Monday's economy stories

What Trump told the Boy Scouts
President Trump addressed the National Jamboree of the Boy Scouts of America on Monday, riling up the big crowd with attacks on the media and boasts about his election victory.
He noted that 10 of his cabinet members were scouts, and three of them — Energy Sec. Rick Perry, Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke and Health and Human Services Sec. Tom Price — joined him on stage. At one point Trump joked that Price "better get" the votes needed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, "otherwise I'll say, 'Tom, you're fired.'"
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who Trump publicly criticized Monday and has discussed replacing, is an Eagle Scout but was not in attendance.

The Athletic thinks people will pay for quality sports journalism
The Athletic, a locally-focused, subscription-supported sports publication, announced its expansion into nationwide coverage today with the splashy hires of Stewart Mandel for college football and Seth Davis for college basketball.
What makes it different: The Athletic charges $5.99 a month (or $40 for a full year) to access its content, allowing it to provide a clean ad-free presentation to readers. From Mandel: "The Athletic's subscriber model allows us to focus entirely on high-quality written content. NO ads, NO auto-play videos, NO clickbait."
Why it matters: An AP NORC Center and American Press Institute study earlier this year found that 53% of people are willing to pay for news that suits their interests and fosters a good user experience. Spikes in subscriptions and investments in subscription products across diverse, often-specialized publications like The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times' cooking section and The Information prove that trend. By investing in a clean user experience and backing it up with quality niche content, The Athletic is hoping to latch onto the trend.
Attention deficit: Breaking through Trump
"In the age of Trump, global players — from tech companies to governments — have to shout," seven BuzzFeed reporters and editors:
The sheer attention Trump absorbs — on Twitter, on television, in culture, and in the anxious dreams of American citizens and the country's allies and enemies — draws away the lifeblood of everything from the launch of new apps to new social movements. Attention is the currency not just of American attention-seekers from Kim Kardashian to Amazon, but also of the other great geniuses of attention-seeking over the last decade: terror groups like ISIS, and opponents of the postwar social order like Julian Assange. Trump hoards attention...

The sky-high pay of health care CEOs
The CEOs of 70 of the largest U.S. health care companies cumulatively have earned $9.8 billion in the seven years since the Affordable Care Act was passed, and their earnings have grown faster than most Americans' during that time, according to an Axios analysis of federal financial documents.
Why it matters: The ACA has not hurt the health care industry. Stock prices have boomed, and CEOs took home nearly 11% more money on average every year since 2010 — far outstripping the wage growth of nearly all Americans. But the analysis also reveals that the pay packages for the country's influential health care executives don't give them incentives to control health care spending — something that economists, policymakers and even Warren Buffett have said is the most pressing problem in health care.

E-commerce's next victim: commercial real estate
The shift to on-line shopping is now striking at the underlying value of malls, and commercial real estate as a whole.
- About $120 billion in U.S. commercial mortgages mature this year: Borrowers went delinquent on about $2.4 billion of it in June alone, according to Trepp, a real estate data provider, quoted by the WSJ.
- It was the largest rise in delinquencies in six years, according to Fitch, the rating agency. Fitch's silver lining: it's not as bad as it expected at the beginning of the year.
- Still, more defaults are coming: The credit industry expects delinquencies on such debt to escalate over the coming year, according to a new poll of portfolio managers, and to spread globally.
- Look at this number: In the FT, Blackstone executive Nadeem Meghji said the value of regional malls in smaller cities may be down 40% on average over the last two years.
- We are only seven months into the year: Retailers have announced plans to close 76 million square feet of store space already this year, according to CoStar, a data provider, almost as much as that announced in the whole of 2016.
"Second-order effects": Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, an auditing firm, tells Axios that the plunge in valuations is likely to spread to office buildings and other commercial real estate. That will then affect surrounding communities. "They won't have those property taxes," he said.




