No direct link to offer, shows under amex offers
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Might be useful if you’re trying to hit spend requirements or the free night certificate spend requirement on the Surpass.
For the ultrawealthy, it used to largely be the case that they wanted their flashy home purchases and sales to be made very public: Think drone shots, a glossy listing, and a splashy press release naming the owner and buyer.
All of that served as a way to show off and solidify their wealth. But now the upper echelons of the housing market want to be much more private, and a lot of it has to do with privacy being the new sought-after luxury.
A growing class of ultrawealthy buyers, particularly tech and AI executives who have moved to Silicon Valley, are deliberately routing their home purchases through limited liability companies, privacy trusts, and so-called “whisper” listings that never touch the multiple listing service.
Their end goal isn’t getting the best deal they can possibly get: It’s more about maintaining anonymity and thinning their paper trails to ensure security. This new phenomenon is called stealth wealth buying, Ken DeLeon, founder of Palo Alto, Calif.-based DeLeon Realty, told Fortune.
The shift started about three years ago, said DeLeon, who is one of Silicon Valley’s top-producing luxury brokers and was once ranked the nation’s No. 1 real estate agent by the Wall Street Journal and RealTrends.That was when the market capitalization of tech companies began to grow again, and more wealthy people began flooding Silicon Valley.
Photo courtesy DeLeon Realty
“Increased wealth brought about greater security concerns and a stronger desire for privacy,” he said. “Over the last year, AI has driven some of the greatest wealth creation Silicon Valley has seen in 25 years, while also becoming an increasingly controversial topic. As a result, the desire for privacy has grown even stronger.”
Meanwhile, home prices in Silicon Valley have continued to rise. Atherton posted a median sale price of $8.33 million in 2025, a 5% gain from the previous year and a new high for the longtime Bay Area billionaire enclave, according to PropertyShark. The town’s top deal of the year was a $51.5 million sale of a 10,000-square-foot estate once owned by tech executive and multimillionaire Stephen Luczo, and it traded off-market, Palo Alto Online reported.
That detail is key: For the buyers behind these transactions, exposure about their home transactions is more of a liability than a flex.
Think back to April, when a man threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman‘s North Beach home in San Francisco, setting fire to an exterior gate. Authorities later alleged the 20-year-old suspect had traveled from Texas, intending to kill Altman, and had written about AI’s purported risk to humanity.
“Events like this have made people want to distance themselves further from public attention and increased their desire to remain anonymous,” DeLeon said.
The mechanics of stealth-wealth home transactions look nothing like a standard sale. There is no Zillow notification, no open house, and often no sign in the yard. A listing might circulate among just three to five elite brokers in a given metro before quietly trading hands, DeLeon said.
“Some sellers prioritize privacy over price and are willing to sell off market to avoid exposure,” he added.
Outside of Silicon Valley, off-market residential sales have surged at least 30% year-over-year in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens between 2024 and 2025, with Brooklyn alone logging roughly $5.4 billion in privately marketed sales, according to data reported by The Real Deal.
Anonymity extends beyond just the listing. For higher-end clients, DeLeon said, he routinely recommends taking title through an LLC or a privacy trust—but with one key detail.
“Sophisticated clients want to structure things carefully, making sure the manager of the LLC is not someone directly associated with them, such as their personal attorney,” he said. “The goal is to ensure that, even if someone digs into ownership records, they still cannot easily connect the property back to the principal owner.”
And the effort toward maintaining privacy doesn’t stop at closing.
“Utilities, deliveries, and even small packages, such as toys ordered for their children, are often placed under the LLC or trust name rather than their personal name,” DeLeon said, in order for owners to maintain a low profile.
It’s not just the buyers’ or sellers’ effort to keep a low profile. The job of luxury agents has shifted, too. DeLeon said he’s routinely asked to act as a buffer by meeting vendors, signing for inspections, and fielding questions and details that an owner would normally handle.
Sometimes clients won’t even want agents or sellers to know who they are, he added.
“In some cases, both sides of the transaction conceal their identities,” he said. “I try to serve as a buffer for my clients throughout the entire process, ensuring that vendors and other involved parties do not know the identity of the principal.”
While stealth-wealth buyers win privacy, they pay for it—literally. That’s because off-market sales tend to reach a smaller pool of buyers, which means less competition and often lower offers.
“Most sellers understand that when they sell off the market, they are usually accepting a lower sales price,” DeLeon said. “In general, studies have shown that off-market listings across nearly all price points tend to sell for less than they would if they were fully exposed to the open market.”
A February 2025 Zillow Research analysis of 2.7 million home sales also shows that homes sold off the MLS in 2023 and 2024 typically went for almost $5,000 less than those listed on the MLS. That represents a median 1.5% gap, totaling more than $1 billion in lost proceeds for sellers. In California, the gap widened to 3.7%, or roughly $30,075 per home.
That tradeoff has caught regulators’ attention. The National Association of Realtors’ Clear Cooperation Policy requires agents to submit listings within one business day of publicly marketing them. As of March 2025, sellers can instruct agents to use a new “delayed marketing exempt listing” option, but only after signing a written disclosure acknowledging the trade-offs.
DeLeon said brokerages still push off-market sales for the wrong reasons.
“Unfortunately, many brokerages encourage off-market sales not to protect sellers’ privacy, but to minimize marketing costs and increase the likelihood of double-ending their commission,” he said.
Whether stealth wealth practices will become even more prevalent is still in question.
“If sellers are told the true cost of selling off-market—that protecting privacy will likely lower their sales price—then I think the pendulum may swing back where sellers prefer to get full exposure for their home and thereby maximize their sales price,” DeLeon said, “even if it means some loss of privacy.”
Bank of America has a message for anyone who has grown skeptical of the AI boom: you are thinking too small.
In a report published Thursday, the bank’s research team made a typically sweeping claim for a Wall Street bank assessing the supposed artificial intelligence boom. It’s not like electricity or even the internet, the global economics team wrote. It is more powerful than both — and the productivity boom it will eventually deliver could be 10x larger than anything the economy is currently showing.
The problem is that the economy is currently showing 0.1%, “a small aggregate effect relative to all the excitement around AI,” the bank admitted. It’s a number so small that it barely registers against global growth of 3.5%.
Whether that argument holds is the most consequential open question in economics right now — and not everyone on Wall Street is buying it.
The gap between AI’s micro-level fireworks and its macro-level footprint is real, documented, and striking.
AI is already delivering task-level productivity gains that would have seemed implausible five years ago: software developers completing 55% more work with AI coding tools, customer support agents resolving 14% more tickets, professional writers finishing projects 37% to 40% faster.
But these aren’t showing up as a boost to GDP, BofA said, explaining that while AI can currently transform about 20% of all workplace tasks, only 23% of those are actually cost-effective to automate at today’s prices. Automated tasks save roughly 27% in labor costs, and labor is about half of all costs. Multiply it out and the theoretical ceiling is a 0.66% gain in labor productivity — before organizational friction, skills mismatches, slow diffusion, and regulatory drag compress it further toward the figure BofA has landed on: 0.1% per year.
The bank acknowledges the academic literature on AI’s aggregate impact is “inconclusive,” with multiple studies finding that even firm-level gains shrink or disappear when economists look at national accounts. While GDP statistics are poor at capturing quality improvements, this fits with the anecdotal sense that there’s a yawning divide between AI on paper and in reality. EY-Parthenon’s vice chair Mitch Berlin told Fortune earlier this month that he’s seeing a real “gap” in conversations with clients, even while saying that everyone he talks to is excited about what lies ahead.
BofA said AI is different when compared to previous innovations such as electricity or information and communication technology. The key difference, the bank argued, is that it can have an impact across a broader part of the economy than those previous advances, and “small improvements on this front can easily magnify the impact on aggregate productivity 10 times over the next decade.” BofA’s case rests heavily on the view that AI will follow the same J-curve — delayed impact followed by rapid acceleration.
But, still, a 10x increase? Really?
BofA’s bull case is not a forecast so much as an arithmetic exercise in what happens when conditions change — and the bank is explicit that the conditions driving that change are reasonable to expect.
The 10x figure comes from work by economist Philippe Aghion and co-authors published in 2024, which plugged more current AI capability estimates into a standard productivity model and found cumulative gains over the next decade that are 10 times larger than what today’s numbers suggest. The mechanism is straightforward: as AI models improve and inference costs fall — currently halving roughly every three months — the share of tasks that are both transformable and economically viable to automate expands rapidly. Each incremental expansion compounds non-linearly.
Doubling AI’s task reach from 20% to 40%, everything else equal, more than doubles aggregate productivity gains. If AI becomes cheap enough that all currently transformable tasks make economic sense to automate, gains multiply by more than seven. Add capital deepening — companies investing more as the return on capital rises — and the numbers get larger still.
But BofA makes a distinctive argument about innovation itself. Wheres electricity was powerful in automating physical processes, and the internet moved information faster, neither technology made inventing new things faster. AI can — by assisting research, accelerating hypothesis generation and augmenting the cognitive work that produces breakthroughs.
Eight days before BofA’s report landed, Panmure Liberum strategist Joachim Klement published a detailed argument that the AI investment cycle is not a productivity story waiting to unfold, but rather a bubble that is still waiting to pop.
From a macro perspective, the AI boom is already 60% larger than the dot-com bubble at its peak, with tech investment accounting for 93% of all U.S. GDP growth, far beyond the 56% peak of the technology, media and telecom era. Hyperscalers — Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Oracle — are projected to spend $658 billion on capital expenditures in 2026 alone, growing at a 20% annual clip through 2030.
For those investments to generate even a 10% return, Klement calculated that hyperscalers need to find $2 trillion to $5 trillion in additional annual revenue — a quadrupling of their current base, with no meaningful increase in costs. Meta’s implied return on invested capital on its planned spending: negative 28.8%. Oracle’s: negative 35.6%. “There clearly are signs of irrational exuberance in stock markets today when it comes to the AI investment theme,” Klement wrote.
Klement also made a structural argument about the software layer that the productivity bulls tend to skip. Hallucinations in large language models, research from Tsinghua University shows, are not a fixable bug — they are neurologically inherent, traceable to neurons that emerge during pre-training and cannot be removed without breaking the model. This structurally disqualifies LLMs from the high-stakes deterministic use cases — accounting, legal filings, compliance — that currently justify much of the enterprise that premium investors are paying.
And threatening the entire data center rationale quietly from below: specialized small language models running locally on desktop hardware, at costs up to 1,000 times cheaper than cloud-based LLMs for routine commercial tasks. If the workloads that justify the hyperscaler capex boom can be handled locally and cheaply, the house of cards Klement described starts to look structurally unstable from the foundation.
Klement is not predicting imminent collapse — he estimates the bubble can sustain another one to two years on rate cuts. But in his mildest scenario, a modest correction in U.S. tech investment would send European and UK markets into bear territory. In a repeat of the dot-com crash, technology stocks would drop more than 70%.
Tyler Cowen, one of the most widely read economists in the United States, addressed the gap between BofA’s bull case and Panmure’s bear case at the Sana AI Summit at the New York Public Library on Thursday — without quite framing it that way.
His forecast for AI’s contribution to U.S. growth: from 2% to 2.5%. Meaningful, he argued, but far short of what Silicon Valley is promising — and far short of BofA’s 1 percentage point addition to global growth. The constraint, in his telling, is institutional: roughly 40% to 50% of U.S. GDP sits in sectors — government, higher education, healthcare, nonprofits — that will be “very slow to adjust.” That drag doesn’t make AI less real. It makes the timeline longer and the path more uneven than the most bullish projections suggest.
Cowen’s 2.5% is still, in his view, transformative. Against the backdrop of $39 trillion in national debt, that delta is the difference between a debt spiral and a manageable fiscal path. “You feel we’re screwed,” he told the audience. “My kids are screwed, grandkids are screwed … But if our economy can grow at 2.5%, instead of 2%, that debt, rather than exploding and making us the next Greece, that debt actually converges to a manageable level.”
Cowen also asked the audience hypothetically, what else is there? “The way to get out of this hole, like if you work in AI, you are our savior.” Productivity growth means to no big tax increase and no big cut to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, he added, and there isn’t another good idea about how to plug the gap. “You are our plan A. There is no plan B.”
Strip away the valuation disagreement and BofA and Panmure Liberum share more common ground than their conclusions suggest. Both believe AI will materially change the economy. Both acknowledge the gap between task-level gains and aggregate productivity is real. Both identify organizational friction — not model capability — as the primary constraint on near-term macro impact.
The disagreement is not about whether the technology works. It is about whether the investment cycle has outrun the technology’s current economic contribution so dramatically that a correction is now the most likely near-term path — even if the long-term productivity boom eventually arrives on the other side of it.
That is a question BofA’s 10x argument, however coherent its mechanics, cannot answer. The gap between 0.1% and 1.0% has a plausible path. What it does not have yet is a timeline.
President Donald Trump presided over the administration of the oath of office for Kevin Warsh as he became the chair of the Federal Reserve Board in a ceremony at the White House Friday morning.
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Trump said at the event that no one was better qualified than Warsh to lead the central bank, which he praised as “a pillar of the world financial system and the most important central bank anywhere in the world, with a history stretching back more than 100 years.”
Trump added that he wanted Warsh to maintain the central bank’s independence and pursue his own objectives as leader of the U.S. central bank.
“Honestly — I really mean this, this is not meant in any other way — I want Kevin to be totally independent,” Trump said. “I want him to be independent and just do a great job. Don’t look at me, don’t look at anybody, just do your own thing and do a great job.”
Warsh said after taking his oath of office, which was administered by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, that he viewed his mission as Fed chair as one aimed at bolstering prosperity for all Americans.
“While I’m not naive about the challenges we face, I believe, Mr. President, these years can bring unmatched prosperity that will raise living standards for Americans from all walks of life, and the Fed has something to do with it,” Warsh said. “Our mandate at the Fed is to promote price stability and maximum employment. When we pursue those aims with wisdom and clarity, independence and resolve, inflation can be lower, growth stronger, real take-home pay higher, and America can be more prosperous, and no less important, America’s place in the world more secure.”
As chair, Warsh will oversee meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets monetary policy and seeks to balance the central bank’s dual mandate of controlling inflation and maximizing employment.
Warsh takes the helm of the Federal Reserve System at a pivotal moment for the U.S. economy.
But the ultimate complicating factor is the president himself, who has pressured the central bank to lower interest rates, a preference he has long expressed but that he has been more strenuous in expressing since taking office last year, raising concerns that the White House is looking to dictate monetary policy.
During his confirmation process, Warsh pledged to make independent judgments on monetary policy, though he could face pressure from the Trump administration to lower interest rates.
Speaking before the Senate Banking Committee on April 21, Warsh rejected the notion that he would bow to political pressure, saying he had not committed to Trump that he would lower interest rates, though he
Warsh also has promised changes at the central bank. Among his proposals is
The Senate
With Warsh stepping into the role, Jerome Powell will step down as chair after leading the central bank for eight years, but will remain on the Board of Governors. His term as governor runs through January 2028.
During his final post-meeting news conference in April, Powell said he chose to remain on the board amid concerns the Trump administration could revive scrutiny over renovation costs tied to the Fed’s headquarters project.
A Department of Justice review launched in January was dropped April 24, around the same time Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., continued to press that the matter is
Despite the end of the Justice Department review, Powell said
“I worry that these attacks are battering the institution and putting at risk the thing that really matters to the public, which is the ability to conduct monetary policy without taking into consideration political factors,” Powell said. “It is so important for the economy, for the people that we serve, that they can depend, over time, on a central bank that operates that way: free of political influence.”
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Across the country, May 29 marks a coordinated push to promote college savings accounts known as 529 plans. Created under Section 529 of the Internal Revenue Code, these plans offer families tax advantages to save for education, and this year, many states are sweetening the deal.
From cash bonuses to newborn giveaways, state treasurers and plan administrators are using the date to draw attention to long-term saving. The effort is backed by the College Savings Plans Network (CSPN), a group under the National Association of State Treasurers that tracks participation and manages outreach.
“It’s fitting that 529 Day falls during graduation season,” said CSPN Chair and Kansas State Treasurer Steven Johnson. “This time of year reminds us that the transition into adulthood often begins shortly after high school graduation. 529 Day celebrates the flexibility and tax-advantaged benefits of 529 plans, which remain one of the best tools families can use to help prepare their students for a successful future.”
A 529 plan is a type of investment account that allows money to grow tax-free when used for qualified education expenses. That includes tuition, fees, books, and even some housing costs at eligible colleges, universities, and trade schools. Some states extend benefits to K-12 tuition, student loan repayment, or even converting funds to a Roth IRA.
These accounts can be opened by parents, grandparents, or others on behalf of a beneficiary. Contributions are made with after-tax dollars, but many states offer a deduction or credit on state income taxes. There are no income limits, and funds can be transferred between family members if the original beneficiary doesn’t use the money.
As of the end of 2025, Americans had saved more than $600 billion in 529 accounts, according to CSPN. The continued interest reflects growing concern about student debt, which now totals nearly $1.8 trillion nationwide.
To mark 529 Day, most state-run plans are offering limited-time promotions or educational events. Some of the bonus offers include:
Other states may be offering live social media contests to podcasts and webinars. In Arizona, the state Treasurer is making surprise hospital visits to gift newborns their first 529 deposits. Others are inviting kids to draw pictures of their dream jobs or join summer baseball events to raise awareness.
With student loan forgiveness policies uncertain and college costs rising, families are increasingly turning to savings strategies that help limit future borrowing. A small but steady contribution into a 529 account can reduce the need for loans and build a sense of financial preparedness.
The plans also serve more than just college-bound students. Funds can be used for trade schools, apprenticeships, and qualifying certifications. They can also support adult learners returning to school later in life.
Even modest contributions matter. Many plans allow accounts to be opened with as little as $25. Some states even provide seed money to encourage participation, especially among lower-income families.
Don’t Miss These Other Stories:
Editor: Colin Graves
The post 529 Day Offers Bonuses To Start Saving For College appeared first on The College Investor.
Elevated welcome bonuses on consumer Chase United credit cards have ended, but the two business card offers have been extended. You can now earn up to 115,000 United MileagePlus bonus miles when you apply and are approved for one of the two United MileagePlus business cards.
If you need a United Agent Code for one of the elevated credit card offers, you can simply start a chat with United Airlines through their website and ask for an Agent Code.
The representative will usually send you a special application link, and the code will appear in the URL. Some agents will also provide the code directly in the chat if you ask.
The same Agent Code works for both personal and business United cards.
The elevated offers on the consumer United cards may be gone, but these business card bonuses are some of the best we have seen. With the extra 10K miles for adding an employee card and another 5K miles with a United Agent promo code, you are getting a total of 115,000 United MileagePlus bonus miles.
The regular United Business card is the better option for those looking for the bonus while paying a lower annual fee, while the United Club Business card only really makes sense for heavy United flyers who can maximize the lounge access and premium perks.
HT: DoC
Bank of America’s SWOT analysis: stock navigates rate pressures with growth
It has become much harder to forget since the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Hundreds rather than the usual thousands of vessels have passed through the strait since March 5.
“This really feels like a global crisis, a little similar to what happened with Covid-19,” says Rystad’s Abramov. Gasoline and diesel prices have surged, and jet fuel and fertiliser are already in short supply; food prices are expected to rise, while the next phase of the crisis is likely to lead to fuel rationing and industrial shutdowns, experts have said.
Policymakers are debating when recession may set in. “The word on everyone’s lips is stagflation,” a senior European industrialist says. “The longer this goes on, the more I worry about it.”
As the disruption has stretched on for months, companies have been forced to find radical workarounds. Some are trying to transport goods via land — either through existing oil pipelines or using trucks.
Danish logistics group DSV, market leader in the Middle East, is moving cargo through Saudi Arabia and Turkey. “When everything is flowing, you don’t consider your job vital. But if you can’t get cargo in, the people there can’t eat,” says Jens Lund, the company’s head.
Lorries, however, can replace only a small share of the capacity provided by large container and cargo ships, while border crossings and challenging terrain can further slow their transit.
Western countries have traditionally worried about routes in the Middle East, fearing that any regional conflict could limit access to the Red Sea, Suez or the Bosphorus.
But Trump has placed the Panama Canal at the heart of his vision of hemispheric defence – accusing China of trying to control the waterway, and threatening to take control of it himself. A Hong Kong-based conglomerate previously ran two ports on the canal, until Panama annulled its contracts earlier this year. China has called the US president’s claims groundless and said it wants to keep the canal neutral.
Nonetheless Trump’s moves may encourage Beijing to “rekindle building a Nicaragua Canal”, says Jensen, referring to a concession granted to a Chinese businessman in 2013 to develop a new rival waterway – though little came of it.
Following Trump’s threats and the cancellation of the port contracts, China has increased inspections of Panamanian-flagged vessels, leading to reports of ships reflagging, he adds. China’s foreign ministry said in March that its inspections were in accordance with laws and regulations.
A Chinese academic in Beijing, who asked not to be identified, says Panama’s move on the ports “would not be forgotten in Beijing, which would improve its projection of hard power to ensure that this did not happen again in other important strategic chokepoints”.
“Right now, the cost is very limited [for countries like Panama], but I think in the future, this is not going to be tolerated,” he says.
It’s no secret mortgage rates are in a bad place right now.
But instead of talking about that all day, let’s talk about how can they get better…
Ultimately, the quickest path lower is a peace deal in the Middle East. Note that I said quickest, not easiest. It’s hard to sit here and say that it’ll be easy.
And it’s also important to point out that they always rise faster than they fall, so it’ll take time even if there’s a resolution there.
The other main component is labor, but you don’t want weakness there because it hurts the housing market, not to mention the individual who loses their job.
Ultimately, mortgage rates need peace if they’re to move back to their recent lows.
That’s why mortgage rates rose to begin with, so it’s really the only way for them to erase this big move higher.
If you recall, the 30-year fixed had been at 3.5-year lows prior to the conflict at the end of February and early March.
Just as we finally got our long-awaited sub-6% mortgage rate, poof, it was gone in a flash.
It was the cruelest of scenarios, but kind of what you expect if you’ve been around the mortgage industry long enough…
When things finally start looking good, they seem to disappear just like that. And that’s exactly what happened.
While there was some hope in April after a bad March, May is when things finally got real for mortgage rates.
I had been warning folks that things were going to get worse, and that the $100+ barrel oil was going to find its way into inflation numbers and push mortgage rates higher.
But for a while, everyone was attempting to “look through” it all and bank on it being transitory.
We were also told repeatedly that the whole Iranian operation would be wrapped up in days, or a week, or just a few more days.
Now it’s feeling a lot like a quagmire with no end in sight. And the market finally decided to take it seriously.
That’s why you have the near-7% mortgage rates again. Reality set in.
So it’s pretty clear the best and fastest way to get lower mortgage rates is for the U.S. and Iran to come to some sort of deal. And quickly.
Now before things improve, they could get worse. It’s just one of those things where the trend is not your friend.
And it takes time for a reversal to take place. In the meantime, you get even higher rates.
So much higher can they go you ask?
Well, for a while I’ve been pointing to 6.875%, maybe a low 7-handle for the 30-year fixed. That looks fairly likely at this juncture.
After all, we’re around 6.75% now so it’s only an .125% to a .25% away. Yikes!
It seemed crazy a few weeks ago, when I first started bringing this up, but now it’s probably looking like a rather conservative estimate.
Funny how that works.
Just remember that mortgage rates don’t move in a straight line up or down.
There will always be ebbs and flows, good days, bad days, good weeks and bad weeks.
That means there will be opportunity at times to lock in a lower mortgage rate and you’ll need to stay vigilant if you’re shopping rates.
In addition, remember that when there’s a lot of volatility in mortgage rates, rate dispersion is higher.
This means there’s a wider range of rates being offered by banks, lenders, credit unions, etc. So be sure to gather multiple quotes and negotiate even more aggressively!
