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Trump Blames Wall St. for Housing Crisis & New Dietary Guide Says More Protein
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Of derivatives, which could increase risks and volatility. Monthly income is not guaranteed. Prepared by BlackRock Investments, LLC. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neal Freyman.
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And I'm Toby Howell.
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Today, President Trump blames Wall street for the housing crisis.
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Ben, the new food pyramid just dropped. Red meat is in. Processed food is out. It's Thursday, January 8th. Let's ride.
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Good morning. You know, I think I've stumbled upon the best science fact of the year so far, which is that jellyfish have eerily similar sleeping habits to humans, which is news to most of us who never even considered that jellyfish sleep in the first place. A study published this week found that jellyfish seemed to sleep about eight hours a day, take midday naps, and even snooze when they didn't get a full night of rest. When you take into account that jellyfish don't have brains, the research gives us key insights into the origins of sleep and how extremely, extremely ancient it is. Toby, can you imagine encountering a jellyfish in the ocean that had pulled an all nighter? Probably a grumpy fellow.
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I don't know if I could determine if a jellyfish was sleeping or not sleeping, but looking at brainless animals to determine sleep's fundamental purpose in life, they could come just watch me take a snooze. Sleep being this universal biological rhythm, though, instead of a purely neurological phenomenon, it felt like Avatar to me. You know how they have like the goddess AWA in the connecting everything. The fact that sleep. Sleep is our, you know, common thing that we share with jellyfish and each other. I think we should go visit a one more. Visit our goddess more though, because I'm looking at you, looking at myself. We got some bags under our eyes right now. And now a word from our sponsor, Rubrik. Neil, you ever take a golf swing that you swear is perfect and then the ball slices into a completely different zip code? That's what AI agents are like. High potential, but they can go off track fast.
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No, that has personally never happened to me, Toby. But that is why Rubrik aging cloud exists. It's the only platform that let you monitor, govern and rewind your AI agents so they don't hook your entire operation into the woods.
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It gives you total visibility, policy enforcement, real risk scoring, and if things go sideways, your rewind is done in minutes.
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That's why hospitals and banks trust it.
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If your business relies on AI agents, you need the ability to monitor, govern and rewind their actions. Right now, our listeners get exclusive early access to Rubrik Agent Cloud Head to Rubrik that's R U b r I k.com rubrik.com President Trump shocked the housing industry yesterday when he announced his intention to ban large institutional investors from buying up any more single family homes and what he's framing as a defense of the American dream. In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote, people live in homes, not corporations, and tied the decision to record high housing costs. Home prices are up more than 50% nationally since 2019, with the national median home price crossing a peak of $435,000 last summer. However, institutional investors might be more of a convenient scapegoat than an actual root cause of housing unaffordability. Big corporations like Blackstone only own about 2 to 3% of U.S. housing nationally, though that number is higher in hot housing markets like the Sun Belt. The market did not take kindly to the announcement sending shares of Blackstone, a major investor in residential real estate, down as much as 9% yesterday, and invitation Homes, the biggest owner of rental homes in the US as much as 10%. Trump said he is asking Congress to codify his directive into law, but so far there's been little clarity on enforcement exemptions or if existing holdings would be affected. So the cart may be before the horse a little bit and terms of enforcement, but to institutional investors, Neal, it is still a scary cart.
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Yeah. Let's do a little history lesson if you'll oblige me. Wall street getting into the single family housing game is not something that had happened for a long time in American history. This is actually a product very much of the financial crisis. There was that huge housing blow up in 2008 and 2009. If you do remember, you were in middle school. But basically what happened was all these builders and all of these landlords had all this unwanted inventory. There was tons of foreclosures that nobody these houses too, but they were at bargain basement prices. Who was there to soup in? Who actually had cash in 2009? That was Wall Street. So they started buying up these dilapidated homes, often at foreclosure auctions, to the point where it steadily increased. And then by 2022. This is during peak Covid housing boom. Investors were buying more than one in every four single family homes sold. Fast forward to 2004 and 2005. They have become, you know, certainly a scapegoat or certainly a lot of people are blaming them for squeezing the housing prices higher and not allowing the average homeowner to get into that starting home. So I would say people on both sides of the aisle point to the growth of institutional investors in the housing market as one reason why we're seeing home prices soar 50% in the last six years.
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Yeah, it can feel like a bogeyman, even if you look at that total number and say it is a smaller slice of the pie than it might initially appear. But if you go to those hot housing markets like I describe cities like Houston, Miami, Phoenix, Las Vegas, like these are places where institutional investors are flocking to because that's where the money is to be made. So if you live in one of those places, it maybe feels like an outsized problem. Also, institutions are tough to bid against if you are a homeowner. They often use all cash offers. They often close very quickly on these properties. They rarely are negotiating over, you know, bathroom tiles because they don't really care as much about what the backsplash looks like in the kitchen that they're, they're treating it as an investment asset. So the competition dynamics is also a thing that makes people frustrated, even again, if it's a small slice of the overall pie.
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If you talk to economists in the housing industry, a lot of them say that actually institutional investors provide a very important role in the housing market. They do push back against the criticisms of Blackstone and they're ilk getting into the market because they say, look, the housing market right now, not a lot of people are forking over anything to buy houses. And the institutional investors backed by Wall street have a ton of cash to play with. And they are actually providing really important liquidity to the market. There's what we need is more housing. We need a spur more home building. And the fact is that there's just not a lot of demand. So they are providing a lot of crucial demand. And on the other side, they're also. Wall street is known to buy fixer uppers essentially and, and refurbish them at a lot higher rates than the average homeowner. So they say for those two things, actually, they don't mind that Wall street is in the game.
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Final question here is can Trump actually do this? It is unclear if the president can impose A ban without Congress right now. So it does also tons of pushback to about being like anti free market. So whether it would make it through Congress at all is the outstanding question. So there is still just enforcement. Is there going to be exemptions? All of those question marks are still out there and lingering. Moving on, the US Is escalating its attempt to cut off Venezuelan oil exports, this time forcibly boarding and seizing two more tankers. One vessel was taken in the Caribbean Sea, but the other was especially geopolitically charged as it was being escorted by Russian naval assets. After the ship, formerly known as the Bella One evaded US Capture for more than two weeks, it ultimately claimed Russian protection before it was seized by the US Its capture combined with the capture of the Caribbean tanker laden with 2 million barrels of crude, brings the total number of detained ships to for what's the game here? The Trump administration wants to control spice production on Arrakis, I mean oil production in Caracas. On Tuesday, Trump announced that Venezuela would turn over 30 to 50 million barrels of sanctioned oil to the US with a value just short of $3 billion to be refined inside the our borders. And the Energy Secretary, Chris Wright followed up those comments yesterday, saying that the US Will oversee the country's oil production, quote, unquote, indefinitely. Now, the big question mark still remains, Neil, is if any of the oil companies that exited Venezuela over the last two decades are willing to return. Energy Secretary Wright has reportedly been trying to convince companies like ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Chevron to invest in drilling, but it remains a bit of an uphill sell.
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Yeah, I think the big headline here is that the United States is essentially taking de facto control of oil production in Venezuela, quote, unquote, indefinitely. And they say they want that to have leverage. Venezuela's economy is basically its oil exports and they want to take control of this, to have leverage to make this new government after they captured Maduro bend to their will, essentially. And it's just there's very few historical parallels, perhaps none in modern American history of the United States government essentially taking over the oil exports of another country. But this seems like the lever that they're going to play in order to make this new government in Venezuela be more United States friendly.
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But in order for that lever to have any effect is you need the oil to start flowing. You need spice to flow, if you will. And that is a tough sell because oil companies are going, I don't know if I really want to invest billions of dollars into making this aging infrastructure start to become more efficient. We one probably need some sugar on the side. You know, there's been rumors out there that the administration is offering up taxpayer money for rebuilding costs in exchange of some of the. Prof. And then tomorrow, Trump is scheduled to meet with oil executives at the White House. But a lot of those oil executives are probably going to say, hey, we need some serious guarantees here before we dive in and start, you know, pumping oil once more.
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Yeah. There are a number of challenges for American companies coming back to Venezuela. Let's do another history lesson here. I'm sorry, I'm just going full. I was a history major, but there was a lot of American oil production in Venezuela for decades. And they sit on the largest known crude reserves anywhere in the world. So it is a, can be a lucrative market. But there are two waves of nationals stabilization from Venezuela in the 70s and in the 2000s that essentially seized American assets and kicked them out of the country so that the only one remaining now, the only oil, the only American oil major now operating in Venezuela is Chevron. There is tons of corruption. The infrastructure is extremely dilapidated. And there is a lot of uncertainty about the political future of Venezuela. So there are a lot of challenges that remain that Trump has to convince these oil companies to invest what Some are saying, $0 billion a year over the next decade to get Venezuela's oil production back up to the 3.5 million barrels that was its peak a couple of decades ago.
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And then just big picture here, what happened to the price of crude after these tankers were seized? It actually fell as much as 2.4%. Maybe in reaction to the fact that Trump says that the oil will be shipped to America and that America is going to take control of, you know, the de facto production of Venezuela, because when more supply comes online, that actually tends to send prices down a little bit. It softens prices a little bit. Meanwhile, shares of Gulf coast refiners that are well equipped at, you know, dealing with the type of crude that comes out of Venezuela are rising. Names like Philips 66, Valero Energy, these are companies that seem to be winners. If, you know, Venezuelan oil started to become processed in the United States.
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The Trump administration released new dietary guidelines yesterday, and they just flipped the food pyramid upside down. Steak, cheese and dairy foods that used to be at the bottom are now at the top. While the government is urging Americans to pass on highly processed foods and added sugar, more protein and cooking at home are encouraged. White bread, chips and cookies, avoid them like the plague. Released once every five years, the nation's dietary guidelines set the official standard for meals at places like schools and hospitals and serve as a signal for food companies around what types of products they should produce. This year's edition has RFK Jr written all over it. The health and human services secretary has been spearheading the so called Maha movement that accuses food giants of poisoning Americans diets with ultra processed items. Some of those efforts, like removing artificial food dyes and discouraging highly processed foods, are welcomed by nutrition experts. Others, like the vilification of seed oils and promotion of beef tallow, have gotten a more chilly reception. Still, the new guidelines amount to a significant shake up to a rulebook that that's only seen subtle changes since it was first introduced more than 40 years ago. Toby, in terms of the food industry, who are the winners and the losers here?
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I mean, I think the winner once again is a protein. Protein eats everything. These days, the administration said we are ending the war on protein. They're saying that you should consume 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. That's a new development. The fact that we're measuring it in terms of your body weight, that's probably jacking it up to 50 to 100% higher than a previous guideline. So everyone who is force fed protein into, you know, popcorn, into things that it probably shouldn't be in, is probably going to become a winner here. I think a winner is also just full fat products. Fat has been vilified over a lot of, you know, American nutritional history. But now this guideline introduces some nuances around fat sources, saying that, hey, olive oil can be good. Butter and beef towel, those are a little bit more of the controversial ones. The alcohol industry could be a sneaky winner in the revised guidelines because now the official stance is that people are advised to consume less alcohol for better overall health. That is changed from when previous specific recommendations were that you should have a maximum of two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women. So taking that specificity out of the alcohol guidelines could be a winner for the alcohol industry.
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And a loser is definitely just coke and juice and anything that has added sugar. So the guidelines here say that Americans should consume no more than 10 grams of added sugar per meal. And what they say added sugars are is this. You know, look at the label. And if you see anything like sugar syrup or anything ending, ending in dash oc o like sucralose or things like that, that is something you should stay away from. Now this is a pretty strict guideline because there's a lot of added sugar and stuff we eat, which is maybe the reason that they're doing this, to call attention. A cup of something like Honey Nut cheerios includes about 12 grams of added sugar and one 12 ounce can of Coca Cola has 39 grams of added sugar.
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My breakfast of Honey Nut churros covered by Coke is no longer advisable. I think you are right to One other big kind of change when it comes to sugar is that they raised the age where kids were recommended to be allowed to consume sugar from 2 years old to 10 years old. I was having a conversation about this with some of my friends. If I never tried sugar Till I was 10 years old, what I would go you'd go to a friend's house and you'd see an Oreo for the first time and you would just faint. So it is interesting. I can't imagine not encountering sugar or trying sugar till 10. Obviously it's probably the right nutritional thing to do, but just socially that's just a pretty big change when it comes to what kids will be eating and consuming. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's numbers. Neal My morning routine got a lot better just by checking my portfolio on Public.
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Dip from Firehouse Subs is here for a limited time. Piled high with premium roast beef, caramelized onions and melty cheese on a freshly toasted garlic butter roll, Every French Dip is served with warm, savory au jus for dipping. This melty French dip is only at Firehouse Subs for a limited time, so head to your nearest Firehouse Subs or order on the app and try the French Dip before it's gone. Limited time at participating Firehouse Subs restaurants while supplies last welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will turn you into an insufferable Know it all. For my first number, if you're having trouble affording life, try the Midwest. The region home to Culver's and Caitlin Clark is the value play of the United States, the Bank of America Institute says. Featuring lower than average home prices and strong wage growth, the Midwest has the lowest median sales price for existing homes of anywhere in the country at 319,000 versus 409,000 nationwide, writes the Wall Street Journal. Rents in major Midwestern cities are also lower than the national median, while incomes have been increasing at a faster clip than in other regions. For an example of the Midwest allure, and I don't think anyone has ever said that in their life, look at these six counties in Wisconsin from Oshkosh to Green Bay. There, one homeowner in seven spends above 30% of their income on shelter costs, compared to one in five nationwide. Meanwhile, people are bringing home more money than the national average thanks to a strong manufacturing presence, which accounts for more than twice the share of jobs than it does across the country. Living in the Midwest means even though you don't have access to the ocean, you do have access to the nicer things in life. With higher incomes and lower housing costs, people in the Midwest are spending more on discretionary items than Americans living elsewhere, as shown by bank of America card data. Toby, did I just sell you on the Midwest?
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Well, you got a bashed it in the middle there. I see some allure from the Midwest, absolutely. Like affordability is the number one thing that is drawing people to the Midwest. I do want to toss in some additional data from Zillow too, who just ranked housing markets by page view activity Home price trends, speed at which homes go under contract to find which markets are the hottest right now in the Midwest absolutely dominates their data as well. The number one most popular housing market in the country last year was Rockford, Illinois. Actually it's up from number two the year prior. And the top 10 markets, five of them are from the Midwest. Those include Rockford, Dearborn, Michigan, Toledo, Ohio, South Bend, Indiana. So you are absolutely right. The data is reflecting this that people are saying where can I afford life the most? And it's probably in the Midwest.
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I'm, I'm all in on the Midwest of that if it wasn't clear. All right, for my next number, one of the biggest, fastest growing industries in the United States is youth sports. According to an Aspen Institute survey, family spending on youth sports jumped 46% between 2019 and 2024 to hit $40 billion a year. Now to put that into context, that's more than the revenues of the NFL and NBA combined and about four and a half times domestic box office sales. Last year, families spent an average of over $1,000 annually on one child's primary sport. Though another analysis has found that the average youth club activity requires $3,000,000 a year for some leagues you need to pay up to $50 just for the opportunity to try out. Competing and traveling for increasingly bougie leagues are putting financial strain on parents who think their kid is the next Cooper Flag. Many have turned to crowdfunding sites to help them pay for baseball tournaments. Go Fund Me said that competitive travel was the top sports fundraising cause in 2025. And a New York Life survey found that one in five parents said money concerns caused them to reduce or drop their child's participation in sports. Toby the entrance of Wall street for turning what used to be the domain of local rec leagues and volunteer coaches into a private equity backed pay to play profit hungry behemoth.
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I mean, a lot of people would rather trump post on Truth Social like hey, let's get Wall street out of youth sports rather than out of the housing industry. Because anyone who has a kid or anyone who's played sports knows that this is a massive issue. Just the money that has been attracted in this industry. I mean there is consolidation happening at the flag football league level. Josh Harris, who's a big hedge fund manager recently rolled up 200 youth flag football leagues, which is just a crazy sense to say. And then Dick's Sporting Goods invested in that entity, paid $120 million for a minority stake. So that just shows you the scale of the money at play here. And the worst part is everyone knows that the system is broken. It's probably not good for the kids and their athletic development either because what you're doing now is seeing these money grabbing sports leagues. Bring kids out of rec leagues, tell them to hey, focus on travel. Baseball from sometimes as young as second grade. And there is research that says when you do that, when you enter early sport specification as a kid, it hurts performance overall. You need to play a lot of sports. I mean, you were a tennis player, you were a baseball player, you did all of these things growing up. But now when you're paying, you know, $1,000 for each league, your parents are probably saying you got to choose one of these because we can't support you in all of them.
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Yeah, I'm going to go watch Little Giants now as an antidote for, for what's happened to youth sports. We need to go back to that purity. Okay, my final number goes out to all the millennials. Remember Runescape, the browser game you used to play endlessly on your basement computer? Well, it's more popular than ever. In 2025, RuneScape grew its paid members to well over 1 million, a jump of 30% from the start of the year. It also at one point had 240,000 people logging in at the same time, a record number of simultaneous players in its history. According to the studio head, it's the fastest growing multiplayer online game in the world. And that's remarkable longevity for a game that turned 25 years old earlier this week. The spike in interest is driven by nostalgia, of course, but also because RuneScape has been smart about not straying from its roots. What made it a huge hit in the first place? These days, RuneScape is actually two different games. One is a modern take called RuneScape. The other is called old school. Runescape, which adheres closely to the original. Runescape is no longer the top of the food chain when it comes to these kinds of games, which bring together tons of people into a virtual world where they can complete tasks, communicate, or even wage battle. World of Warcraft, for instance, has more than 1 million players a day. And Final Fantasy is higher in the rankings still. Toby, you trying to clean up?
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I am trying to clean up. And you know what I did as soon as this story hit the news wires is see if my old account was still around. I was able to log back into my old account that I was playing on when I was a kid growing up, which is just a crazy hit of nostalgia, as you said. That is driving a lot of this. I was not as good as I thought I was. I go, this is what I was so proud of when I was a kid. But the fact that you can reconnect to your kid inner child at all in terms of this game is one of the reasons why it's so appealing. They've also made a couple of kind of risky player first decisions when it comes to modern gaming standards. One, they put microtransactions to a vote. Microtransactions are these little in game purchases you can make that usually help you level up a little quicker. Very controversial. People say that it's just preying on.
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The gaming industry, but very lucrative for these gaming, extremely lucrative.
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If you were a gaming company, you would absolutely keep microtransactions in the game to maximize your profits. Instead they went to their player base to say, do you want this? Do you like this? Of course they overwhelmingly voted no. So they removed microtransactions from the game. That is a massive zag while the rest of the industry zig. So it's just these little things that have accrued a lot of goodwill from their player base, which is why I think it's had such long longevity.
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All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. President Trump lit into US Defense defense contractors in a series of truth social posts yesterday accusing them of getting fat and rich on the American government's dime. Trump wrote, defense contractors are currently issuing massive dividends to their shareholders and massive stock buybacks at the expense and detriment of investing in plants and equipment, also calling on them to limit executive pay to $5 million a year. He singled out Raytheon, calling the weapons maker the least responsive to the needs of the Department of War. A few hours later, Trump put those words into action. He signed an executive order putting pressure on defense contract directors to stop conducting stock buybacks and dividends and boost their investments in infrastructure and production capacity. Defense primes like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon parent RTX spent almost $50 billion cumulatively on dividends and share buybacks in 2023 and 2024, compared to 39 billion on R and D and Capex over the same period. And speaking of stocks, you might think that Trump's comments would have knocked the shares of defense contractors, but they are all surging this morning after the president proposed expanding the military budget from $1 trillion to 1.5 trillion.
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And finally, the big futuristic electronics show. CES is going down in Vegas right now. While robotics and AI devices are grabbing headlines and giving a glimpse of the future, there's also a bunch of really weird stuff that's been on display. The Verge put together a list of some of their favorite oddball inventions, including a hairdryer that doubles as a lamp, a $399 vibrating chef's knife that helps you slice tomatoes better, a pair of over the ear headphones that you can smush together to form a speaker, and of course, a perennium zapping device that helps guys deal with premature ejaculation. The future is on full display in CBS.
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Let's talk about this knife. So it's $399 chef's knife. It looks exactly like a knife, but it has these ceramic crystals in it that vibrate more than 30,000 times per second. And the company says that you can actually see or feel that the vibration is actually happening because it's just so fast and small that it's undetect to the naked eye. But it does promise that it could cut your effort by 50% in cutting anything. So it's something that as a home chef, I am interested in. But when looking at the scope of it does seem like the main theme here is humanoid robots. All these companies want you to have your own R2D2. And LG Electronics was probably the, you know, the highlight of this. They rolled out their new robot named Cloyd and they had to do a live demo where they tried to put something in the wash. And it did so very slowly. But it. This industry thinks that humanoid robots in your home doing tasks that you don't want to do, like doing the laundry, like putting stuff in the dishwasher, is the future. And Elon Musk himself has said that his. That Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus is going to be, you know, the largest. The largest product ever sold. So we'll see about that. But it does seem like humanoid robots is the main theme.
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Gave the humanoid robots the vibrating chef's knife and then it cuts your word workload to zero percent. I don't know how much effort are you putting into cutting anything in the kitchen that reducing that effort by 50% would be a meaningful effort output. I've seen your knife skills. You know, you're kind of moving pretty quickly. I don't think you need any vibrational crystals.
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Well, I appreciate that. All right. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Thursday. If you want to get in touch, fire up an email to Morning Brew Daily Morning Broadcom or DM us on Instagram @MB Daily show show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milian is our executive producer. Raymond Lu is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Heron. Makeup apparently thinks playing runescape is more important than coming into work. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew.
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Great show. Right now. Let's run it back tomorrow.