The housing market is being haunted like Scrooge this holiday season as Fortune 500 chief economist sees 'housing market of Christmas past' settling in for 2024 - Fortune   

The old adage that history repeats itself can be just as worrisome as it is comforting. But in a time of stress, like a housing crisis, recession or other economic downturn,  it’s human nature to string together comparisons to the past as a way to understand the present says Mark Fleming, chief economist with Fortune 500 financial corporation First American.

This fall, the housing market started to seem downright Dickensian to Fannie Mae CEO Priscilla Almodovar, as she described “a tale of two markets” in an interview with MarketWatch. For the holiday season, though, Fleming tells Fortune that there’s another great Dickens tale that’s apt for the current state of things: homebuyers are being haunted, like Ebenezer Scrooge himself, by the ghosts of housing markets past.

Fleming has a surprising analogy for today’s housing market. While the stress and anxiety caused by high mortgage rates and inflation today may feel reminiscent of the rapid housing inflation before the Global Financial Crisis of the 2000s, that’s not the decade to which Fleming turns. Instead, as he first noted in late October, today’s housing market most resembles that of the 1980s—another period that saw high inflation, rising interest rates, and a boom of homebuyers coming of age. As a rough year for homebuyers comes to a close, current market conditions bring to mind nothing like an unwelcome visit of a “housing market of Christmas past,” he tells Fortune.

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Older boomers won the pandemic after becoming a whopping $14 trillion richer, Fed data reveals—and Gen X is losing the race - Fortune   

Despite their moniker, “baby” boomers account for an oversized amount of America’s riches, having become somewhat of a Monopoly Man.

The wallets of the oldest boomers (those over 70, a group that also includes members of the Silent Generation) are looking pretty plump post-pandemic. New Federal Reserve data shows that the cohort has become $14 trillion richer since 2019 came to a close. These seniors might be a David-sized representative of the population at 11% but they make up a Goliath-sized footprint in our economy, holding 30% of the country’s wealth—a record, Bloomberg reports. 

That’s equivalent to $43.3 billion, six times what it was 25 years ago. The total wealth for those under 55 pales in comparison, only 2.5 times bigger during the same time frame. What’s more: As the share of the country’s household wealth for the 70-plus age group rose during the pandemic, it declined for those ages 40 to 59 (mainly Gen Xers and younger boomers)—it’s now smaller than it was in 2019. Somewhat surprisingly, it increased slightly before leveling off in 2022 for the under 40 age group—the stereotypical economically challenged millennials and their Gen Z successors. While their share is slightly higher than what it was in 2019, it’s still half of what it was for this group in 1989—when older boomers were their age.  

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How The League founder went from $200,000 in debt to making her first million with a dating app for the young, ambitious, and wealthy - Fortune   

Welcome to “How I Made My First Million,” Fortune’s newest series in which we interview today’s most powerful people about how they amassed their wealth. You’ll hear from founders, entrepreneurs, investors, and creatives across the globe on how they joined the seven-figure-club, what they’d do differently, and their best piece of advice for building wealth.

When the 39-year-old was earning her MBA at Stanford, she found herself unenthused and let down by the current crop of dating apps, which she called “essentially a game of hot or not.” So, the computer science buff and Salesforce alum took matters into her hands; she reimagined the parameters of online dating by adding an extra emphasis on selectivity and an unmistakable air of prestige. In 2014, in the heyday of the Silicon Valley startup boom, that app, The League, was born. It’s designed for “ambitious, high-achieving people who want a partner that’s equally motivated,” she told Fortune—the very app she wanted for herself.

Bradford, who graduated with $200,000 of business school debt, has since built The League into a top-tier dating app. Last year, she sold it to the Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, for a reported $30 million. That sale made her a millionaire many times over; Bradford and her team netted more than $10 million from the sale, by Fortune’s calculations. The first thing she spent it on was a down payment for a retirement community for her parents—and finally paying off her student loans.

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Wall Street's expecting a soft landing in 2024—but that doesn't mean stocks will soar - Fortune   

At the start of 2023, most economists and Wall Street leaders were convinced that a U.S. recession was imminent. With the Federal Reserve rapidly hiking interest rates to fight inflation, raising borrowing costs for already struggling businesses and consumers nationwide, economic and market forecasts were bleak. Investment banks’ average year-end price target for the S&P 500 fell to just 4,000 as bearish predictions flooded in late last year, implying the blue chip index would rise a mere 4% this year (compared to its roughly 10% average yearly gain since 1957).

But instead of struggling, stocks have soared—and the economy has remained resilient. Rising interest rates have managed to slow inflation without cracking the labor market, leading to steady consumer spending and GDP growth. 

Now, instead of attempting to forecast the next recession, many economists are more concerned with timing the Fed’s interest rate cuts. “It’s more likely than not that the economy will be able to move successfully into a soft landing,” Sinead Colton Grant, BNY Mellon Wealth Management’s new chief investment officer, told Fortune. But the newfound economic optimism and rate cut forecasts haven’t translated into a sky-high price target for stocks. After a more than TK% jump in the S&P 500 in 2023, Wall Street’s equity market outlook is, once again, a bit tame.

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