For the subconscious to sort, for the Cosmos to browse.

Thoughts

Homebuilders are hotfooting it into the supply gap. While residential real estate transactions declined by 22.4% between the time the Fed started raising rates, in March 2022, and April of this year, that downshift was driven by existing-home sales (down 24.8%), not new-home sales (down 3.4%). Over the past four decades, newly built dwellings have accounted for an average of 13% of all single-family inventory. Today, new builds make up just over 30% of the total.

“Trust in God but tie up your camel.”

**Messying The Birkin**: A Documentary Film

i think what's happening right now is **the nightclubification of social media**.



it is now wildly easy to make a twitter clone, and there are many of them. if software engineers were more into instagram, they'd be making as many instagram clones, too.



so, where should you post?



bluesky, farcaster, read.cv's posts, substack's notes, or twitter itself? and *why post there*?



the better question is *where do i want to be **seen** posting?*

“When you reinvent a brand, no matter how big or small it is, everyone is desperate to know what it is going to be. So, if you launch with menswear as a presentation and you create a new advertising campaign with a still life of old logos and images by Steven Meisel that were shot in 1997, people find it very disorientating.

It strikes me as very radical to use old fashion pictures for a current campaign.



It transgresses fashion’s guiding idea, that of newness. The idea is to eradicate the idea that fashion is only the future. Fashion can be a new image, or it can be an old image if it is framed in the right way.”

The Logic of Envy

“Note to the FDIC: Next time around, don’t forget to procure time-sensitive signatures on bank holding-company source-of-strength commitments. Also, answer your email.”



Grant's, Vol. 41, No. 9, “Mystery of the well-bid bank bonds”

“At the peak of the 2021 frenzy, the typical buyout transaction, financed with syndicated bank debt, was encumbered to the tune of 6.9 times adjusted Ebitda, of which first-lien leverage amounted to 5.4 times. The three-month Secured Overnight Lending Rate (SOFR) has jumped to 5.28% today from 0.09% at year-end 2021. Multiplying the first-lien leverage ratio (5.4:1) by the change in rates (5.28% minus 0.09%) means that interest expense is eating up an additional 28% of Ebitda.”



Grant's, Vol. 41, No. 11, “By Another Name”

“\[ThyssenKrupp\] as it stands today was formed in the 1999 merger of Thyssen A.G. and Fried Krupp A.G. Hoesch-Krupp. TKA’s problems began a short six years later with the decision to expand steel production to the Western Hemisphere through a pair of plants in Brazil and Alabama. The housing bust of 2007–09 crimped de- mand in the Americas, making Thyssen- Krupp’s €12 billion ($13.2 billion at current exchange rates) investment a balance-sheet-encumbering bust.”



Grant's, Vol. 41, No. 9, “Do-over of a makeover”

In 2002:



“At 10 times revenue,” McNealy remarked, referencing Sun’s peak valuation, “to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes. What were you thinking?”



Grant's, Vol. 41, No. 11, “As Seen on TV”

“In the 15 months of waiting for the FCC to make up its mind, Tegna was strategically immobilized. There was a prohibition on repurchasing shares, raising the dividend, issuing debt or acquiring assets in excess of $30 million. The stricture against borrowing might have been a godsend, as Robertson observes: ‘If the Federal Reserve is tightening into a credit contraction, Tegna—perhaps without exactly intending to—was busily fortifying against it.’”



Grant's, Vol. 41, No. 11, “As Seen on TV”

“To be truly open to your partner’s experience, you must relinquish your conviction in the righteousness of your own position; this requires humility and the courage to tolerate uncertainty.”

“In the heyday of the 1990s, as Curley reminds us, ‘the three highest-margin businesses were alcohol, tobacco and media.’”



Grant's, Vol. 41, No. 11, “As Seen on TV”

“One of my sellers got a full-price offer on her $1.15 million home, but had to cancel the listing because with prices and rates so high and inventory so low, she couldn’t find another home she could afford. She wouldn’t even qualify to buy her own home anymore.”

The problem? He was also criticizing the actions of the people that now worked for him and whom he needed to execute the strategic pivot. Clearly, not realizing that every second you spend criticizing the past is an opportunity missed to inspire people with your vision for the future.

“There are only two ways to get a mortgage rate beginning with a five-handle today,” colleague Evan Lorenz remarks. “The firsts is to secure a builder-funded rate buydown. The second is to invent a time machine.”

“I can’t remember a time in my life \[when\] I sold every single asset and was thrilled at every single sale,” he said on a recent podcast. “Frankly we are not sympathetic to the people that bought them. They were drinking the Kool Aid and now they will pay the price for being overly optimistic and not doing their homework.”



*Fade to Blackstone*, PUCK

FCCR, Fixed-charge coverage rate = (Operating Income + Fixed Charges before Tax) / (Fixed Charges before Tax + Interest Expense)



As the interest expense goes up, the FCCR goes down, the only way to make it go back up again is to lower the fixed charges before tax or increase operating income



Of course, though, cutting capex to get there is detrimental to growth

“By our count, in the past century, the United States has twice defaulted under Moody’s third criterion. On both occasions, in 1933 and 1971, a president unilaterally changed the terms of payment to the detriment of the Treasury’s creditors.”



Grant's, Vol. 41. No. 11, “Federal Default is Perpetual”

“Derman’s writing, like his reading, is wide-ranging as to topic, texture and genre. He illuminates finance with comparisons to physics, physics with allusions to God, Goldman Sachs with reference to Bell Labs, social science with the reflected light of actual science. He is the kind of person on whom nothing is lost, a trait I ascribe to his being, in many different ways, a foreigner.”



Grant's Vol. 41, No. 9, “His life as a verb”

If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything

“... Your poor
idea of heaven: absence
of change. Better than earth? How
would you know, who are neither
here nor there, standing in our midst?”

Louise Glück
*Field Flowers*

“...just to enter into their radiance, to lean his shoulder against his friend’s with a great sensation of confidence and letting go, and almost to faint when a woman’s hand lingered a moment on his in the crowd of the trolley—the longing, yes, to live, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth this earth could give him.”



Albert Camus

*The First Man*

Jean Baudrillard wrote in The Illusion of The End:“At the heart of pornography, sexuality threatens to disappear.”

“The job at that bar was the best job I’ve ever had, in concert with the life I’d always wanted—publishing my writing, running a literary magazine, having several close circles of friends, living in the city I’d always dreamed of.”



Becca Schuh, *Bad Waitress*