MSNBC is in a World of Hurt

After lying to its viewers about inflation, the border and the mental acuity of President Biden and going gaga for Kamala Harris it now faces a collapse in viewership, and more importantly a significant change in its corporate structure.  Today MSNBC's parent Comcast announced that it will spin off most of its cable networks into a new entity. Significantly that new entity will exclude NBC and its news division which means that MSNBC will no longer have access to NBC's worldwide network of reporters.

Thus the new MSNBC will consist of commentators and news readers that won't have the imprimatur of NBC news. Thus it won't be able to cover breaking news about weather events, wars, campaign events and domestic disturbances. Simply put the network does not have the reportorial  staff, unlike its sister company CNBC which has reporters covering business verticals and an international presence.

Indeed, without NBC News, MSNBC, won't hold a candle to Fox News, CNN and Bloomberg News, all of whom are global news organizations. Thus in order to be competitive it will have to staff up at huge cost. Some of that cost will be borne by the overpaid on-the-air talent, something that is long overdue. 

For my previous commentary on MSNBC see: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2012/11/my-letter-to-comcast-ceo-brian-roberts.html and https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-comcast-whores-of-msnbc.html

Political Risk comes to Manhattan Real Estate

To paraphrase Exodus 1:8, now there arose a new mayor over New York who knew not Michael Bloomberg or Rudy Giuliani. With the reactionary Bill de Blasio becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for mayor and the odds-on favorite to win the general election in November, the 20 years of progress New York City has made threatens to become undone. Simply put de Blasio is throwback to the truly horrible mayors New York had prior to 1993. Think "bungling" Bob Wagner, the limousine liberal John Lindsay, the hapless Abe Beame and de Blasio's idol, David Dinkins. The last, of course, served as Mayor during the nadir of New York City's modern history. What all of these past mayors had in common was that they turned the city's fisc over to the public employee unions and they let crime run riot. By 1990 most informed opinion believed that the purpose of city government was to manage decline, not to create the thriving city that New York is today.

To New Yorkers of today and for that matter the real estate investors of today, that history is only dimly recollected at best. Instead of rewarding success, de Blasio seeks to punish it with high taxes. Instead of building  on the school reforms of the past decade, de Blasio wants to turn the schools back over to the unions. Instead of managing the budget, de Blasio will reward his union backers with pay raises unrelated to productivity. Instead driving down the crime rate to make New York the safest big city in America, de Blasio would end the very successful stop, question and frisk policy of the Bloomberg Administration. Of course the initial victims will be the people of color that now support de Blasio.

What all this means is that real estate investors who now take New York's well run government for granted will have to price in higher taxes and a diminution of services. Given the heady values of Manhattan real estate all the risk appears on the downside. The same goes for the big office REITs with a Manhattan focus, Vornado, SL Green and Boston Properties. The only hope is that Republican Joe Lhota pulls off an upset.