The glut of apartments on the market, Are large hyperscale companies inflating earnings, China isn't just manufacturing; they're innovating & 50-year Mortgages: helpful or harmful?

No surprise to me that there’s a glut of apartments on the market  I saw the potential for this oversupply happening in San Diego a couple of years ago. It seemed anywhere you drove within a short distance you would see the construction of new apartment buildings. It is not just here in San Diego though as the glut of apartments is happening around the country. With the dynamics of supply and demand, if you’re looking for an apartment today, you’re in for a treat. In September rental rates had the steepest drop in more than 15 years. Landlords are now offering months of free rent, gift cards, free parking and some are even paying for your moving expenses just to get you to sign a lease. You may want to play hardball because in some areas they’ll even cut the rent on top of all those incentives. In September, 37% of rentals agreed to concessions like months of free rent. What caused the problem for landlords is during the early years of the pandemic, developers could not begin building apartments fast enough, especially in the Sunbelt area where there was a major population migration. It became the biggest apartment construction boom in 40 years, but because of the delay of construction permits and labor shortages, development took much longer than they had hoped. It seemed no one looked around to see all the apartments going up, and now they’re all competing with each other for renters. The landlords are hoping they can raise rents by the end of 2026 or at least sometime in 2027, but I don’t think they are factoring in how many apartments are online with more still to come. Based on the current apartment inventory and new apartments coming online, renters could be in for lower rent maybe perhaps until 2028. This will not be good for the housing market because rent for houses will be the next to fall and then people will have to factor in the affordability of renting vs buying a home. This would also likely hurt the demand for buying rental properties as an investment if you can't get as much rent as you thought.    Are the large hyperscale companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet inflating earnings?  Michael Burry, who was made famous by "The Big Short", made the claim that some of America's largest tech companies are using aggressive accounting to pad their profits. He believes they are understating depreciation expenses by estimating that chips will have a longer life cycle than is realistic. Investors are likely aware of the huge investment these companies are making in AI, but they likely don't understand how the accounting of the investments work. If a business makes an investment in these semiconductors/servers of let's say $100 B, that doesn't hit earnings when the money is spent as under generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, they are instead able to spread out the cost of that asset as a yearly expense that is based on the company’s estimate of how rapidly that asset depreciates in value. From what I've seen, these companies are generally depreciating their Nvidia chips for over 5 to 6 years. This seems to be a stretch considering Nvidia is on a 1-year chip production cycle, and the technology is changing quite rapidly. Burry estimated that from 2026 through 2028, the accounting maneuver would understate depreciation by about $176 billion and if Burry is correct, hyperscale's will have to write off AI capex as a bad investment, due to depreciation-useful life mismatch. This would then produce a major hit on earnings. While I remain a believer that AI is here to stay, I do believe there will be some big-time losers in this space given all the money that is being spent. Be careful chasing the hype as I do worry the fallout for some of these companies could be larger than many things possible. Burry has also warned this year that AI enthusiasm resembles the late-1990s tech bubble and recently disclosed put options betting against Nvidia and Palantir. He also stated that "more detail" was coming November 25th, and that readers should "stay tuned." I know I'm definitely curious what other information he has!    China is no longer just manufacturing; they are also beginning to innovate.  For many years innovation was generally done here in the US, and we would have the products manufactured in China. China is no longer happy with this arrangement, and its research and development spending is up nearly 9% a year well above the 1.7% here in United States. In 2024, China filed 70,160 international patents which was about 16,000 more than the 54,087 patents the US filed. China also seems to be more advanced in robotics installing 300,000 industrial robots in 2024 compared with roughly 30,000 industrial robots in the US. It also has been noted that when it comes to worldwide sales of electric vehicles, 66% came from China. While these developments seem positive for China, the country is still experiencing problems with a slowing economy as they have seen fixed asset investment decline and a