Rob Topping

12.9% of credit card balances in the US are 90+ days delinquent, near the highest since 2011. 10.9% of student loan balances are now 90+ days delinquent, the highest since 2019. 5.7% of auto loan balances are now 90+ days delinquent, the highest level on record.

77 of the Fortune 100 have private flight departments. Many of them are run by veterans. Jets, helicopters, and drones are carefully selected to support the company’s travel missions and growth plans. The person overseeing this mini airline is called the Director of Aviation. It’s one of the most badass corporate jobs nobody’s ever heard of. Crews are expertly trained, every jet is meticulously maintained with 99% reliability, and every trip has contingency plans for weather or mechanicals. All supported by a department of just 25 to 50 people. Super high stress, higher stakes, and a secret weapon behind some of the most successful companies on the planet. They make it possible to go anywhere, anytime. Our firm is proud to buy & sell aircraft for 43 of them. Their culture of excellence is what made me fall in love with this industry. Happy Veterans Day to all who have served and a special thanks to the ones who make aviation so great

🚨JUST IN: A shocking MSNOW report reveals Donald Trump has made up to $5 BILLION while in office, while MAGA supporters who invested in his cryptocurrency have LOST $1 BILLION, with their investments now worth almost NOTHING. This is unprecedented corruption.

$SKYH: Moments ago, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved Sky Harbour's two ground leases at Van Nuys Airport (VNY). Why this matters: VNY is one of the busiest general aviation airports in the world and the main business aviation gateway for Los Angeles. Hangar space there is scarce, and Sky Harbour's newest Tier 1 campuses are earning far more per square foot than its legacy sites. The two sites: - 7701 Woodley Ave: 16 acres, about 266,000 sf planned in two phases, $110M minimum investment. The city's revenue share is 10.5% of hangar base rent only, so Sky Harbour keeps all of the fuel margin. - 16425 Hart St: 8.83 acres, about 71,500 sf if the commercial parcel is rezoned to aviation, $23M minimum investment. The city takes 25% of gross receipts, including fuel. - Both leases run up to 32 years (an initial 5-year term, up to 2 more years for construction delays, plus a 25-year extension once entitlements are secured). My rough economics (my estimates, not company guidance): - At $80-$100 per sf of total income (rent plus fuel margin) and $10 per sf of property expenses, the two sites could produce about $18M-$24M of stabilized annual NOI after all payments to the city. - On $133M-$158M of total investment, that's a roughly 11%-18% yield on cost. - At a 6% cap rate, that's $141M-$264M of value created, or about $1.40-$2.65 per share using 100M shares (about 82M are outstanding; I use 100M to allow for dilution). This will take time. Sky Harbour still needs entitlements and permits. Woodley Phase 1 is scheduled to open around mid-2029, and Phase 2 isn't scheduled to finish construction until mid-2031, followed by lease-up. The value above is years away and worth less in today's dollars.

1/ I'll explain exactly how this happened because I'm the person at Forbes who calculates these numbers. This is going to take some unraveling, but here's a spoiler: The president's answer here is nonsense.

My 6 takeaways from the Chicago’s selection of its first-ever fully elected school board: 1. For the first time in history, the Chicago school board is not in the palm of the mayor’s hand. Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago Teachers Union recently enjoyed a voting bloc as large as 15 of the 21-member school board. But after Tuesday, they no longer control the presidency or the board majority. With mail votes still being counted, it’s likely the union will end up with nine board seats. That’s despite several structural advantages for the union in these elections. 2. Running Hilario Dominguez for school board president was a strategic blunder. Dominguez ran for president of the school board while on leave from his job as the CTU’s political director. The union’s political leadership went all-in for Dominguez despite significant concerns about his personal conduct, dedicating 73 cents of every dollar they spent on the school board to his race. But as election night returns came in, it became clear that Dominguez was the Ken Paxton of Chicago: a candidate chosen for his loyalty over electability. 3. Citywide returns highlighted the city’s freakish municipal election timing. Victor Henderson, the distant third-place finisher for school board president, received more than 109,000 votes (about 18% of the total). That’s more than any single mayoral candidate received in February 2019, and more than almost any candidate is likely to receive this February. It could be enough to make the runoff. 4. Chicago Teachers Union leadership is already invoking a strike. Hours after returns showed Dominguez losing the race for board president, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates was already talking about a strike. “I’m ok to negotiate when I know that this union will take it to the picket line,” she said. Now that the board is elected, this behavior should be called out for what it is: refusal to accept the results of a legitimate election. 5. The fake $150M included in the CPS budget was exposed. This summer, Johnson’s appointees on the board pushed through a nearly $10 billion budget that assumed an additional $150 million in state money out of thin air, over the objections of the district’s own CEO and CFO. As I wrote at the time, it was akin to setting the district’s house on fire and hoping insurance pays out. Now the insurer is in disarray. Two days after the election, Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch announced he will not seek another term as speaker after 26 House Democrats called for new leadership. A $150 million bailout from Springfield was always far-fetched. It is even more so now. 6. The board has a historic opportunity for meaningful change. In one of her first comments on a major policy question after winning the election, Biggs told the Chicago Tribune she intends to let the moratorium on school closures expire next year, though she said no school would close without community input. That is a necessary step for a district with 158 schools where empty desks outnumber students. The Chicago Policy Center’s CPS Excellence Agenda offers the new board a Day 1 roadmap built on three pillars: academic excellence, financial excellence and board excellence. Go deeper in this week’s edition of The Last Ward ⬇️ thelastward.org/p/6-takeaway…

🚨 YOU CAN NOW BUY THESE 6 STOCKS CHEAPER THAN NANCY PELOSI 🚨 All from her disclosed trades 👇🏻 1/6 Intel $INTC She bought on May 29 at $114.68 and again on July 24 at $92.32. Today: $56.28!

This Ben Johnson segment from Sunday NFL Countdown is awesome. I can’t believe he’s the head coach of the Chicago Bears. He was really born to be a coach. Love it. 🔥 (🎥: @ESPNNFL , @CourtneyRCronin)

This is the biggest housing story over the next 20 years... Who exactly is the next buyer in 10, 20, and 30 years?

This is f*cking wild. Someone asked Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei what a kid finishing high school should do right now. He didn't sugarcoat it: "AI can do entry-level law work. It can do entry-level finance. It can do entry-level consulting. AI will also eliminate jobs, and probably a large number of them" In 42 seconds, he lists the first careers in the line of fire: junior law, junior finance, junior consulting He's already put a number on it: half of entry-level white-collar jobs disrupted within 1 to 5 years Every shift before this one, from farms to factories to the internet, gave people time to catch up. This one, he says, cuts deeper and moves faster Chatting → Prompting → Agents → Harness → Loops → You Run the AI His advice is simple: learn to use AI. But using it is now the bare minimum. What sets you apart is a harness that runs it for you Bookmark this before your feed buries it Every repo below costs nothing: Ready-made Claude plugins for legal, finance, sales, HR and data github.com/anthropics/knowle… Analyst-grade agents: models, memos, research notes github.com/anthropics/financ… Skills for Excel, Word, PowerPoint and PDF github.com/anthropics/skills An agent that does financial research on its own github.com/virattt/dexter An agent that researches any topic in depth github.com/assafelovic/gpt-r… Ask your spreadsheets and databases questions in plain English github.com/sinaptik-ai/panda… Agents that work as a team, each with its own role github.com/crewAIInc/crewAI A harness with everything built in github.com/langchain-ai/deep… Anthropic's SDK for building your own agents github.com/anthropics/claude… A memory layer so your agents remember context github.com/mem0ai/mem0 A loop that keeps the agent going until the job is done github.com/snarktank/ralph An agent that clicks through websites and fills forms for you github.com/browser-use/brows… Automate busywork with drag-and-drop workflows github.com/n8n-io/n8n 18 free lessons on building agents github.com/microsoft/ai-agen… Total cost: $0 It won't be AI that takes your seat. It'll be someone who built a harness 95% will keep sending résumés for work AI already does, the 5% with a harness will be the ones managing it Save it and forward it to anyone starting their first job Then follow the guide below and build your harness while everyone else is still waiting ↓

Now down 99.6% since this post promoting the meme coin on January 19, 2025 (day before inauguration)...

Value stocks (+24%) are now outperforming Growth stocks (-6%) by over 30 percentage points in 2026. If that holds, it would be a record spread, even wider than what occurred in 2000 when the Dot-Com Bubble burst. Is this the beginning of a major shift in market leadership?

🚨🇺🇸 From Melania stopping the immigration crackdown to advisers warning the Iran war would cost the midterms, here’s what really happened inside the White House before Tuesday’s disaster... The first lady's complaints led the president to tell aides that Stephen Miller had "gone too far," and that was just one of the decisions the Journal traces. Other details from inside the White House: -Advisers warned him in the spring the Iran war could cost the midterms; he said there was "plenty of time," and privately asked even junior staffers at photo ops whether he should change course -Told aides polls on affordability were "fake," and reminded them he won 2016 without commissioning any -Said at times he "didn't care about the midterms at all" and was tired of domestic issues he saw as smaller than foreign policy and his legacy -Thune got off the phone six times believing he'd talked Trump out of endorsing Paxton; Trump backed him anyway, then complained about his candidacy -Trump pushed stronger Republican candidates out of Senate races in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Texas; Democrats won all four -Brian Kemp turned down a Senate run after Trump called him "disloyal" at a rally -Cabinet officials told oil executives in March the war would end by April; Trump was "shocked" to learn the military was short on munitions and cut a Russian fuel deal to get prices down -Focus groups kept bringing up the ballroom and the arch unprompted: "It seems like he wants to put his name on everything" Advisers warned about the war, the polls warned about prices, and focus groups kept bringing up the ballroom... but the final speech before the election was about algae in the Reflecting Pool. For a party now facing a Democratic House and Senate, the lesson is pretty simple: next time someone says “plenty of time,” check the calendar... Source: WSJ / Writer: Daniel