Monday Morning Cup of Coffee takes a look at news coming across the HousingWire weekend desk, with more coverage to come on bigger issues.
California is set to legalize marijuana trading next year and it’s already leading to an economic uptick in the Golden Bake, um, I mean Golden State.
According to this great article in National Real Estate Investor: “This highly anticipated event is attracting private real estate investors from across the U.S. who want to take advantage of the opportunity opened with the legalization of cannabis use in the sixth largest market in the world,“ writes Patricia Kirk.
For a more comprehensive look at the impact of legalizing marijuana on the national real estate markets, see this marijuana feature by HousingWire's own Caroline Basile, exclusive to HousingWire subscribers only.
Basile notes: “With recent changes, banks are finding an opening to serve lucrative marijuana businesses. Nationally, 29 states have now legalized marijuana in some form, either recreationally, medicinally, or both, generating billions of dollars in sales. These billions of dollars mean there is much that banks could make from this booming industry, but federal laws and guidance have made things complicated for financial institutions who want in.”
Kirk’s piece states that the market for legal cannabis use is projected to grow by compounded annual rate of 18.5%, from $2.76 billion in 2015 to $6.5 billion by 2020, according to a report co-produced by New Frontier Data and ARCVIEW Market Research.
"That’s not even figuring in revenue from real estate, technology development or the overall economic impact of the cannabis market,” Kirk adds.
Considering Hollywood is located in California, this sentence will perform a fairly seamless transition into our next subject.
Actor James Woods, the star of many Hollywood studio productions, announced he may be leaving the limelight in an unusual way: it was announced in a real estate listing (see below tweet).
James Woods announces his retirement from acting — via a real estate listing https://t.co/STkrSCNgIx pic.twitter.com/fjHo9Z0cqK
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) October 6, 2017
According to the LA Times’ Nardine Saad:
"The Oscar-nominated star’s news came via the real estate agent Allen Gammons, who is listing Woods’ Exeter, R.I., lake property, according to the Associated Press.
Gammons said the 70-year-old “Ray Donovan” alum wants to relax and simplify his life by selling his many real estate holdings on both coasts, the Providence Journal reported. He added that since Woods' brother and mother recently died, the veteran actor hopes to spend more time on passions including photography, antiquing and poker.
The $1.39-million property sits on Boone Lake in Exeter and is one of Woods’ four Rhode Island homes, the Journal said. It includes two lakefront houses and has been in the Woods family for decades. Woods will also keep a pied-à-terre in the state, he added."
Speaking of simplifying one’s holdings, this great nation is looking to free up some hard-earned American money by cutting our taxes.
And while this transition isn’t nearly as nice as the earlier one, Goldman Sachs sent an email to clients that is equally worth noting.
Wall Street analysts Jan Hatzius, David Mericle and Alec Phillips are looking to predict the impact to the economy should tax reform lead to a corporate and personal income tax cut of around $1 trillion over 10 years.
After crunching the numbers, the outlook is good, but not great. In the medium term, the tax package raises the level of GDP by 0.5%, lowers the unemployment rate by 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points, and adds less than 0.1 percentage point to core inflation, while raising the federal funds rate by just over 25 basis points, the email states.
“These numbers are not huge, but they strengthen our conviction that the U.S. labor market will overheat moderately and the funds rate will rise by significantly more than implied by current bond market pricing,” the Goldman analysts conclude.
But all these estimations come with several big “ifs,” according to the note:
“The risks around our fiscal assumptions remain significant. It is conceivable that the ultimate tax cut will exceed that implied by the Senate budget resolution, which could roughly double the GDP and interest rate effects relative to our baseline estimates. A bigger risk, however, is no meaningful package at all—a scenario with roughly a one-third probability, in our view. This would take away one potential source of upward pressure on the funds rate, though not enough to undo our hawkish view relative to market pricing.”
It's rare that a foreclosure ever ends on a high note. Yet this brief foreclosure tale, published on chatroom Reddit, fills the heart with hope in humankind.
The post is brief and the title says it all: A nice couple found my great grandpa's purple heart in a [sic] forclosed home in a box [sic] labled "trash" and returned it to my family.
But perhaps even more interesting is, within hours, the commenters uncovered everything about this honorable soldier's story.
One Redditor put it well: "It takes 68 years for his medal to be found and posted on the internet. Four hours after the fact, someone starts figuring out who he was and digs up pretty much everything about him in about three hours."
This is our world, today. Enjoy your week, everyone!
