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Not long after U.S. housing prices reached a record high this summerthe median existing home went for $435,000 in JunePresident Donald Trump said that he was considering a plan to make home sales tax-free. Supporters of the idea, introduced by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as the No Tax on Home Sales Act in July, say it would benefit working families by eliminating all taxes on the sales of family homes. But most Americans who sell their homes already do so tax-free. And the households that would gain most under Trumps proposals are those with the most valuable real estate. As a legal scholar who studies how taxes affect racial and economic inequality, I see this proposal as part of a familiar pattern: measures advertised as relief for ordinary families that mostly benefit the well-off. Most families already sell their homes tax-free Right now, according to the Internal Revenue Code, a single person pays no tax on the first $250,000 in gain from a home sale, while married people can exclude $500,000. All told, about 90% of home sales generate less than $500,000 in gains, so the overwhelming majority of sellers already owe no tax. The minority who would see new benefits from the proposed tax change are those with more than $500,000 in appreciation, typically owners of high-priced homes in hot real estate markets. Yales Budget Lab estimated the average benefit for these tax-free sales was $100,000 per qualifying seller. Homeownership itself isnt equally distributed across the U.S. population. About 44% of Black Americans are homeowners, compared with 74% of white Americans. That racial gap has only widened over the past 10 years. Similarly, single womenparticularly but not exclusively women of colorface additional barriers. A broader trend of upward wealth transference Though still just a proposal, the tax-free home sales bill is part of a broader set of Republican tax plans that would have regressive effectsthat is, where the vast majority of benefits go to high-income people and very few to low-income peopleunder a pro-worker banner. Trump floated the tax-free home sales idea less than three weeks after he signed a large package of tax and spending measures in July 2025. That bill generated strong public criticism because of its emphasis on tax savings for the rich at the expense of almost a trillion dollars in cuts for federally funded healthcare for the poor and disabled. The home sales idea follows the same scriptand echoes the distributional pattern established by his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That tax reform increased racial wealth and income disparities and provided 80% of its benefits to corporations and high-income individuals. In fact, my research shows that white households received more than twice as many tax cuts as Black households from that law. The same dynamic plays out in this new tax-fueled housing policy. Eliminating capital gains taxes on home sales would primarily benefit the 29 million homeowners who already have substantial equitya group that skews heavily white, male, and upper middle class. Meanwhile, Americas millions of renters, disproportionately people of color and women, would receive no benefit while potentially losing access to social programs Congress must cut to fund these tax breaks. Beverly Moran is a professor emerita of law at Vanderbilt University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Zillow is facing mounting legal battlesincluding a lawsuit Tuesday brought by the Federal Trade Commission alleging that Zillow paid rival Redfin $100 million to exit and stop competing in the online apartment rental listings market. The FTC claims the arrangementframed publicly as a partnershipwas in fact an unlawful anticompetitive agreement that eliminated Redfin as a meaningful competitor in the online rental space. According to the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the February 2025 deal required Redfin to terminate its advertising contracts, step away from competing in multifamily property advertising for up to nine years, and act solely as a syndicator of Zillows rental listings. The FTC alleges the arrangement not only harmed Redfin employeeshundreds of whom were laid offbut also renters and property managers, who now face reduced competition, higher costs, and fewer innovations in rental search platforms. Paying off a competitor to stop competing against you is a violation of federal antitrust laws,” wrote Daniel Guarnera, Director of the FTCs Bureau of Competition, in a press release published on September 30. Zillow paid millions of dollars to eliminate Redfin as an independent competitor in an already concentrated advertising marketone thats critical for renters, property managers, and the health of the overall U.S. housing market. The FTC will do our part to ensure that Americans who are looking for safe, affordable rentals receive all the benefits of robust competition between internet listing services like Zillow and Redfin. The suit is the fourth major legal challenge filed against Zillow in just over three months, underscoring growing scrutiny of the companys business practices: June 23, 2025: Compass filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging Zillows ban on private listings was anticompetitive and harmed brokerages. July 30, 2025: Commercial real estate giant CoStar sued Zillow for copyright infringement, seeking more than $1 billion in damages. September 19, 2025: A class-action lawsuit was filed against Zillow, accusing the company of hiding agent fees within its Flex referral program. September 30, 2025: The FTC filed its suit alleging Zillows $100 million agreement with Redfin was designed to suppress competition in rental advertising. The rapid-fire succession of lawsuitsspanning copyright, antitrust, consumer protection, and federal enforcementhas put Zillow under one of the most intense legal spotlights in its corporate history. The outcomes could ripple well beyond Zillow itself, potentially influencing how much choice, transparency, and information consumers have when navigating the housing market. This will be something to watch in 2026 and beyond.
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E-Commerce
TikTok is a one-stop-shop for recipe inspo, viral dance trends, tin-foil-hat conspiracies, and, increasingly, political commentary. Now, its also where one in five Americans are getting their news. Thats according to a Pew Research Center analysis published last week, which has tracked a dramatic uptick in news consumption on the platform, up from just 3% in 2020. During that span, no social media platform weve studied has experienced faster growth in news consumption, Pew noted. In Pews survey, 43% of adults under 30 said they regularly get their news on TikTok, up from 9% five years ago. But it’s not just younger people. A quarter of adults between the ages of 30 and 49 also regularly turn to TikTok as a news source, compared to just 2% in 2020. This analysis is based on Pews survey of 5,153 U.S. adults between August 18 and 24. While the researchers focused only on adult TikTok users, overall more than half of TikTok users (55%) now say they regularly get news on the platform, up from 22% in 2020. TikTok is now on par with several other social media sites including X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Truth Social in the share of its adult users who regularly get news there, researchers wrote. The tide on TikTok has been turning for some time, with more and more media outlets and independent journalists adapting to reach new audiences and doubling down on vertical video. These days, snappy, shareable content, delivered in 30 seconds or less, is far more likely to hook audiences shrinking attention spans than long form reporting. The quality of this news content is another story. Since much of this content comes from individual creators, or newsfluencers, rather than established news organizations, fact and opinion can often be presented interchangeably, and misinformation can spread quickly. News delivered directly to the FYP, courtesy of a highly individualized algorithm, has the problem of sinking people further and further into echo chambers of their own creation. It then begs the question: What kind of news are we each consuming?
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E-Commerce
Factory activity shrank in much of the world last month, private surveys showed on Wednesday, as signs of a slowdown in U.S. growth and the anticipated impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs added to pressure from weak Chinese demand. Euro zone manufacturing slipped back into contraction as new orders fell at their fastest rate in six months, with export markets acting as a particular drag, signalling that the recovery in the region’s industrial sector was fragile. The HCOB Eurozone Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI), compiled by S&P Global, fell to 49.8 in September from August’s 50.7, which was the first reading above the 50.0-point line denoting growth since mid-2022. “The drop in the PMI is showing up across the board, with respective figures for consumer goods, capital goods and intermediate goods all down on the month,” said Cyrus de la Rubia, chief economist at Hamburg Commercial Bank. Surveys revealed a split across the currency union with the Netherlands leading the expansion with activity at a 38-month high while growth continued in Greece, Ireland and Spain. Meanwhile, the bloc’s three largest economies Germany, France and Italy all registered contractions. In Britain, outside the European Union, activity shrank at the fastest pace in five months, reflecting subdued domestic demand and fewer export orders, painting a more downbeat picture than recent official data. In Asia, the stress on manufacturers highlights the challenge policymakers face in protecting their export-reliant region from higher U.S. levies, a key policy of the Trump administration that has upended the global trade order and put the brakes on economic growth. Export powerhouse Japan and global tech hub Taiwan saw manufacturing activity shrink in September, the surveys showed, leaving businesses in Asia heavily dependent on the U.S. market on a fragile footing. Worryingly, China, a key engine of the global economy, also remained in the doldrums. An official survey released on Monday showed manufacturing activity in the world’s second-biggest economy contracted for a sixth month in September, dragged down by weak consumption and the squeeze from U.S. tariffs. The prolonged slump underlines the twin pressures on China’s economy: Domestic demand has failed to mount a durable recovery in the years since the coronavirus pandemic, while Trump’s tariffs have squeezed Chinese factories as well as overseas firms that buy components. “The September PMI readings for most countries in Asia remained weak and we continue to expect manufacturing activity in the region to struggle in the near term,” said Shivaan Tandon, emerging markets economist at Capital Economics. “With growth set to soften and inflation likely to remain contained, we expect central banks in Asia to loosen policy further.” The S&P Global Japan Manufacturing PMI fell to 48.5 in September from 49.7 in August, staying below the 50.0 threshold. It shrank at the fastest pace in six months due to steep falls in output and new orders, the survey showed. Taiwan’s manufacturing PMI fell to 46.8 last month. Factory activity also shrank in the Philippines and Malaysia, the private surveys showed. By contrast, South Korea’s factory activity expanded for the first time in eight months underpinned by improving overseas demand. The manufacturing PMI in Asia’s fourth-largest economy, released by S&P Global, rose to 50.7 in September, moving above the 50-mark for the first time since January 2025. The outlook for South Korea’s exporters, however, hinges on negotiations to formalise a July deal aimed at reducing U.S. tariffs on Korean goods imports including automobiles to 15% from 25% in return for South Korea’s investment of $350 billion in the U.S. The talks have stalled due to Seoul’s concerns over foreign exchange implications. India’s manufacturing sector expansion lost some momentum and slipped to its weakest pace in four months, suggesting Washington’s punitive 50% tariffs on its goods could be starting to hurt Asia’s third-largest economy. Jonathan Cable and Leika Kihara, Reuters
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E-Commerce
Last week, two Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) LP decks leaked to Newcomer. As far as I (and Google and ChatGPT) can tell, this is only the second time ever that internal Andreessen Horowitz documents have leaked. The firm is notoriously secretive. I am much too humble and my fund is much too insignificant to seriously believe that my Substack from September 3Andreessen Horowitz is not a Venture Capital Fundand its subsequent republishing on Fast Company could possibly have annoyed the Sand Hill Road behemoth so much that it decided to leak its own LP deck for the first time in history. But you gotta love the timing. Regardless of why the decks were leaked or by whom, the data they contain is a rare look at how the firm has evolved. I spent some time yesterday afternoon trying to piece together a picture of a16zs profits, based on whats publicly known, and the new data that leaked. I hesitate to share them in full because any detailed conclusion requires too many assumptions to be useful. But I will tell you three indisputable takeaways from my analysis: Andreessen has made a lot of money for its investors. Andreessen has made a lot of money for itselfby my calculations, somewhere between a third and half of what its returned to all of its investors combined. A very sizable chunk of its revenue has been from management feesat least 25%, likely a lot more. Which brings me back to the post I had been planning to share this week before the leak: The disruption of venture capital Three years ago, I wrote a piece titled, A great disruption is coming for venture capital. For context, after graduating business school, I worked with Clayton Christensenthe man who developed the theory of disruptive innovation, whom I also studied under while at Harvard. His body of work is among the most impactful in the history of management science, because it predicts why and how massively successful companiesthe incumbents in an industrycan make all the right, rational strategy decisions, only to be disrupted by lower-cost, higher-access upstarts. As you might imagine, working for the guy shaped how I see the world to this day. Even before I started VC investing, I realized venture capital was on a predictable path to disruption. Looking at venture through Christensens lens, I saw big funds moving upmarket, leaving the door open to disruptors (in this case, smaller emerging funds) to eat the category from the bottom up. Key to the theory of disruptive innovation is the idea that incumbents are incentivized to focus on their most profitable customers, in order to capture more revenue and higher margins. In doing so, they leave their less profitable customers for the taking. Upstarts come in with a right-sized alternative, and get better over time, until all or most customerseven the biggest, most profitable onesflock to them. This is how incumbents get disrupted. This is how I recently realized that one key part of my initial analysis was wrong. I wasnt wrong at the headline level: Incumbent VC funds (aka megafunds) are absolutely getting disrupted. I was wrong about who their customer is. As an early stage VC, I believe the founder is my customer. If I do right by them, Ill be massively successful in the long term. This is how I run my fund to this day, and its the lens through which I published the original disruption of venture capital essay. But after raising my own funds, Ive come to realize that, when it comes to how VCs make money, the founder is not the customerthe limited partners (LP) or the people and institutions that invest in VC funds are. Which means that incumbent funds arent moving upmarket because theyre chasing their most profitable founderstheyre moving upmarket because theyre chasing their most profitable LPs. How Andreessen Horowitz makes money Lets go back to the leaked decks. a16zs most recently announced fund from earlier this year claimed $7.2 billion of assets under management. Assuming standard VC terms (2% fee, 1% stepped down fee, 10 year fund term), a16z would make $144 million per year in fees alone during the investment period, and half of that amount every year after that until the end of the fund cycle. If you add up the fees a16z is earning from every one of its reported funds, assuming the standard VC terms above, then this year it stands to make about $700 million in fees alone. Given the limitations of the data that leaked, its hard to tell how much it makes in carry (its mixed in with recycled capital in the slide). But, needless to say, it is a lot of money. Andreessen Horowitz is now reportedly raising a $20 billion fund. If successful, this new fund will net the firm another $400 million per year on fees alone during the investment period. In other words: The bigger the fund, the bigger the fees. As you raise more funds, the fees accumulate. Its a sweet business model. I mean this honestly: Can you blame these guys for chasing the biggest LPs and pitching increasingly gigantic funds, considering how much they stand to make here? Thats why they keep inventing new strategies to absorb and deploy more and more capital. Because you cant cost-effectively deploy $20 billion in small, high alpha, early stage rounds. It needs to deploy big numbers. So that it can raise even bigger funds. And this is exactly what incumbents moving upmarket looks like. Literally a textbook example. I wish Clay were still alive so I could talk to him about it. What Christensen would say happens next As incumbents move upmarket, they leave the bottom of the market ripe for disruption. Small funds, disciplined early stage investors, and emerging managers are the ones filling the gap. Because of our fund sizes, fees are tinythis sector of the market makes money off the carry, not the fee, in perfect alignment with our LPs, which our LPs also love. The best of these disruptive managers are hungrier, more aligned, nd structurally motivated to find alpha-rich founders and ideasexactly what LPs want. Over time, more and more LPs will realize this, and will add a pocket for new VC to their portfolios. These upstart funds will thrivehistorically, smaller and emerging funds return way more to their investors. And eventually, this emerging layer of investors will become the true, new venture capital industry. The megafunds will continue to make money, right up until the opportunity to deploy it profitably in gigantic pre-IPO megarounds disappears. Theyll be competing with large asset allocators, not only for deals, but more critically, for LP dollars. At that point, theyll have a choice. They can fully morph into asset managers, more like banks and hedge funds; they can try to disrupt from within; or they can join the ranks of bygone incumbents of yore. Why this matters I wrote about this last time more at length, but its worth revisiting. As megafunds move upmarket, their deployment strategy doesnt resemble venture capital anymoretheyre making large consensus bets and competing away the alpha. If youre a non-consensus founder planning to pitch consensus funds, my advice is just to know before you go, and dont be discouraged by the outcome. Find true VC fundsearly, non-consensus, founder-firstand prioritize pitching there. And dont take your eye off your traction. If youre a VC investor, know your strategy and stick to it. Alpha is being eaten away by consensus firms. If you dont have the assets under management (AUM) to compete at that level, discipline and focus are key. And finally, if youre an LPknow what youre investing in. If your VC portfolio is all consensus funds, Id venture to say you no longer have true, alpha-seeking VC exposure. Thats why more and more LPs are starting to shape an emerging fund strategysmaller allocations by design, just like their original VC portfolio from 20 to 30 years ago, before todays incumbents morphed into megafunds.This article was originally published in Leslie Feinzaigs Venture With Leslie newsletter.
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E-Commerce
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