Weekly Reading for 10/10/2022

America’s Growing Love of Office Pools – ESPN.com

Over the last few years, the U.S. sports betting market has been growing rapidly.

One of the busiest times for this is what we’re involved in right now – the start of football season!

The excitement of being able to bet on college or NFL games attracts some bettors, but a lot of money goes into fantasy football pools, survivor pools, and super bowl squares as well.

According to 2019 survey data from the American Gaming Association (AGA) 11.8 million Americans were projected to bet on the NFL that year, with 31% of those people doing so through a pool. Overall, the AGA estimates 54 million people – nearly 1 in 4 American adults –participate in a betting pool annually. I can only imagine that number has gone up quite a bit with sports betting becoming legal in numerous states since that time.

This article is an interesting read that goes through some stories about some of the largest betting pools that have existed in the U.S.

Congratulations to those still alive in the Novem survivor pool and good luck this week!

FRBSF Economic Letter September 2022

This research paper discusses the causal effects work from home had on the housing market

• Logically it makes sense as people pivoted to more work from home during the pandemic. House prices began to increase.
• This paper gives some specific numbers on exactly what this effect was and where it was seen most

Not surprisingly, cities that had a higher WFH % pre-pandemic saw a larger spike and maintained level of WFH post pandemic

By isolating certain factors the researchers came to the conclusion that each percentage point increase in WFH represented almost 1% increase in house prices

• According to the underlying data on a national level remote work increased 16%, meaning remote work resulted in about 15% house price increases from November 2019 to November 2021

Overall this suggests that fundamentals of the housing market have changed and continued ability to work from home will have a significant impact on housing prices in the future

I believe it is important to review and understand how different policy choices have played out and understand the real world consequences of these decisions. Although not something politicians or the news may be highlighting. It gives you a greater appreciation of the residual effects as well as increased capacity to analyze future policy decisions with a wide scope! Even though we are almost 3 years removed from the start of the pandemic it is still in the early innings of understanding all of the consequences from health and economic perspectives.

Supply- and Demand-Driven PCE Inflation | frbsf.org

The different regional federal reserve banks provide great research on various topics!

This research can help provide insight into the Feds underlying thought process and give access to some of the data they find important

• Rather than trying to read the tea leaves from secondary or tertiary sources. Sometimes it helps to go directly to the main source.

Even though a lot of the financial news media prints the CPI number. The Fed has made it clear they prefer to use the less volatile Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) for inflation effects

The chart below from the article shows how this number has changed over the last 5 years and breaks it down by supply and demand effects

• Demand-driven categories are identified as those where an unexpected change in price moves in the same direction as the change in quantity in a given month.
• Supply-driven categories are identified as those where unexpected changes in price and quantity move in opposite directions.
• Ambigous categories are ones where the effects can not clearly be determined for either group.

As you can see even though the latest number announced a couple weeks ago was higher than the previous month. There still appears to be a general slowing trend.

Additionally, it appears the supply driven portion contributing to inflation appears to be decreasing.

They claim it is kid-friendly but you can be the judge yourself! ‘Buoy’ revealed as first Seattle Kraken mascot in franchise history | king5.com