BAILOUT NATION: China considers local government purchases of unsold homes.

China’s property sector has been in a deep slump for years, hit by a debt crisis among developers. Since 2022, waves of policy measures have failed to turn around the sector that represents around a fifth of the economy and remains a major drag on consumer spending and confidence.

Banks have been reluctant to heed Beijing’s repeated nudges to bolster credit to the embattled sector given the risks of more bad loans and continued weak sales. Home sales value of top 100 developers in April slid 45% from a year earlier, according to recent surveys published by CRIC, a major real estate information provider.

The Politburo of the Communist Party held a meeting on April 30, saying it would improve policies to clear mounting housing inventories.

Dozens of cities have offered subsidies to encourage residents to replace their old apartments with new ones, in order to sell their growing stock of new apartments and provide crucial cash-flow to ailing developers.

Local state-owned enterprises would be asked to help purchase unsold homes from distressed developers at steep discounts using loans provided by state banks, according to the report, adding that many of these homes would then be converted into affordable housing.

China’s state-owned enterprises (SOE) are already models of Communist inefficiency and overloaded with existing debt, so I’m not sure how this is going to work.

THAT’S HOW IT USUALLY WORKS: DEI consultant gets most of nursing school’s ‘racial healing’ grant.

LINCOLN BROWN: Colorado Town Tries to Shutter Church Homeless Ministry. “For Dys and the First Liberty Institute, the issue is about more than governmental overreach and a case of NIMBY. It is about the First Amendment. Dys told me that Castle Rock is attempting to force The Rock to cease and desist from pursuing its core mission. He added that the First Amendment means something and cannot be dismissed when a municipality says, ‘Because I said so.'”

THE PURGE: Cornell president steps down after seven years, becomes latest leader to resign amid Ivy League anti-Semitism epidemic.

DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Heart-stopping moment nine-year-old girl and her terrified mom come face-to-face with mountain lion after it chased their pets toward house.

I NEVER THOUGHT THEY WERE: Crypto-Libertarian Erik Voorhees Warns Your Chatbot Queries Are Not Safe. “In the best case that’s not that big of a deal, but in reality, what it means is – all your information – and essentially like parts of your mind like think your intellectual inquiries that you pursue – the things you think – the things you want to debate – the questions you have about life – and like big topics um can be known by Third parties.”

A NEW HOPE:

Full stack of Flight 4 Starship pic.twitter.com/TPprnj0zC4

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 16, 2024

LIMITED TIME DEAL: Worx String Edger & Weed Trimmer. CommissionEarned

PROF. CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: The Sun’s Most Powerful Flare in Seven Years Just Erupted. “That’s the most powerful solar flare of the current cycle, absolutely the most powerful since 2017, and comfortably within the top 20 solar flares ever measured.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Milestones on the Slippery Slope. “While you sip your coffee or eat your biscuits and gravy, let me draw your attention to a couple of stories that haven’t been on the radar this week.”

FRUITS OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY: Look Who Threatened to ‘Erase’ All White People. “A black man from New Jersey has been federally charged with threatening to mass murder white people in a genocide-scale shooting rampage. The would-be shooter wanted to “erase…all of them”—that is, eradicate the white race, according to the FBI.”

Maybe he can get a professorship at Harvard or Penn.

BORDER? WHAT BORDER?

EXCLUSIVE: Internal CBP data I obtained via FOIA request reveals 13 years of known gotaways data at the border, showing gotaways have *exploded* under the Biden admin compared to the Trump & Obama years.
This is the first time these numbers have ever been revealed.

FY2010… pic.twitter.com/LUQU5v87b2

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) May 15, 2024

This is not an accident.

More here.

THEY SHOULD KNOW, THEY’LL BE DOING IT: US intel officials warn Congress that election interference will be ‘more complex than ever.’

ISN’T THIS INTERESTING! Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) has an interesting donor in Pennsylvania who just happens to be the best buddy of Turkey’s Erdogan. Just coincidental, right? Right??

MARK JUDGE: My book launch.

ALL OF THE MSM’S BIDEN-TRUMP DEBATE QUESTIONS: You’re reading it first here … well, actually Daniel Oliver’s roundup of utterly predictable questions the MSM debate moderators will ask Biden and Trump is over at American Greatness.

MORE OVERCLASS ELECTION INTERFERENCE: Google Removes 35,000 YouTube Posts to ‘Safeguard’ EU Elections.

MAID IN CANADA: Euthanasia Escapee Has a Dire Warning.

YOU HAVEN’T HEARD THIS FROM ALVIN BRAGG, THOUGH:

Take a crime prevention class or go to jail: Westchester DA’s scathing rebuke of anti-Israel college protesters https://t.co/knrdbxO0qA pic.twitter.com/jDYo5sjhzw

— New York Post (@nypost) May 15, 2024

Related: To the Class of 2024: You Are All Diseased.

Not all. There are plenty of based frat guys out there, it turns out.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE FRENCH?

'Anti sex' beds arrive in Paris for Olympic Games athletes https://t.co/6ZQBCHgJbM

— New York Post (@nypost) May 15, 2024

To be fair, those look like the dorm beds when I was in college, which were notably unsuccessful at preventing sex.

DON SURBER: Ukraine may be lost: But bribes paid and supplies depleted mean FJB’s mission is accomplished.

THE TIMES, THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’ INDEED: Is this a political blockbuster-in-the-making? Latest Cygnal Battleground Survey of 1,500 Likely Voters in 39 key congressional districts finds that 55 percent of the Blacks responding consider the Democratic Party to be more extreme than the Republicans. That’s a 20 percent increase over the responses in March when the same question was posed. Cygnal also found significants shifts away from the Democrats among married and college-educated women.

RED ALERT:  Stewart Baker writes at the Volokh Conspiracy:  “Congress is Preparing to Restore Quotas in College Admissions … and Everywhere Else–as a Very Quiet Part of the Bipartisan ‘Privacy’ Bill.”  I haven’t had a chance to review the bill yet.  But the conservative civil rights lawyers who have had that opportunity all agree that this “bipartisan” bill will, if passed, be a disaster.  I assume the GOP staffers involved simply didn’t understand the ramifications of the “disparate impact” provisions in the bill.  But I’ll know more once I’ve read the bill myself.  In the meantime:  Dear Congress:  Please don’t pass this bill.

(Yes, I noticed Glenn posted this last evening, but it’s important enough to post again.)

YEAH, PRETTY MUCH:

CNN confirms the debate will be a 3-on-1 https://t.co/3jtjzLZD4v

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 15, 2024

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Inflation Puts More Retirees at Risk of Running Out of Money: Rising prices require bigger withdrawals from retirement savings.

Retirees took more money out of their savings to keep up with rising prices, raising the risk of depleting their nest eggs.

The rise in spending since 2021 shows how pernicious inflation can be for those in or near retirement, especially since higher prices can also erode the value of the cash and fixed-income investments many plan to live on in the near future, according to a study Boston College released Wednesday.

“High inflation later in life is often harmful to retirement security,” said Laura Quinby, a senior research economist at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research and co-author of the study.

Though inflation has cooled from the 9.1% pace it set for the 12 months ended in June 2022, it remains above the Federal Reserve’s 2% annual target rate. Prices rose 3.4% in April from a year earlier, according to the latest Labor Department data released Wednesday, compared with an annualized 3.5% pace in March.

Higher withdrawals are one reason Boston College projects that inflation caused a 14.2% decline in the financial wealth held by middle-income retirees between 2021 and 2025. (If rising interest rates trigger a recession, their wealth would decline 16.6%.)

Note that “inflation has cooled” just means the rate at which prices are rising has slowed. Things still cost more than they used to, and they’ll still cost more next year than they do this year. It doesn’t actually mean that things have gotten better, just that they’re getting worse more slowly.