By Walt Hickey

We’re off tomorrow! Americans, have an excellent Independence Day, and everyone else enjoy your Thursday.

Trading Cards

The market for trading cards is leveling off, after rising from $745 million annually in 2019 to $1.55 billion in 2023. Sure, some of that is from companies getting more money out of consistent buyers, but the reality is that the pie has simply grown and more people are engaging with the hobby. This year, publishers are responding by cutting back supply, attempting to gauge precise demand rather than shipping whatever comes out of the printer to whoever, foaming at the mouth, will buy it. While Wizards of the Coast has held firm on Magic: The Gathering, the Pokémon game has scaled back significantly, and Konami has reined in Yu-Gi-Oh! production.

Milton Griepp, ICv2

Tourism

In 2023, South Korea saw 11 million international visitors, up 241 percent year over year. That’s also up to 63 percent of the pre-pandemic levels of tourism, and 2.1 million of the tourists were from China. The surge in tourism is welcome, but there are issues: Korea is actively trying to rein in a practice called “dumping tours,” where tourists buy cheap tours that in fact are entirely designed to just shepherd them to specific shopping locations. A survey of 3,100 tour packages in Seoul found that of the 100 lowest-priced packages, 85 of them were likely dumping tours, and 45 of them included six to eight shopping trips over the course of a five-day tour.

Peden Doma Bhutia, Skift

Apartments

New York City’s rental vacancy rate is down to a mere 1.4 percent, and there’s little indication that relief is on the way. In May, just 36 permits for multifamily buildings were allocated, the lowest for May in a decade excluding the 2020 situation. Last year, only 15,500 apartment unit permits were filed, the lowest since 2016. Overall, those constraints have had the Econ 101 impacts one might expect: Asking rents are up 33 percent, and median prices are up 24 percent.

Jennifer Epstein, Ann Choi and Rachael Dottle, Bloomberg

GM

General Motors sold 21,930 electric vehicles out of 696,086 total deliveries in the second quarter. Those EV sales are up 40 percent year over year, and the electric Hummer sales were up 76 percent compared to the previous quarter. Overall, people are worried about auto sales in no small part thanks to the cyberattack that hit dealerships all across the country, which hampered sales toward the end of the month. Either way, it’s the best quarter for the company since 2020.

Ben Kesslen, Quartz

Upflation

Last year, retailers sold 20 percent fewer razor blades than they did in 2019, and sold 6.5 percent less deodorant. One way that consumer packaged goods are able to find value is by finding new uses for existing products, like rebranding a deodorant as a whole-body deodorant or a razor as a blade that can handle face as well as body. This allows them to sell the same thing for multiple uses, which increases use in the aggregate and allows them to charge a premium for a product that is packaged as more versatile even if it’s basically the same chemistry in a new package.

Leslie Patton and Deena Shanker, Bloomberg

Fervo

Geothermal start-up Fervo Energy just signed a deal to sell 320 megawatts of power from a project in Utah to Southern California’s main electric utility, a pair of 15-year power purchase agreements that mark the largest such deal for a geothermal energy producer made with a utility. Starting in 2026, 70 megawatts will begin flowing to California, and by 2028 the entire project will be fully online. The Department of Energy projects that 90 gigawatts of geothermal energy will make its way to the grid.

Claire Hao, Houston Chronicle

EPSCoR

One of the National Science Foundation’s most popular programs is the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, or EPSCoR, a 44-year-old program where the states that don’t tend to benefit from the big programs have a special budget line to fuel research. States that get less than 0.75 percent of the overall budget are eligible for a slice of the program’s $250 million. Overall, the 28 states eligible for EPSCoR got 12 percent of the $9 billion NSF budget in 2022, and the hope is to get that to 20 percent by 2029 fueled by chips-related investments.

Jeffrey Mervis, Science

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