Bitcoin News Australia

Nelson Peltz is practically a mouseketeer now. 

On Thursday, the activist investor earned a huge win in his protracted battle of wills with Disney CEO Bob Iger: a board seat endorsement from Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), an influential proxy-advisory firm. Disney’s upcoming shareholder meeting, scheduled for April 3, suddenly got a lot more interesting.

Activists: Endgame

ISS carries significant sway among Disney’s major investors. Some 20 years ago, in fact, the group helped push out longtime CEO Michael Eisner. This time around, ISS is still publicly backing Iger, but it’s casting doubt on the current board’s ability to pick the next Iger, who is due to retire for the second time in 2026 after they botched picking a successor the last time. Still with us? That’s why, in a report sent to shareholders on Thursday, the group recommended Peltz to the board, writing, “Dissident nominee Peltz, as a significant shareholder, could be additive to the succession process, providing assurance to other investors that the board is properly engaged this time around.” Notably, ISS is not recommending shareholders vote for the other board member put forth by Peltz’s Trian Partners, former Disney CFO Jay Rasulo.

Iger and his team have had a busy start to the year convincing shareholders to rebuff Trian’s activist efforts, as well as similar efforts by smaller activist investor Blackwells Capital. In February, the company made a $1.5 billion investment in “Fortnite” video game studio Epic Games (imagine that: a giant entertainment company getting into an entertainment sub-industry that generates roughly seven-times more annual revenue than movies do), and announced a forthcoming sports streaming app joint-venture with Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox. 

The moves have sent Disney’s shares up some 30% year-to-date — enough for Iger to amass an Avengers-esque lineup of powerful allies ahead of the upcoming shareholder vote:

• Earlier this week, “Star Wars” creator George Lucas, who sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 and remains one of the company’s largest individual investors, publicly urged all shareholders to vote for the 12 board members put forth by Disney. Lucas has been joined in his support by the descendants of Walt Disney, as well as Laurene Powell Jobs, another significant shareholder.
• Glass Lewis, another major proxy adviser, has also urged shareholders to back Disney’s board members, as has JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, whose bank has long supported Iger in the proxy fight.

Are Americans at home with the housing market? 

Sales of previously-owned homes in the US hit a surprising height in February. Sick of waiting for the Federal Reserve to make a move, buyers and sellers seem to be accepting the market for what it is, high mortgage rates and all.

Neither Buyer’s nor Seller’s Market

It’s no secret that America’s housing market has been in a slump. Because the Fed has raised interest rates nearly a dozen times since 2022 to fight inflation, borrowing money for a home purchase has gotten more expensive with 30-year mortgages — the most popular kind — sitting at around 6.9% these days, according to Freddie Mac. Still, there’s been a drop since October when they reached 7.8%.

Owners didn’t want to part with the low mortgage rates they were already locked into. That led to a housing shortage, and what was left on the market proved too expensive for many buyers. The Fed is expected to lower interest rates later this year, but for plenty of buyers and sellers, the waiting game has gone on long enough:

• In February, contracts closed on roughly 4.4 million existing homes, an increase of 9.5% from the month prior, according to the National Association of Realtors.
• The median existing-home sales price elevated to $384,500, the eighth consecutive month of year-over-year price gains. However, the sales prices across all US homes jumped only 0.6% from January to February, which resembles pre-pandemic trends, according to Redfin.

“Buyers realize that they can always refinance later and the perfect home can be hard to come by,” Jessica Levine, a top 10 broker at Douglas Elliman, told The Daily Upside. “Prices have also stabilized, so waiting is no longer in a buyer’s best interest.”

The Biden Administration is out to clip some executive wings.

A New York Times report published Thursday highlights Joe Biden’s drive to impose higher taxes on private jets. It’s a tax that dovetails with the other policies Biden announced in his State of the Union speech, many of which are geared towards higher rates of taxation on society’s upper echelons. 

Crashing the PJ Party

Private jets (or PJs as Roman Roy likes to call them) have been growing steadily more popular since the onset of the pandemic, and PJ usage has been dragged into the public eye thanks in part to jet-tracking teen Jack Sweeney, who managed to make enemies out of both Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.

Per the NYT, corporate jets benefit from tax breaks not available to commercial aircraft, tax breaks which allow companies to pay lower fuel taxes and write off the cost of private jets more swiftly. But the Biden administration wants to put an end to that:

• Biden’s plans would hike the tax rate on private jet fuel by 386% over the next five years, from 28.1 cents on the gallon to $1.08. It also wants to lengthen the amount of time over which a business can write off the cost of a private aircraft from five years to seven, the same time frame that applies to commercial planes.
• The US government is already closely monitoring private jets, according to comments from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Thursday. She said in a statement to the Senate Committee on Finance that the Internal Revenue Service is “launching a new initiative to end abuse of corporate jet write-offs.”

Ed Bolen, president and chief executive of the National Business Aviation Association, pushed back against the planned tax hikes in quotes to the NYT. “We haven’t seen any real justification on why an important and essential American industry is being targeted for tax increases,” Bolen said.