Why Record Numbers of Americans Are Leaving the U.S.
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Hillary Clinton tells Congress she has no information about Jeffrey Epstein, plus why a record number of Americans are leaving the U.S. and why other countries want them.
The Americans are definitely coming, and not just for holiday. Places that you've read about a little bit, like Portugal, like Italy, but it's also happening in places that you wouldn't perhaps know. Countries are very, very interested in attracting Americans because they bring capital with them and they bring know-how.
And mortgage rates dropped below 6%. What does it mean for the housing market? It's Thursday, February 26th. I'm Alex Oselev for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News? The top headlines and business stories that move the world today. In a late-breaking development, Warner Bros. Discovery says that Paramount's revised offer to buy it is superior to the deal it has with Netflix. Netflix now has four business days to counter. Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Go to WSJ.com for more on this breaking story. Mortgage rates have fallen below 6% this week for the first time in more than three years. Freddie Mac said today that the average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage was 5.98%.
WSJ personal finance reporter Veronica Dagger says that might help boost home sales going into the crucial spring home-buying season.
It's good news for some buyers because they'll feel more confident buying a house with a mortgage rate that starts in the fives versus the 6% range. That said, so much of it right now in this market is more of a psychological thing. Yes, you have real savings the lower the mortgage rate goes. However, there's a lot of things stopping buyers from buying a house. If you are worried about an environment where people are losing their jobs, that sense of uneasiness about this economy is holding a lot of people back. Also, owning a home has become increasingly expensive. It's not just the mortgage rate. Home insurance keeps going up in so many areas of the country, along with property taxes. We still have really high home prices as well.
What you could actually see happen in certain areas is home prices going up because of this drop in mortgage rates. That's also tough for buyers because there isn't a whole lot of supply in certain markets.
Speaking of housing, New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani met President Trump in Washington today to discuss building more housing. The two political opposites have found common ground on the issue of affordability. Last year, the U.S. experienced something that hasn't happened in almost a century, net negative migration. More people moved out than moved in. The Brookings Institution, a think tank, puts the net loss at around 150,000 people. The Trump administration has said this shows the effects of its immigration crackdown with 675,000 deportations. But there's also something else going on. America's own citizens are leaving in record numbers. A Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 15 countries showed that at least 180,000 Americans left, too.
Joe Parkinson, who leads the journal's World Enterprise team, joins me now from London. Joe, I want to start with how we actually know that this is happening. Does the U.S. government measure the number of citizens who are moving elsewhere?
The government hasn't kept accurate data on that since around about the Eisenhower administration. What we needed to do was basically look at the other end of the telescope. So instead of looking to the U.S. government, go to every country, find the data, pull the data to try and create a picture of how many Americans were actually moving abroad. And as we went through that data, a historical pattern began to emerge.
When did this outflow of Americans start, really?
This is not a new story entirely. What's changed to magnify the numbers in recent years really are big shifts in technology and things like remote work that you can now work for an American company but be based in Lisbon, in Bali, Mexico City. That wasn't really possible five years ago, let alone 20 years ago.
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