HOME BUILDING TO DECLINE 20%

Australia is staring into the headwinds of a ‘shallow’ 20% decline in housing construction over the next three years as building materials and labour shortages extend building timeframes — despite higher borrowing costs and affordability problems cutting demand, according to the Housing Industry Association (HIA).

The decline from 229,000 housing commencements in the 2021 calendar year to an estimated 183,800 in 2024 is projected based on unemployment remaining at low levels and an extension of construction times from 8.3 months to 12.2 months on average.

However, different sectors of the housing market should be expected to behave differently. A 34% decline in detached houses starts through to 2025 will be offset by an increase in apartment commencements and other attached homes — buy 14% — by 2026 as immigration increases, according to HIA’s quarterly forecast.

“Ongoing strong demand for homes is assisting builders to trade through this cycle, but rising borrowing costs and slowing demand will increase cash flow pressures, before the availability of materials improves,” the HIA report says.

“The combined impact of higher interest rates, increased cost of a new home and capacity constraints will see the volume of homes commencing construction slow to a trough in 2025.”

The decline in home building is forecast to last for 13 quarters — longer than the typical two-year fall according to the HIA.

Following a peak of 141,150 detached home starts, the total will fall to 128,790 this year and then slip 5.2% in 2022. Higher interest rates will dampen demand with commencements cut to 108,890 in 2024 before bottoming out at 99,350 in 2025.

Attached home starts will rise 1.2% in the financial year 2023, and 3.9% in 2024 to reach 80,700 from last year’s 74,350.

The market should expect 4.3% of further growth in 2025 and 4% in 2026 bringing the total to 87,560.

“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want, but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds. The future is for everyone.”

That ad copy is from the voice-over of a July Meta Platforms META -3.38%.

spot that’s been part of a public-relations blitz to position Meta as the humanist AI company. The message was undercut by the ad’s inclusion of David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a brooding 1972 song about an impending apocalypse. But this week CEO Mark Zuckerberg left no ambiguity, publishing a 6,500-word manifesto—about 10 times the length of this newsletter—with a title that echoed the ad: “The Future is for Everyone.”

That seems to be Meta’s new tagline. In light of sinking public opinion and the company’s thousands of lawsuits from states, school districts, parents, and users, Meta’s public relations have been defensive. This push represents a return to offense, with a chance to distinguish Meta’s approach to AI from other labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX SPCX +9.65%.

“It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future.”

Zuckerberg frames what sort of future we build with AI as the central issue of our time. “We believe that delivering superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question,” he says. “This has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before.”

The flood of words belies the situation on the ground in mid-2026. Americans, at least, have a love-hate affair with social media. A November Pew Research Center poll reported that 71% of U.S. adults used Facebook, and 51% used Instagram. Worldwide, 3.6 billion people use at least one Meta app every day.

But in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in July and August, 61% of respondents said they wanted more government oversight of social media, and two-thirds supported laws to keep children under 16 years old off the platforms. When it comes to Meta in particular, in the 2026 Axios Harris 100, an annual poll about corporate reputation, Meta placed 96th out of 100. It’s only above two other social media companies, Chinese ultracheap retailer Temu, and Spirit Airlines, a defunct air carrier. Regarding ethics, Meta came in last, and it was only ahead of TikTok in trust.

The steady drip of headlines in the teen social media trials isn’t helping. Last week, Meta lost a judgment in New Mexico state court that raised their liability in that relatively small jurisdiction to nearly $1 billion dollars. On Wednesday, jury selection began for a federal case with four states suing Meta over addictive product design, and false marketing that said its platforms were safe for teenagers. In July, Meta claimed that the states are asking for a total of $1.4 trillion in damages, in addition to design changes in the apps. This is part of a multidistrict litigation, where thousands of federal trials with social media defendants are coordinated in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ district courthouse in Oakland, Calif.

There is a separate such group of thousands of cases in California state court, mostly with individual plaintiffs. The steady drip of bad headlines from the courts will continue unless Meta decides to settle en masse.

Meanwhile, in the second quarter, Meta booked “$2.40 billion of charges related to legal proceedings,” according to its quarterly filing. That may be just the beginning.

Zuckerberg spent 6,500 words getting his utopian message out, but I can sum it up in two: Trust us. The evidence is that Meta has a long way to go to win back that trust.

HOME BUILDING TO DECLINE 20%

Labour and materials shortages are set to pinch home supply.

Meta is betting on a human-first AI future, but growing legal battles and declining public trust are putting Mark Zuckerberg’s vision to the test.