The housing market is defrosting in Florida's microwave

Maybe the hurricanes will wipe out the man-eating gators. [Bloomberg]( This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a 13-foot alligator with Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions in its mouth. [Sign up here](. Today’s Agenda - The [housing market](? A sign of hope. - Mining [asteroids](? Stick to the telescope. - The Golden Bachelor? How about [nope](. - China’s [economic trust](? A downward slope. A Florida House Is Not a Home What would you like first: The good news or the bad news? Agh, fine, I’ll be nice. It is the [harvest moon]( — a time for self-reflection — after all. The good news is that the housing market seems to be miraculously unfreezing itself. Cue the applause! The confetti! The oyster shooters! Conor Sen [says]( there are currently 25,000 more single-family homes for sale than there were just *four weeks ago* — at a time of year when resale inventories are [normally]( declining. All signs point to the “seller drought” abating, which makes Conor optimistic that the horrifying housing market will be less spooky in 2024. “Depending on the balance between sellers and buyers, we could even see [home prices start to fall]( again in some markets, with more meaningful declines in others,” he writes. The bad news is that a lot of people are selling and buying and building houses in the state that’s home to the now-deceased [13-foot alligator]( with human remains in its mouth, otherwise known as Florida: A lot of the towns in the chart above are increasingly at risk of becoming uninhabitable because of climate change. “Moving to Florida essentially means living in a house with a bull's-eye on the roof, but millions of people don't seem to care,” Mark Gongloff [writes](. And some people (clearly lacking human ingenuity) are willing to pay millions of dollars literally to throw caution to the wind. Just look at this 2-acre [plot of land]( in Palm Beach that’s on the market for an astounding $150 million: Just this week, Florida overtook New York as the [second-biggest]( housing market in the US. It’s ironic, considering exactly one year ago today, Hurricane Ian landed in Fort Myers, Florida. It was the costliest storm in the state’s history, killing 149 people and inflicting $115 billion worth of damage. Yet mere weeks after the storm, as residents were still sorting through the remnants of their soggy belongings, Mark says buyers [rushed in to pick up]( waterlogged property on the cheap. Even then, it was “pretty much business as usual,” one busy real estate agent told the Wall Street Journal. Home values in the state are up more than 80% in Miami, Tampa and Jacksonville since the pandemic, and there’s no sign of the demand dropping off. Sure, we all wanted the housing market to unfreeze itself, but we didn’t want it to be this warm. Space Dirt Javier Blas wrote about how a NASA space probe brought back the [largest-ever stash]( of asteroid rubble to Earth, which is expected to weigh in at 250 grams. Being the visual learner that I am, I decided to do a little at-home experiment with my kitchen scale and some potting soil[1](#footnote-1) to see just how much extraterrestrial dirt we’re working with. Here was my setup: I found a glass bowl. I zeroed the scale. Then I started pouring cupfuls of dirt into the bowl, as any normal person does on a Thursday morning. I ended up getting dirt everywhere — in my phone case, in the grooves of the scale and even in the crack between the counter and the stove (a harrowing death pit that has claimed the lives of many unlucky macaroni noodles) — but it was worth it! And it brought me back to the sixth grade science fair, when I accidentally exploded a glow stick on my project partner and her mom had to flush out her eye medically. Good times! Anywayyyy. This is what we’ve got. Including my hand for scale because, duh: At first glance … it’s kind of underwhelming?? And space dirt is EXPENSIVE. Javier says the retrieval cost should come to about $4.4 million PER gram. Obviously, that’s fine for researchers wanting to find out the origins of life on our sweet little planet. But becoming the Bob the Builder of the cosmos wouldn’t make asteroid-mining enthusiasts millionaires — it would bankrupt them several times over, he writes. The [get-rich-quick]( dream of [mining]( outer space for gold, copper and other minerals is nothing new. But it’s still complete and utter nonsense, even if you’re big into Star Trek or whatever. “Gold now trades at about $1,900 a troy ounce. To make a venture such as the OSIRIS-REx break even, the yellow metal would need to surge to $268 million,” Javier Blas writes. The fact that Costco, of all places, is [selling gold bars]( right now doesn’t really give me much hope that a surge like that is going to happen. Plus, “that would be assuming all the extraterrestrial dirt was pure gold — and, well, that’s unlikely. If only half of the asteroid were made up of that, the metal would need to trade at $536 million a troy ounce to break even, and so on,” he explains. Read [the whole thing](. The Bachelor to [Golden]( Bachelor Pipeline There’s a joke to be made about how The Bachelor has been around for so long that some of the earliest contestants are probably nearing their golden years themselves. I dug into this a bit, out of curiosity. It turns out that [Byron Velvick](, who starred on Season 6 of the reality show, is turning the big 6-0 next year. I say this because [The Golden Bachelor]( is premiering tonight. And even though Byron isn’t making a comeback, it speaks to how the show’s loyal fanbase — many of whom have been watching from the living room couch since its inception — is growing old, too. With its new spinoff, ABC hopes to “right two wrongs: That romance among senior citizens does not get enough attention; and that not enough programming is created for that age group, [the network’s core viewership](,” Bobby Ghosh [writes]( (free read). But is Gerry Turner, the 72-year-old bachelor, really the best way to do that, he asks? When you think of The Bachelor, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? For me, it’s a group of scantily clad, spray-tanned 20-something-whatevers living in a crusty California McMansion, vying to awkwardly dance with the same dude on a tiny stage in a room full of strangers as a country band that you’ve never heard of plays two songs about love. They have [occupations]( like “socialite,” “professional twin” and “chicken enthusiast.” And they argue about the one villain named Janessa who is there “for the completely wrong reasons.” It is a show you watch to both numb your mind and remind you of your above-average intellect. Sadly, “the trailers for The Golden Bachelor allow for no optimism that the show will greatly deviate from the formula,” he writes. So even if you choose to turn on the TV tonight and watch a group of women ranging from 60 to 75 try and win Gerry’s heart, realize that it’s a cheap shot for ABC. “There is very likely a solid market for a reality TV show about elderly romance,” Bobby says, “but seniors deserve to be taken seriously, including in their entertainment choices.” Telltale Charts Have you ever played that dice game [Farkle](? There are two ways to play, really. You can be safe and keep the points you scored on your first roll. Or you can “risk it all” and roll again if you’re really feeling lucky. If you don’t score, you “farkle” and lose all the points you accumulated on that turn. But if you do score, you can “risk it all” again, and so on. In America, we treat our money with a similar “risk it all” [attitude](. We’re not afraid of farkling our finances, so to speak: Households have about 39% of their money tied in the market and only 13% in cash and bank deposits. We “are willing to tolerate uncertainty, because the stock market, over time, rewards those who buy and hold,” Shuli Ren [writes](. But in China, they’ve been burned before. “Three decades after the opening of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the Chinese have become hard-nosed investors. They no longer want to be the fools catching the falling knives,” she explains. Instead of investing in the market, they’re [hoarding record amounts of cash](. This risk-off mentality creates a massive headache for the government, which is desperately trying to improve market sentiment. Earlier this week, my colleagues over in Bloomberg News published a striking [data-visualization]( showing how 94% of the 323,094 jobs added in 2021 by members of the S&P 100 Index — the biggest US corporations, basically — went to people of color. Our columnist Justin Fox was curious about what the pool of new workers minus the pool of departing workers looked like, so he looked into the [population of working-age people]( over time in the US. Given the trajectory of non-White population growth (pictured below), “94% of new jobs in the S&P 100 going to people of color sounds about what we ought to expect,” he writes, adding that “it’s not evidence of employers going to especially great lengths to hire minorities, or discriminating against White workers, or doing anything other than fishing where the fish are. If the percentage were much lower than 90%, that would be cause for concern.” Further Reading The SEC shouldn’t change [a business model]( that has persisted for decades. — Bloomberg’s editorial board Oh no: The [vibecession]( might be coming back to haunt us. — Jonathan Levin Bob Menendez has gotta stop playing the [race card](. — Susanne Ramirez de Arellano The US needs India to act as [a buffer]( to China, and Modi knows it. — Hal Brands 25 years after LTCM’s [epic demise](, a look back at the facts. — Marc Rubinstein Is the private equity cash cushion big enough to avoid [a financial hit](? — Chris Bryant Further Watching Why do Microsoft and ChatGPT want to [go nuclear](? — Kyla Scanlon Psst: You missed the real Delta SkyMiles [scandal](. — Nir Kaissar Are you under the age of 66? Consider a job in the [federal government](. — Ale Lampietti ICYMI Dumbledore [died](. Senators are [back in slacks](. [Pod living]( is not for those with claustrophobia. The GOP might have [a trick]( up its sleeve. Kickers China is taking back its [giant pandas](. The Nvidia CEO is [committing to the bit](. [Texting culture]( is absolutely out-of-control. This one-eyed opossum has [a big personality](. Ketchup and seemingly ranch is [a real thing](. Notes: Please send seemingly ranch and feedback to Jessica Karl at jkarl9@bloomberg.net. [Sign up here]( and follow us on [Threads](, [TikTok](, [Twitter](, [Instagram]( and [Facebook](. [1] Yes, I store a bag of potting soil next to a gajillion cans of LaCroix underneath the kitchen table in my tiny apartment. Don't judge me! I am a plant mom. Or I'm trying to be one, at least. Remember [the stick](?!? She's still alive! But for some reason, she can only grow two leaves at a time. Maybe she's happiest this way: Follow Us Like getting this newsletter? [Subscribe to Bloomberg.com]( for unlimited access to trusted, data-driven journalism and subscriber-only insights. 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