenders are getting pickier, and the spread may not do you any favors. Do not use rose colored glasses.
If you have dry powder: look for your next deal today. High interst rates make this one of the best times in history to pickup a deal.
If you’re in Nashville: remember that the jobs are here. The rent recovery may lag, but it is built on something real. Need help finding a deal? Click here to talk to a local broker and investor (me ;).
So if you’re down this week, whether it’s money, work, health or family, just keep everything in perspective. Ignore the bad vibes.
Pessimism sells headlines. Progress compounds. Life is good.
The historian Thomas Babington in 1830 put it well (Library of Economics and Liberty):
“On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”
Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Southey’s Colloquies on Society,” Edinburgh Review (1830)
He was arguing with a poet. And this works just as well against your news feed.
Until next time. Stay Curious. Stay Skeptical.
Herzliche Grüße,
-The Skeptical Investor
-P.S. If this newsletter has been useful to you, the best gift you can give me is ...to share it!
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