U.S. household debt hit a new record at the end of March 2021 of almost $15 trillion. That’s a scary-looking number, and it is huge on a standalone basis. But the U.S. consumer is doing much better than they appear by simply looking at the debt side of the equation. In fact, U.S. households are in better shape financially than they have been in some time.

Office properties have taken quite a hit from COVID-19, even though the measurable cost has been obscured by the long-term nature of office leases. As of April, the U.S. office vacancy rate climbed to 15.9 percent, up 280 basis points year-over-year, while sublease space has more than doubled during that time, as measured by Yardi Matrix.

Want to send a chill through the executives sitting atop traditional banks and financial service providers? Flash them the resume belonging to Souheil Badran. It speaks of his stints at the likes of Alipay Americas (an Alibaba subsidiary), Digital River (a global e-commerce, payments and marketing services company), First Data Corp.’s ecommerce solutions group, M&I Data Services (a financial software and services firm), and Edo Interactive (which provides personalized offers and makes them automatically available through credit and debit cards). In essence, the sorts of fintech companies that have been disrupting legacy banking and financial companies for the past decade or more.

In the spring of 2020, all eyes were on New York City as the epicenter of the U.S. pandemic. More than a year later, New York City is a bellwether for what other cities’ recovery might look like. With NYC vaccination rates rising, job growth projected to rise and a near $100 billion city budget unveiled in April, the headlines look promising.

Since the real estate market collapsed in 2008, sending ripples across global markets, the construction industry has struggled, along with landlords, investors and other property owners. An initial surplus of empty units wiped out jobs at all levels, sending tradespeople and real estate experts alike scrambling to create new opportunities for themselves, which seemed to balance the equation for a while.

Germany and Norway have opened a new undersea cable, the €2 billion ($2.4 billion) project called Nordlink, which directly links the two countries’ electricity networks. It is considered to be the world’s longest subsea electrical interconnector.

Nautilus Data Technologies is developing a $300 million, 60-megawatt data center facility in a qualified opportunity zone in Millinocket, Maine.

Like an ever-increasing wave, self-storage began rather simply as a covered land play, owned mostly by mom-and-pop operators. Still today, the industry is about 65 percent owned by mom-and-pop operators, so the industry remains rather fragmented. But, as the attractive operating fundamentals, revealed during the 2008 recession, initially, and again during COVID, more institutional investors began to take notice. It seems self-storage performs well during upcycles and downcycles.

After several years of weak performance, many investors had soured on the prospects for investing in commodities. However, disciplined investors who have stuck with the asset class as an important part of a diversified multi-asset portfolio are seeing positive results.

Investors committed to student housing appear to have some stark challenges ahead. New data provides a final tally of the enrollment decline higher education experienced during the spring term of 2021. Total college enrollment fell 3.5 percent from a year earlier, a shortfall of 603,000 students. That was compounded by news the U.S. birth rate fell 4 percent in 2020, marking the lowest number of births since 1979 and the sixth consecutive year of declining birth rates.

At a recent conference, the COO of a large real estate investor was lamenting that he couldn’t actually say with accuracy the number of individual assets his firm’s various funds owned around the world, let alone speak to trends or forecasts from one asset class to the next without a massive data-pulling exercise from various teams. His plight is not unique and speaks to the challenges of real estate as a growing asset class and the ongoing struggle to harness data.

No less an intellect than physicist Albert Einstein once observed: “Reality is merely an illusion … albeit a persistent one.” The malleability of what we perceive as objective reality has long been a subject of fascination among spiritual sages and, more recently, technologists — the latter of whom have been working on creating augmented realities for reasons ranging from work to play. Alas, the bandwidth required to virtualize or augment human realities has been beyond our grasp.

After months of habit-forming behaviors, many shoppers have acclimated to shopping online. Breaking old habits and becoming confident in the use of a new channel are often perceived to be the largest barriers to online grocery adoption. Why did ecommerce adoption come slowly to the grocery business? How did the coronavirus pandemic change that? What nation has the highest online grocery penetration in the world? How is automation being used to change the economics of ecommerce grocery delivery? What foods top the list of online orders? What timeframe constitutes high-velocity service? And what will the grocery store of the future look like?

For most people, getting to the stars is nothing more than a dream. But on May 5, 2021, the 60th anniversary of the first suborbital flight, that dream became a little bit more achievable. The space company Blue Origin announced that it would start selling tickets for suborbital flights to the edge of space. The first flight is scheduled for July 20, and Jeff Bezos’ company is auctioning off one single ticket to the highest bidder.

What’s so special about special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs? That’s a question on the minds of many, as the blank-check fundraising vehicles recently have risen to prominence and domination.