What’s in This Week’s Issue…

Good morning. For decades, owning a home was the foundation of the American Dream: buy a house, build equity, pass wealth to your children.

But today, millions of Americans are locked out of ownership not because they failed, but because the rules of the game were rewritten.

The buyers competing against them aren’t other families anymore.

They’re private equity firms with billions in cash, government-backed loans, and political protection. And the more they buy, the more permanent the lockout becomes.

So this week…

• 🏆 The Big Play: How private equity turned a housing crash into a permanent system of control

• 💪 The Power Move: What you can do when Wall Street owns the roof over your head

• 💵 Follow the Money: How North Korean IT workers are taking over American companies

-GEN

🏆 The Big Play

The biggest money power story of the week.

How Wall Street Hijacked America’s Housing

To see how we got here, we have to go back to the last crisis.

When the 2008 housing crash wiped out nearly 10 million families, it wasn’t just homes that were lost. It was the collapse of the old housing system itself.

A system where ownership was widespread, and family homes were primarily bought by people who planned to live in them.

But Wall Street saw something different: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turn America’s most basic need into a permanent revenue stream.

That transformation unfolded in three stages:

1. From Crisis to Cash Flow: How Wall Street Bought the Suburbs

Private equity firms like Blackstone, Apollo, and Starwood didn’t just buy foreclosed homes, they invented a new asset class out of them:

• Blackstone’s Invitation Homes snapped up tens of thousands of single-family homes, then pioneered rent-backed securities that bundled rental income into tradable purchased by investors.

• This financial product that let Wall Street profit twice: once from the tenants paying rent, and again from investors buying the securities.

• By 2025, institutional investors owned over 574,000 single-family homes, controlling entire neighborhoods in cities like Atlanta, Phoenix, and Charlotte.

• The model is no longer limited to existing homes. Firms now fund “build-to-rent” subdivisions where no one will ever own the property they live in.

The shift wasn’t just financial. It was cultural.

Homeownership stopped being a cornerstone of the middle class, and became just another product for Wall Street’s balance sheets.

And once the homes became assets, the next step was obvious: maximize their return.

2. The Extraction Machine: Turning Renters Into Profit Centers

Unlike mom-and-pop landlords, private equity doesn’t view tenants as neighbors. It views them as revenue streams to be optimized:

• Rent hikes: Corporate landlords raised rents faster than market averages, with PE-owned properties posting 12% increases during the pandemic alone.

• Fee stacking: Everything became monetized, from “pet rent” to online payment fees to maintenance charges, turning everyday living into a subscription model.

• Algorithmic pricing: With software like RealPage, landlords coordinated rent increases across entire markets, keeping prices artificially high even when supply rose.

• Aggressive evictions: Studies show tenants in PE-owned properties are 10% more likely to be evicted than those in non-institutional rentals.

But here’s the kicker: much of the money extracted from tenants flows back to pension funds for teachers, nurses, and firefighters, the very people struggling with rising rents.

Wall Street built a machine that extracts wealth from families twice: once through their rent, and again through their retirement contributions.

But building that machine wasn’t enough. To protect it, they needed something stronger than spreadsheets. They needed politics.

3. The Political Moat

Private equity didn’t just profit from the housing crisis. They used those profits to make sure the system could never be challenged:

• In California, voters tried twice (Prop 10 in 2018 and Prop 21 in 2020) to expand rent control. Private equity firms spent tens of millions to crush both measures.

• On Capitol Hill, they preserved the carried interest loophole, saving billions in taxes that could have gone to public housing programs.

• In 2024 alone, PE firms poured $231 million into political contributions, buying influence to ensure federal housing reform never touches their profits.

This political moat completes the circle:

housing is financialized → tenants are squeezed → profits are protected by law → any attempt at reform gets drowned in campaign cash.

At this point, housing isn’t broken by accident. It’s functioning exactly as designed: as a closed system that transfers wealth upward, permanently.

💪 The Power Moves

Playbook for understanding the game of power.

What You Can Do When Wall Street Owns Housing

Private equity's housing takeover reveals the blueprint for modern wealth extraction: identify a basic human need, financialize it, then optimize the system for maximum rent extraction while eliminating alternatives.

This isn't just happening in housing.

It's the same playbook being applied to healthcare, education, infrastructure, and every other sector where private equity can insert itself between you and something you need.

The pattern is always the same.

But understanding this system gives you power. Because once you see how wealth transfers work, you can position yourself on the right side of them.

The housing crisis created two groups: those who lost homes and became permanent renters, and those who bought distressed assets and became permanent landlords.

The next crisis will create the same dynamic in different sectors.

The Takeaway:

In a system designed to transfer wealth from workers to investors, your financial survival depends on understanding which side of each transaction puts you in control.

The goal isn't to become a private equity firm. It's to stop being their product.

And that starts with recognizing that in today's economy, every basic need is being turned into someone else's investment opportunity.

Your job is to make sure you're the investor, not the investment.

💵 Following the Money

Three of the wildest financial and corruption stories from around the world.

#1 - Trump allows 600,000 Chinese students in US, angering conservative supporters

#2 - How North Korean IT Workers are Taking Over Companies in the US, Japan, and South Korea

#3 - Ukraine strikes Russian fuel sites, Moscow rations supplies

✨ Poll time!

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