Airline consolidation is not only relatively common but necessary for growth and competitiveness, and the recent announcement of Alaska Airlines’ planned acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines is a prime example of this trend. The move, valued at $1.9 billion, signifies more than just a business transaction. It represents a strategic positioning for future growth in a highly competitive, highly concentrated sector.

Currently on target to reach a record-breaking 230 gigawatts of wind and solar installations this year, China leads the global renewables market with more than double the number of U.S. and Europe installations combined. Wind and solar project investment for China is expected to reach $140 billion for 2023.

For all the attention on flashy new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, the challenges of regulating AI, and doomsday scenarios of super-intelligent machines, AI is a useful tool in many fields. In fact, it has enormous potential to benefit humanity. In agriculture, farmers are increasingly using AI-powered tools to tackle challenges that threaten human health, the environment and food security. Researchers forecast the market for these tools will reach $12 billion by 2032.

With some key macroeconomic forces gradually shifting, what can real estate investors anticipate in 2024? Principal Asset Management recently issued its annual Inside Real Estate forecast, offering its analysis of those and other issues. Among the report’s authors is Arthur Jones, senior director of real estate research and strategy at Principal Real Estate.

In a new report, Goldman Sachs makes the case that natural resources are poised to increase in value in 2024 on a potential end to the current monetary tightening cycle, shrinking recession fears, hedging against geopolitical risks and demand for “green energy” metals such as copper and aluminum, among other drivers.

When the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was signed in late 2021, it included $42.5 billion for broadband internet access as part of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program. The program aims to ensure that broadband access is available throughout the country. This effort differs from previous federal broadband programs because it promised to allocate the funding to individual states and allow them to figure out the best way to distribute it.

The ecommerce fashion startup Shein filed to go public in November, fueling speculation the IPO market is set to heat up in early 2024, coinciding with an expected end to monetary tightening at the Federal Reserve.

Senior living facilities took the brunt of the early COVID-19 pandemic. A fragile elderly population was no match for an aggressive novel virus. As a large percentage of residents succumbed to the virus, you had to wonder if the industry itself would succumb. After all, it’s hard to bounce back from headlines painting group homes and senior communities as death traps. It might be hard, but apparently it isn’t impossible, and new figures released by the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care (NIC) indicate the senior housing market is doing just that.

The Internal Revenue Service scored a significant win over the hedge-fund and asset-management industries in a case that could bring higher taxes for many fund managers. The U.S. Tax Court’s ruling could require managers to pay self-employment taxes of more than 3 percent on much of their income. If the opinion survives additional legal battles and is applied broadly, it will close off a popular technique that lets them exclude millions of dollars in income from self-employment taxes and related levies that others must pay. 

Charlie Munger, the late vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, quoted in Damn Right, his 2000 biography: “Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich. Not because I wanted Ferraris. I wanted the independence. I desperately wanted it. I thought it was undignified to have to send invoices to other people. I don't know where I got that notion from, but I had it.”

As evidenced in dozens of announcements of upcoming projects over the past two years, the United States is on the cusp of a manufacturing investment supercycle. Poised for sustained growth well into the next decade, this renaissance is being driven by an increased focus on reshoring, the implications of which are reverberating through the commercial real estate market. As the nation pivots toward domestic manufacturing, a phenomenon known as the “ripple effect of reshoring” is gaining momentum.

Impact investing has boomed from only $25 billion in 2013 to more than $1.164 trillion in 2022, according to the Harvard Business Review and estimates from the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN). What is impact investing? The term refers to investments made with the intention to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return, according to Amit Bouri, the CEO of GIIN. Impact investing is more than just “screening out” or avoiding certain categories that might be considered taboo, such as fossil fuels or weapons manufacturing, but instead proactively investing in business strategies that make the world a better place.

Ohio residents voted in favor of a ballot measure to legalize the sale of cannabis for nonmedicinal use in November, as well as the cultivation of the crop. In garnering 57 percent support among voters, the success of the measure will make Ohio the 24th U.S. state to enable commerce involving recreational cannabis, defying a long-standing federal prohibition on the distribution of the drug.

There’s been a rapid pace of offshore wind policy transformations in California since 2018, and the state is now at the precipice of constructing floating offshore wind farms in the Pacific. That is one of the takeaways from a panel discussion hosted by Reuters in September with industry and government leaders from the offshore wind sector.

Industrial outdoor storage (IOS) is industrial-zoned land primarily used for the storage of trucks, trailers, vans, large equipment, containers and materials. The land can be improved by installing pavement, perimeter fencing and flood lighting. The defining factor of IOS, as compared with traditional enclosed industrial, is that the primary value is derived from the open, horizontal outdoor space, rather than a vertical building. This is reflected in the way IOS properties are rented on a per acre basis as opposed to per square foot. Any enclosed spaces on an IOS property serve ancillary purposes, such as truck maintenance and repair, loading and unloading, or back-office needs, and typically make up less than 20 percent of the property.

There are few trends in private wealth that are more talked about than the so-called death of the traditional 60/40 stock-and-bond portfolio. The reason? Though the 60/40 has served investors well for decades, the historic bull market on Wall Street is believed to be running out of steam, and the bond market has been dragged down by interest rates far lower than historic rates, (though that has changed over the past couple of years with Fed rate hikes). Some industry observers suggest the 60/40 will be replaced by the emergence of more diversified portfolios containing a rich blend of alternatives and real assets. That could mean the 60/40 will be reformulated as a 50/30/20 or 40/30/30 portfolio.

State Street writes that the investment industry runs on data, and recent advances in data quality and access have built the industry to its current state. Further innovations in the aggregation and use of data will transform the investment business, it reasons in a report it published and titled, Capturing the data opportunity: Institutional investors in the age of AI. Read it here.

The Department of Labor (DOL) is soon to release a rule proposal that is expected to strengthen protections for retirement savers who receive conflicted advice from their financial advisers. Due to loopholes in the DOL’s current rules, financial professionals and firms are free to put their own self-interest ahead of retirement investors’ interests. They may steer retirement savers into products, services or account types that maximize their own revenues but come with excessively high costs, poor performance, unnecessary risks or illiquidity, thereby undermining retirement savers’ financial security. Conflicts of interest among many advisers take a huge toll on the ability of millions of hardworking Americans to have a financially secure and dignified retirement.

Amidst the backdrop of a tumultuous economy, rising interest rates and frozen transaction markets, institutional target allocations to real estate have remained flat for the first time in 10 years, at 10.8 percent, finds the 11th annual Institutional Real Estate Allocations Monitor, published by Hodes Weill & Associates and Cornell University’s Baker Program in Real Estate. Institutions have chosen to spend 2023 focused on managing their existing portfolios in an environment in which investors are waiting for valuations to find a bottom. While the survey finds that institutions expect to hold target allocations steady in 2024, investors believe the next few years will prove to be good vintage years to capitalize on expected dislocation and distress.