On U.S. social media, false and harmful posts from connections shilling the dubious products of multi-level marketing (MLM) companies have become inescapable.

Why it matters: Trust in media is descending to unprecedented depths — and social media increasingly is media. News is not a distinct category any more, so much as it's a single ingredient in a wide-ranging and often highly toxic stew of highly disparate posts.

• When a large part of Americans' media consumption comprises untrustworthy posts from MLM shillers, that alone is likely to poison the entire pot.

The big picture: Facebook, TikTok, Snap and other social networks find it easy to sell advertising slots to businesses for hundreds of billions of dollars per year because those ads more than pay for themselves.

• Alongside the ads appear "native" posts from friends, colleagues, relations, and others — people we know and trust.
• Since the pandemic, those posts and DMs have been home to an ever-increasing barrage of MLM sales pitches, a huge number of them illegal.
• Even before the pandemic, roughly half of Americans said they felt inundated by MLM sales pitches — and 51% said they've spent too much on MLM products.

Between the lines: If you're not nodding with recognition, you're an outlier.

• The phenomenon is underreported, explains MLM expert Robert FitzPatrick, because "journalists are the least affected people."
• After all, the main thing that MLM sellers do isn't selling so much as recruiting — they hire other people to sign up to become sellers. And skeptical journalists, by their nature, are extremely unlikely to sign up for anything involving selling a product, especially if doing so involves lying about its effects.

How it works: In a comprehensive new paper, Alexandra Roberts, of Northwestern Law School, lays out the multitude of laws, rules, and contracts that are violated by most such posts — the FTC Act; state consumer protection statutes; the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act; the Lanham Act; the social media sites' terms of service; and even the sellers' own contracts with the MLM companies themselves, which are carefully designed to blame the victims rather than the corporations who are profiting.

• In her own survey, Roberts found that more than 40% of sellers were unaware of any laws they might be breaking — and most of the rest were quite capable of coming up with reasons why they failed to comply with marketing restrictions.
• "Less than 1% of sellers actually make money from this work," Roberts tells Axios, "so when they make false claims they're exposing themselves to a lot of liability for no payoff."

What we're watching: Roberts makes the case that the only way to de-poison the well is to ensure that MLMs can no longer "run on free advertising and consumer deception" — including by ensuring they're held liable for all false claims made by sellers on their behalf.

The bottom line: So long as the MLM industry continues in its current form, the broad national discourse — which is to say our social media feeds — will remain badly contaminated and untrustworthy.

• Roberts tells Axios that we naturally trust our friends more than we trust corporations and news outlets. When our trust in our friends erodes, that has knock-on effects for our trust in everything else.
• We're already seeing the implications for the news media and for democracy itself.

Israel's longstanding cultivation of its global diaspora as a source of funds paid off last quarter, as Jews around the world kept on lending the country money at much lower rates than the commercial markets.

Why it matters: Both Israel and many of its investors are sophisticated players of the arbitrage between debts issued to different types of bondholders. (Traders need not apply: The diaspora bonds are non-tradable.)

How it works: Bonds issued to the Jewish diaspora — carrying names like "Maccabee," "Mazel Tov," and "Shalom" — have historically yielded slightly more than the rates available to the state of Israel in the international bond markets.

• That might be because of their illiquidity, but it is also a little surprising, given that, as the University of Virginia's Douglas Mulliken has demonstrated, they are structurally senior to the country's commercial debt.
• As a result, gentile investors including Warren Buffett have also shown a strong interest in the program.

The big picture: A new paper from law professor and sovereign debt savant Mitu Gulati and two of his colleagues shows not only how the spread between diaspora and commercial rates has changed over time, but also how years of goodwill allowed the country to raise money from its diaspora at well below commercial rates, after those yields spiked following the Hamas attack on Oct. 7.

• By the numbers: In the second half of October, diaspora bonds were being successfully issued at 5.5%. Meanwhile, conventional bonds were trading at a yield of 7.4%, almost two full percentage points higher.
• Flashback: A similar, if smaller, inversion happened after the pandemic hit in early 2020.

Between the lines: Diaspora investments can be seen in the stock market as well as the bond market. Value-focused hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and his wife, Neri Oxman, spent about $25 million to buy a 4.9% stake in the Tel Aviv stock exchange this week.

• The investment "represents our support for Israel," the couple said in a statement.

The bottom line: Many countries have tried to tap their diasporas for funds. Israel is by far the biggest success story.

Here's a conundrum that puzzled me after I was introduced to it by Elizabeth Renter of NerdWallet: Why are single parents so much richer than single non-parents?

Why it matters: It's generally understood that the more money you make, the more money you'll have. But that doesn't seem to be the case when you look at the Fed's triennial survey of consumer finances.

Where it stands: Since the 2013 survey, single parents have been getting much richer — in 2022, the median such adult was worth $50,750, almost three times the $18,023 of nine years earlier. (All numbers are in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars.)

• Single non-parents under the age of 55, meanwhile, both earned more than the single parents for the entire period and didn't have any kids to support. And yet their net worth lagged, hovering around the $20,000 level the whole time.

Be smart: I'll share the best guess that Renter and I came up with after the ad. But before you see that, how would you explain this chart? Reply to this email and tell me what you think.

The way most Americans build wealth isn't by making more money, it's by owning a home.

Why it matters: Between 2007 and 2022, single non-parents fell out of love with homeownership. While the single-parent homeownership rate stayed relatively steady over that time — around 50% — the rate for single non-parents fell to a mere 29%.

Between the lines: It's hard to be footloose and fancy-free once you're raising a child; instead, you tend to seek stability and certainty. That means you're much more likely to want to buy a home. There are also societal expectations that parents should be homeowners.

By the numbers: In a survey Harris Poll conducted for NerdWallet, 47% of renters who are parents with children under age 18 say they are embarrassed to say they rent rather than own.

• That compares with just 29% of non-parent renters.

In other words: There's strong and measurable societal pressure to buy a home once you have a child — and that pressure, in turn, can end up translating into wealth.

The bottom line: That higher net worth for single parents probably isn't very liquid.

When a government is worried that its stock market has fallen too far, sometimes it tries to buy stocks in an attempt to turn the market around. China is looking to unleash about $278 billion to that effect shortly.

Why it matters: Economists generally hate this move, saying it introduces inefficiencies to markets. But policymakers are generally more open to it.

Flashback: Vox's Tim Lee gave a good example of the textbook case against governments buying stocks in 2015, after China started propping up the stock market. That intervention turns out to have been underwhelming.

• A previous intervention, in Hong Kong in 1998, however, was much more successful.
• A Japanese program to buy ETFs in 2010 also worked, if not quite as well.

Be smart: Economists nearly always like options — the mere option to do something, even if you end up not doing it, is seen as having some positive value.

• That explains why Janet Yellen supported giving the Fed the option to buy stocks in 2020, even though she was clear she didn't think the Fed should buy stocks at the time.

The bottom line: In a world where the level stock market can directly drive public confidence, it's easy to see why policymakers might be attracted to the idea of bidding up their home markets.

I featured the Kaffee Klatsch Leadership Lounge in last week's newsletter, but it turns out I was remiss in naming only one of its tenants.

Between the lines: Andrew Kalish, a senior vice president at Handshake, another of the tenants, wrote to Axios with a desire "to make sure all putting up the money to make it a reality get proper recognition."

For the record, then: The Kaffee Klatsch Leadership Lounge was rented out by:

• Hub Culture, with its "mission to enhance collective consciousness ecosystems";
• Handshake, which "builds, aligns & activates​ your social impact goals" by providing action-oriented strategy and executive thought leadership;
• Brand Fuel, which is "a free-spirited, globally recognized brand merchandising agency with a focus on creating meaningful connections and sustainability."

The bottom line: If they (and you) return next year, now you know where to find the #leadership.