The agency is reducing staffing requirements by more than 2,000 positions. Will new streamlined work schedules straighten up and fly right?
Your best investment could be a goose-feather-filled down jacket and a pair of fur-lined winter boots. Why? Because Michigan and Wisconsin are the hottest housing markets in the U.S.
That’s according to Redfin’s 2026 “hottest neighborhoods” ranking, where Michigan and Wisconsin took five of the top 10 spots between them.
Redfin senior economist Asad Khan explained:
“Midwest cities and lesser-known places in Florida are having a moment—and affordability is the reason. Many of these neighborhoods sit just outside major hubs like Milwaukee, Chicago, and Tampa, hitting a sweet spot: lower cost of living without giving up access to highly rated schools, shopping, and dining. They have the convenience of big cities without the big-city price tags.”
For small investors looking to offset risk with lower price points, the Great Lakes and other Midwest cities offer buy-and-hold workhorses to buttress your portfolio without sleepless nights.
According to Redfin’s 2026 analysis, Wisconsin landed three of the 10 hottest neighborhoods—Oak Creek, West Bend, and Menomonee Falls, all Milwaukee suburbs. Michigan contributed two more: Lincoln Park near Detroit and Howell in Southeast Michigan.
Redfin’s ranking was based on year-over-year growth in listing views and measures of buyer competition. Proving its staying power, 2026 was the second consecutive year that Midwestern metros dominated the list.
Here is how Redfin ranks the 10 hottest neighborhoods in America for 2026 and their respective median home sales prices:
In an unaffordable housing market, some of the prices on the Redfin list appear to be from a bygone era. Fortune reports that many of these markets are 30% or more below similar houses in coastal cities. For example, the Redfin top 10 list shows an average home price in Lincoln Park, on the outskirts of Detroit, at $158,000.
“For many, it’s not just about cheaper homes, but about being able to build wealth earlier without drowning in overhead,” Danielle Andrews, a real estate agent with Realty One Group Next Generation, previously told Fortune.
Crucially, offering more than just cheap accommodation, the Midwest is attracting residents for employment, lured by an affordable lifestyle commensurate with starter salaries.
For Generation Zers who are making entry-level salaries, “it’s going to be really difficult to survive and save money” in major cities like Los Angeles and New York, Sam Radbil, research and content strategist at Checkr, a background screening company, told CNBC. The Midwest already has a natural catchment of renters, too: university graduates entering the workforce.
The Wall Street Journal notes that one of the most sought-after areas for would-be residents is the stretch of Wisconsin along the Fox River Valley from Oshkosh to Green Bay. In the six surrounding counties near Appleton, Oshkosh, Neenah, and Green Bay, only 1 in 7 buyers spends over 30% of their income on housing—the bellwether for affordability—while the national average is 1 in 5.
Equally, only 40% of renters in the area spend more than 30%, compared to half nationwide, while wages are above the national level, thanks to the heavy emphasis on manufacturing jobs.
“It is the value play of the United States,” Joe Wadford, an economist at the Bank of America Institute, told the Journal. “It is a great place to put down roots.”
For remote workers who can keep high-paying jobs based on the coasts, parts of the Midwest are a potential gold mine. For investors, too, looking to release home equity, certain cities make sense; however, as out-of-towners flood in, prices are increasing, and potential investment properties are being snapped up by homebuyers.
In analyzing Redfin’s data, Fortune notes that Lincoln Park has seen a 14% year-over-year increase in home sales, and nearly 40% of homes here sold for over asking price, a trend also reflected in other in-demand parts of Michigan.
“It’s pretty low inventory,” Michigan-based Redfin Premier Anne Loehr said of Howell, Michigan, in the Redfin report. “There aren’t many homes to sell because it’s such a popular place.”
This is also visually reflected in Zillow’s Market Heat Index for March 2026, which showed the power balance shifting from buyers to sellers in certain Midwest markets. Meanwhile, the dynamic reversed in some Sunbelt markets, shifting from sellers to buyers.
For a combination of cash flow and appreciation, Norada Real Estate Investments did a side-by-side evaluation of major Midwestern markets—showing 8%+ cap rates from properties priced around $160K, generating rents of about $1,500 a month in B and B+ neighborhoods—and found that Cleveland, Indianapolis, Kansas City, and St. Louis were the top-performing metros, depending on which neighborhoods investors chose.
The Wall Street Journal/Realtor.com Spring 2026 Housing Market Ranking, which evaluates the 200 most populous U.S. metropolitan areas based on a mix of housing market conditions and broader measures of economic health and livability, had South Bend-Mishawaka, Indiana/Michigan, in the top spot for the second consecutive quarter, while Appleton, Wisconsin, was in second place.
There were other notable Midwest cities in the top 20, too, including:
As demonstrated across various reports, the Midwest is having its moment and appears to have stolen the Sunbelt’s thunder. For investors, the combination of affordability and jobs makes it an attractive proposition, but many people share the same idea of moving here, which is heating up competition for great deals. That’s to be expected and what investors want. Buying in an affordable area with no jobs is a recipe for disaster.
The good news is that the Midwest will continue to have heat indices in the high 90s for a while to come. “The Midwest will become the fastest-growing region of the country by the end of the decade,” said demographer Diana Lind, publisher of the New Urban Order newsletter.
However, the Midwest is not monolithic. It’s made up of a myriad of diverse markets and economies. For investors, the challenge is not simply to follow the herd, which has been disastrous for some in Indianapolis, but to research and discern which markets best suit their needs.
With fixed mortgage rates still quite high compared to recent years, and ARMs finally providing a decent discount, you might be starting to look beyond the 30-year fixed.
The problem though is you’re probably still concerned that interest rates could skyrocket and that your ARM will adjust way higher in the future.
That’s always a concern with an adjustable-rate mortgage, which is why they’re discounted to begin with.
But one thing you can do to offset this risk and manage payments post-adjustment is to apply the monthly ARM savings during the fixed-rate period.
This way you’ll have a much smaller loan balance once the mortgage hits its first adjustment.
Let’s look at an example to illustrate what I mean using a $400,000 loan amount.
Imagine you can get a 30-year fixed today at 6.5% or a 7-year ARM for 5.375%.
That’d be $2,528.27 per month for the 30-year fixed versus $2,239.88 for the ARM.
That’s a difference of $288 per month. Over the course of the fixed-rate period (84 months), you’d save about $24,225. Not bad.
After 84 months, the loan balance would be $361,664.98 on the 30-year fixed and $354,410.53 on the 7-year ARM.
So on top of paying less each month, you’d also pay the ARM down faster because a bigger chunk of the payment would go toward principal due to the lower interest rate.
Those are the benefits of an adjustable-rate mortgage vs. fixed-rate mortgage, but there’s also the risk.
Namely that the interest rate can go up after the fixed-rate period ends. And potentially a lot!
Typically, adjustable-rate mortgage caps on a 7-year ARM allow the rate to increase as much as five percentage points at first adjustment.
That means a rate of 10.375% in the absolute worst-case scenario. That’s probably pretty unlikely, but it is the risk associated with an ARM.
Of course, in the meantime you might sell the property, or you might refinance the loan if rates happen to improve.
But if you are still holding the loan after seven years, you might face a higher fully-indexed rate (margin + mortgage index at month 85).
This could in fact be a decent rate if the mortgage index isn’t high at the time, but let’s pretend it is a little bit higher.
Say your fully-indexed rate is 7% at first adjustment. Using the balance of $354,410.53 and remaining loan term of 23 year, the monthly payment would be $2,586.91.
Not terrible. It’s about $60 more than the original 30-year fixed payment. And factor in seven years and it probably feels cheaper due to inflation.
But what you can do to bring this payment down even more, and offset some risk if the first adjustment is a lot worse, is to apply monthly savings to extra payments.
So during the first seven years, pay the extra $288 per month saved on the ARM.
At the beginning of year eight, when the loan first adjusts, the balance would be just over $325,000.
Now if we apply the fully-indexed rate of 7%, the payment is a lower $2,372.24. That’s about $150 less than the original 30-year fixed payment.
In addition, the lower loan balance might make it easier to refinance or sell due to the lower loan-to-value ratio (LTV).
So by paying extra using only the savings of the ARM, you build in some increased optionality to do other things if mortgage rates happen to be less favorable in the future.
Try out my early mortgage payoff calculator to determine possible savings of extra mortgage payments.
Last month, Nvidia (NVDA 4.39%) unveiled a family of open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models designed to address calibration and error-correction challenges in quantum computing. Known as Ising, Nvidia’s new toolkit helps make fragile qubits more usable by pairing them with the power of graphics processing units (GPUs).
The question smart investors are asking is not whether quantum computing matters, but how Nvidia’s expanding ecosystem positions the company to capture more value as investment in AI infrastructure accelerates.
Image source: Nvidia.
Today’s generative AI models devour vast amounts of computing power. However, some quantum enthusiasts believe that certain applications — molecular simulation in drug discovery or complex optimization in logistics and financial modeling — can scale better on quantum hardware.
In essence, quantum systems are not a replacement for traditional AI platforms, but rather an accelerator. Nvidia’s vision is to create a hybrid future in which quantum processors handle complex tasks while GPUs handle the heavy workload of training and inference.
Nvidia found that Ising’s calibration model can automate processor tuning, reducing a task that once took days down to hours. Moreover, its decoding models deliver real-time error correction up to 2.5 times faster and 3 times more accurately than legacy methods such as PyMatching.
Ising’s tools run on Nvidia GPUs, integrate natively with the company’s CUDA-Q software, and are stitched together via the NVQLink interconnect. By anchoring Ising to its hardware and software stack, Nvidia ensures that advances in quantum capabilities fuel further demand for its GPU architectures and data center services. This strategy helps Nvidia turn yet another AI opportunity, quantum machines, into a natural tailwind for its existing infrastructure.
Realistically, quantum computing is not a near-term catalyst for Nvidia. The addressable market remains modest, as quantum hardware remains experimental. Nevertheless, the Ising launch highlights something meaningful: Quantum technology is becoming another growth vector extending Nvidia’s multifaceted AI infrastructure engine.
Demand for Blackwell and Rubin GPUs shows no signs of slowing as hyperscalers and sovereign governments accelerate AI factory build-outs. Meanwhile, CUDA’s software helps lock developers into Nvidia’s ecosystem.
Expansions into areas such as robotics, connectivity networks, autonomous systems, and enterprise workflows broaden Nvidia’s addressable market. These forces, in combination with the long-term optionality of hybrid quantum-GPU systems, support sustained growth for Nvidia in the AI infrastructure age.
I predict that by year’s end, Nvidia shares will reach $280. At current levels, my forecast represents roughly 20% upside to Nvidia stock. My outlook bakes in AI infrastructure as Nvidia’s primary driver while treating quantum AI as a high-conviction call option that keeps the company ahead of competitors.
I think Nvidia is in a position to continue generating data center revenue growth between 70% and 80% year over year, while maintaining a steady gross margin around 75%. Reasonable multiple expansion should be in store as investors price in new catalysts.
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Update 5/16/26: Deal is back until June 13th, 2026. Hat tip to reader ink_me_please
Update 3/1/26: Deal is back until March 14, 2026 May 1, 2026. Hat tip to reader ChurningAndBurning
Update 4/6/25: Deal is back until 15 Apr 2025. This time requires a tax return to qualify for the direct deposit requirement unfortunately. Hat tip to reader Woody
Update 10/12/24: Deal is back and no end date listed. Hat tip to reader Yj32
Update 6/23/24: Deal is back and no end date listed. Hat tip to reader Woody
Offer at a glance
Direct link to offer
Foundation checking has no monthly fee with direct deposit or average balance of $100; otherwise, pay a $5 monthly fee.
Beginning May 1, 2024, Foundation Checking will be updated with the following:
“Accounts closed within 90 days of opening will be charged a service fee of $25.00
Think this is worth doing as it’s a large bonus, we just don’t have any datapoints on what works as a direct deposit. We will add this to our list of the best bank account bonuses.
Hat tip to reader Gadget
Useful posts regarding bank bonuses:
Most companies hit a ceiling not because of strategy or market conditions, but because the leader is still trying to be the smartest person in the room. In this episode, John Jantsch sits down with Jason Wild, executive advisor and co-author of Genius at Scale, published by HBR Press, to make the case that the lone genius model of leadership is not just outdated. It is actively holding companies back.
Jason spent more than 20 years in senior roles at Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce, leading projects across 40 countries. He watched brilliant people pour their careers into innovation efforts that succeeded at rates of five to fifteen percent, not because the ideas were bad, but because the conditions around those ideas were never built to support them. Genius at Scale is his answer to that problem.
This episode covers the shift from pathfinding to wayfinding, the three leadership roles that drive repeatable innovation, why most good ideas die in integration rather than ideation, and what small business owners can do right now to build a team that does not need them to be the source of every good idea.
Jason Wild is an executive advisor, co-founder of Wild Innovation Consulting, and co-author of Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation, published by HBR Press. He spent more than two decades in senior leadership roles at IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce and has led projects in 40 countries. Earlier in his career he had television and film credits, including a co-starring role opposite Mr. T in a CBS movie. Learn more at geniusatscale.com.
[00:02] Opening hook: the reason your company hits a ceiling might have nothing to do with strategy.
[00:53] Jason’s first career in Hollywood and co-starring with Mr. T in a CBS movie of the week.
[01:44] The core premise: why the lone genius model of leadership fails and what replaces it.
[03:33] What Jason saw at IBM that shaped his thinking about why smart people accept such low innovation success rates.
[06:37] Why small business founders are wired to be the genius in the room and why that eventually becomes the ceiling.
[07:19] The ABC framework: architect, bridger, and catalyst unpacked.
[10:07] Why the architect role is really about culture and psychological safety.
[11:03] The bridger as the unsung hero of innovation and why Death Valley is where most good ideas go to die.
[13:04] The role outside consultants and third parties play in bridging across boundaries.
[14:03] What catalysts do differently and how movements start with people and ideas, not companies.
[16:35] The Pfizer story: how banning the word change helped get a vaccine out in 266 days instead of eight to ten years.
[18:25] What we typically celebrate about leadership that the research says is actually wrong.
[20:31] How writing the book as a collaborative team proved its own thesis.
“Stop trying to hire the A player. Focus on building the A team. It sounds subtle but it is a fundamentally different way to lead.”
“Innovation is not about coming up with the best idea. The organizations that innovate time and time again focus on the conditions and the environment around the idea.”
“Most innovation stalls not at the ideation phase but the integration phase. That is where good ideas go off to die.”
“Self-awareness is one of the most undervalued skills in leadership. How you make people feel when you give them feedback determines whether they will ever bring you their real thinking.”
“If the billionaire founder can make time to stand in line at a bank branch, everyone else can practice empathy too.”
Learn more at geniusatscale.com.
📌 Welcome to the Ultimate Product Management Course! 🚀 This full-length video combines 10 essential episodes to help you master product management from beginner to expert.
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📖 Course Breakdown:
– Introduction
– Product Management 101: What Does a PM Do?
– Understanding the Product Lifecycle
– Identifying Market Needs & Conducting User Research
– Defining Product Vision & Crafting a Roadmap
– Working with Cross-Functional Teams
– Creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
– Agile Methodology & Product Management
– Key Metrics & KPIs for Product Success
– Gathering & Implementing User Feedback
– Go-To-Market Strategy & Product Marketing
🔥 What You’ll Learn:
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MIT will enroll nearly 500 fewer graduate students next year as the school grapples with steep declines in federal research funding, President Sally Kornbluth told the campus community in a May video message.
New graduate enrollment for 2026–27 is down nearly 20% compared with 2024 across departments outside the Sloan School of Management and the EECS Master of Engineering program.
Why enrollment is shrinking: Two forces are squeezing the graduate pipeline. The 8% endowment tax has pressured MIT’s budget for more than a year. And federal grant flows have not rebounded even after Congress restored some funding in February.
Without reliable grant money, it’s difficult to fund the graduate students to staff the labs. Kornbluth said many faculty members are already cutting graduate students, postdocs, and specific research projects. Policy changes affecting international students and scholars are also discouraging top applicants from applying to MIT in the first place.
“Hundreds of exceptionally talented young people will not have the benefit of an MIT education — and we won’t have the benefit of their creative brilliance,” Kornbluth said.
What MIT is doing: Kornbluth outlined several offsetting moves: 176 grant proposals submitted to the Department of Energy’s new Genesis Mission, a recently launched MIT–IBM Computing Research Lab, expanded master’s-only programs, and a refreshed philanthropy push under new Resource Development leadership. Growth in non-federal research funding has not been enough to close the gap from the federal decline.
She also flagged early discussions among federal agencies about factoring geography into grant decisions rather than ranking proposals strictly on scientific merit — a shift that would disadvantage research-heavy schools concentrated in the Northeast and West Coast.
How this connects: The endowment tax was expanded under a tiered structure:
MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford sit in the top bracket. The College Investor has noted the contradiction of Congress taxing those endowments while still routing Title IV federal student aid to the same schools.
Graduate funding cuts at the institutional level compound separate federal changes hitting students directly. Grad PLUS Loans are ending in 2026, and new federal borrowing caps for graduate borrowers will push more students toward private loans — or out of graduate programs entirely.
What to watch next: MIT is one of the first top-bracket schools to publish concrete enrollment numbers tied to the endowment tax and federal grant pullback. Expect similar announcements from peer institutions in the 8% tier.
Watch for any bipartisan movement in Congress to revisit the rate — Kornbluth said MIT’s Washington Office is lobbying on both sides of the aisle to roll it back.
Also, keep an eye on the graduate school brain drain and active recruiting by other countries to attract top talent.
Don’t Miss These Other Stories:
Editor: Colin Graves
The post MIT To Admit Fewer Graduate Students As Federal Research Funding Drops 20% appeared first on The College Investor.
Dire warnings about oil supplies are coming from everywhere lately as the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed while President Donald Trump’s trip to China failed to produce a breakthrough to reopen the critical waterway.
While investors have been trading on hopes that the Iran ceasefire will remain intact, there is little sign that the oil trade will return to normal soon, forcing them to reckon with the reality of worsening shortages and an imminent tipping point ahead.
JPMorgan predicted that commercial oil inventories in the developed world could “approach operational stress levels” by early June. Saudi Aramco said global inventories of gasoline and jet fuel could reach “critically low levels” ahead of the summer.
The International Energy Agency warned the world is drawing down oil inventories at a record pace, with 164 million barrels released by governments and industry as of May 8.
“Rapidly shrinking buffers amid continued disruptions may herald future price spikes ahead,” IEA said in its lately monthly report.
The U.S. and Israel launched their war on Iran two and a half months ago, and analysts expected the Strait of Hormuz to reopen by the end of May or early June.
That’s looking less likely as Iran attacks ships in the Persian Gulf while the U.S. military is still enforcing a blockade on Iranian oil. Meanwhile, the Navy’s efforts to reopen the strait with warships is on hold.
U.S. Navy
“But if the Strait remains effectively closed and commercial oil inventories in the OECD continue to be run down at the same pace as they were in April, oil stocks could reach critically low levels by the end of June,” Hamad Hussain, climate and commodities economist at Capital Economics, said in a note on Wednesday.
“That would be consistent with Brent crude prices reaching an all-time nominal peak, and could require more disorderly and economically damaging cuts to oil demand.”
He estimated oil prices could top $130-$140 a barrel next month if the strait remains closed and inventory depletion rates remain steady.
On Friday, Brent crude futures gained more than 3% to close at $109.26 a barrel as China offered no hints that it would lean on ally Iran to normalize tanker traffic.
For now, oil futures haven’t reached doomsday levels. That’s due to ample supplies at sea when the war started, record releases from strategic oil reserves, and a sharp drop in Chinese oil imports as it draws on its own stockpiles, according to Hussain.
More supplies from oil inventories could be released. But they cannot fall to zero as certain volumes are needed to maintain pressure within storage systems, and the daily flow of releases is limited.
In addition, 1 billion barrels of oil is estimated to have been lost already, dwarfing the IEA’s planned total release of 400 million barrels.
Efforts to clamp down on oil demand could intensify, and some countries in Asia have already imposed rationing measures.
“But given the extent of supply losses from the Middle East, the risk of a ‘non-linear’ adjustment in demand and prices will continue to grow for as long as the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed,” Hussain added.
In other words, rather than oil prices following a straight-line trajectory higher, they could instead go parabolic, looking more like the curved end of a hockey stick.
Similarly, analysts at UBS also said oil inventories are approaching record lows, warning that “buffers have now largely been exhausted.”
As stockpiles go even lower, UBS said oil prices could become more volatile and highlighted the “risk of panic buying if physical dislocation intensifies and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.”
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says the annual pace of housing starts for April rose 17% compared with March.
