Stephanie Jang runs again as a Republican candidate
for mayor of Palisades Park, NJ.
• Public Service Background: Before running for municipal office,
Stephanie Jang served on the Palisades Park School Board
of Education starting in 2018 and previously served as the Board’s President.
She was later sworn in as a Palisades Park Councilwoman after winning a tight council election.
Last two years, she served as an administrative secretary of the mayor in Englewood Cliffs.
(She promotes that Palisades Park increased property tax by 11.5% while Englewood Cliffs increased 0%)
• Mayoral Campaign: Jang is launching her campaign under the Republican ticket,
running on platforms aimed at fiscal management, addressing local government transparency,
preventing tax hikes, and supporting local businesses.
• Education Background: NYU Stern School of Business / New Brunswick Theological Seminary(Attended) / Rutgers Univ.
Master of Public Administration ( Currently pursuing)
Gateway Project Enters Excavation Stage
• Excavation work for the Gateway Hudson Tunnel Project has officially begun.
• On September 28, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, along with officials from the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) and tunnel excavation contractors,
held an event to announce the start of tunneling operations.
• The Gateway Hudson Tunnel Project is a project to construct a new railway line connecting New Jersey and New York.
As the busiest railway section in the United States,
expanding its transit capacity is expected to serve as an important milestone.
• This project involves building a new 5-mile-long tunnel, including a new 2-story tunnel constructed beneath the Hudson River.
The new tunnel will connect New Jersey and New York,
providing reliable, high-quality service to over 200,000 daily commuters.
Mortgage Rates Top 7%
• Average 30-year mortgage rates hit 7.03% this week,
the first time they have surpassed 7% since the beginning of last year, according to Freddie Mac.
• The threshold doesn’t hold any particular economic significance,
but it is psychologically important for buyers and means more potential buyers will stay on the sidelines,
dragging down a housing market that is in its fourth year of stagnant sales.
• Here are five things to know about how the housing market changes:
-High mortgage rates are becoming the new normal.
–Adjustable-rate and interest-only mortgages become more attractive.
-Housing market of 2026 is ending on sour note.
(economists say the housing market did make some progress this year in that more buyers,
as they get new jobs or have children, have opted to move despite the costs)
-Sellers might take their homes off the market.
-More bad news for home builders.
How Trump’s Inflation, Rate Bets Backfired
• In the early days of President Trump’s second term, his economic advisers laid out a simple theory:
Show the bond market that Washington was serious about closing its gaping deficits,
and long-term interest rates would fall on their own.
• It hasn’t worked out that way : Inflation is rising,
|the Fed is raising rates and the 10year Treasury yield is well above where it stood on Inauguration Day,
when the new team blamed high rates on runaway Biden-era spending.
Last week, that yield reached the highest level since 2007 as investors weighed a resilient economy,
prolonged energy disruptions that threaten to aggravate price pressures
and a central bank losing patience waiting for them to fade.
• “People know that Trump wants to end the Iran war, but they can see he doesn’t know how,” said Zoellick. “And Iran gets a vote.”
Debt Load Wallops Apartments
• Few investors are feeling more pain from rising interest rates than America’s apartment landlords.
• These property owners face a bill of more than $1.8 trillion in debt over the next decade.
From this year to 2028, about $757 billion of those loans are coming due,
according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. That is the most of any commercial real-estate sector.
• Nearly $300 billion of those loans are maturing in 2026 alone.
This follows a recordsetting 2025, when $310 billion in loans came due,
the highest the sector had seen in a single year since
the Mortgage Bankers Association started tracking. Another $223 billion is due next year.
• New apartment construction flooded the market, mostly concentrated in the Sunbelt.
Cities such as Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta and Austin,
Texas, were inundated with new luxury apartments and not enough people to fill them.
Musk’s Sunbelt Projects Reshape Business Empire
• More than 20 years after Elon Musk got his start in California,
the serial entrepreneur has expanded his empire with infrastructure projects across the southern half of the U.S.
• This year alone, his electric- vehicle maker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX have announced billions of
dollars in new projects in Texas and Louisiana.
The construction of new factories to quickly manufacture chips and solar panels and data centers
to support the companies’ AI capabilities will take years.
• States are racing to offer lucrative tax-incentive packages to win new business from Musk’s companies and,
in some cases, introducing laws that make it easier for the companies to operate.
• Grimes County,Texas / Bastrop County,Texas / Vermilion Parish, La/
Cameron County,Texas / Memphis,Tenn / Southaven, Miss.
Samsung Electronics, have committed a $1 billion investment in Helix
• Six Samsung Group affiliates, including Samsung Electronics,
have committed a $1 billion investment in Helix,
a U.S.-based AI data center infrastructure startup.(Helix Digital Infrastructure)
• Investor Group: Six key Samsung affiliates—Samsung Electronics,
Samsung C&T, Samsung Heavy Industries, Samsung SDS,
Samsung Electro-Mechanics, and Samsung Venture Investment.
• Target Company: Helix, a U.S. startup specializing in Next-Generation AI Data Center Infrastructure.
• Strategic Objective: Address the global bottleneck in AI data center
capacity by providing high-efficiency computing and cooling infrastructure.
Strengthen synergies across Samsung’s semiconductor, construction, IT services,
and manufacturing sectors for the expanding AI ecosystem.
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