Could putting the kibosh on homebuilders’ stock buybacks help fix the nation’s affordability crisis? The White House certainly thinks so.

Last week, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte told The Wall Street Journal that the administration is “studying” how much homebuilders are spending on repurchasing their own shares and said the industry is deliberately keeping prices high. That, in turn, erodes consumer purchasing power by driving up housing costs, the largest living expense for average Americans. As of December, the median sales price for existing homes was $405,400, up 0.4% from last year and well above the $309,800 in 2020.

Low Supply, High Demand

“They’re making, in some cases, more money than they’ve ever made, and they’re buying back stock like never before,” Pulte said. Stock buybacks, which companies use to reward shareholders or when they see their stock as undervalued, have long come under scrutiny from policymakers. That hasn’t stopped builders: In fiscal 2025, D.R. Horton and Lennar forked over $4.3 billion and $1.7 billion, respectively, to buy their own stocks. PulteGroup, founded by Bill Pulte’s grandfather, spent $900 million on buybacks during the first nine months of 2025, and KB Home’s total repurchases for the year ended Nov. 30 added up to $538.5 million. In October, KB Home’s board of directors greenlit the repurchase of up to $1 billion of the company’s stock.

And homebuilders’ stocks are surging. As of market close Friday, the iShares US Home Construction ETF was up 11% for the year — far above the S&P 500’s 1.2%.

But there’s one key thing those homebuilders don’t appear to be doing as much of: building new homes. The latest data from the Census Bureau shows that housing starts in October fell 4.6% to an annual rate of 1.25 million, the lowest level since May 2020. National Association of Home Builders Chairman Buddy Hughes said in a December statement that “builders are contending with rising material and labor prices, as tariffs are having serious repercussions on construction costs.” The organization didn’t immediately comment on the buyback scrutiny on Friday.

While there’s a supply shortage, the same can’t be said for demand:

• Existing-home sales jumped 5.1% in December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.35 million, the strongest pace in nearly three years, according to the National Association of Realtors.
• Refinance demand surged 40% for the week ending Jan. 9, following a drop in mortgage rates after President Trump said he was instructing “representatives” to buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds to bring down housing costs.

Reward System? In the face of a growing affordability crisis — and Trump’s recent promise of “some of the most aggressive housing reform plans in American history” — Pulte told Barron’s last week that the administration is evaluating “incentivizing builders who are working constructively with us with appropriate pricing.” He also said officials are “looking at the builders who are maybe not working constructively with us and evaluating their pricing, as well.”

Artificial intelligence causes memory problems, and we’re not talking about relying on bots to do your homework.

The AI gold rush has created a brand new shortage in computer memory infrastructure, flipping the entire tech world upside-down by making this unglamorous low-margin business suddenly and somewhat shockingly hot. Last year, that made memory darling Sandisk one of the best performers on the S&P 500. Will the run continue in 2026? Early indications say yes.

Short-Term Memory Loss

The hyperscalers have hyperscaled, pushing memory-makers to the brink. Industry peer Micron told CNBC earlier this month that it’s “already sold out for 2026.” Memory typically accounts for about one-fifth of most hardware costs, meaning that for everyone else, competing with hyperscalers has come with a steep price increase. Shares of Nintendo, for instance, plummeted through the close of 2025 as the cost of memory in its Switch 2 hardware skyrocketed more than 40% in the final quarter; last week, president Shuntaro Furukawa said the company “must monitor the situation closely,” though he declined to comment on the hypothetical of raising console prices.

Last year, memory supplier SanDisk split off from data storage firm Western Digital in February, just in time for the boom. Moving forward, it will have to walk the tightrope of reinvesting in production capacity to service clients without giving away its supply advantage:

• Shares of Sandisk scored an incredible 559% total return in 2025 after leaving the Western Digital nest, making it one of the best performers in the entire S&P 500. Shares of the company have already risen another 50% since the turn of the calendar.
• Still, Sandisk leaders told The Wall Street Journal last week they remain hyper-aware of the boom-and-bust cycles the memory industry has historically faced. The company expects to increase capital expenditures by 18% in its current fiscal year, which ends in June, despite an expected 44% revenue jump.

“We need to get the economics right to be able to continue to invest that money and not go through these huge episodic periods of losing money,” Sandisk CEO David Goeckeler told the WSJ, while suggesting hyperscalers commit to supply agreements “longer than three months at a time.”

PC Culture: The recent run on memory supply has some DIY PC-builders remembering — and fretting over — a bold prediction made by Jeff Bezos at The New York Times DealBook Summit in 2024: As hyperscalers suck up resources, Bezos predicted the personal computing industry may go the way of the dodo, with most future consumers instead renting compute power from cloud providers. Given Amazon’s massive cloud services business, we’ll say that, in this case, “predict” may as well be synonymous with “hope.”

The Coachella for business and political leaders is back again, and it will have higher stakes than whether or not the stage has an ice rink.

Hundreds of private jets have started touching down in the Swiss Alps for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. Altogether, 850 CEOs and company chairpeople and 64 heads of state, including six of the seven G7 leaders, are expected to visit the alpine town this week. A total of 3,000 attendees from 130 countries are slated to attend the event, including President Trump.

Last year’s Davos coincided with Trump taking office for his second term. A lot has happened since then, to put it mildly.

Global Economic (Dis)order

Tensions might be high at Davos this year, following months of Trump-helmed tariffs that spooked global supply chains. More than four in ten execs told the WEF that doing business was harder in 2025 compared with the year before, while just 7% said it got better (the rest didn’t respond or said it was the same). Trump could also draw some glares at Davos because of his recent threats to acquire Greenland.

A couple of other topics that are likely to stir up debate:

• The WEF called out AI in two of its five “key global challenges,” focal points of its programming. (Notably, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is expected to attend.) Execs are expected to discuss how AI can boost revenue and be responsibly leveraged to scale new tech. In contrast, another WEF “challenge” is how businesses can continue to invest in humans, not just humanoids.
• In years past, the WEF has been known for its green focus, and this year, one of its key talking points is how companies can nurture “nature-positive business models.” But oil execs, including the CEOs of ExxonMobil and Shell, will likely be listening this year for Trump to promote his “drill, baby, drill” agenda.

Identity Crisis: Political scientist Samuel Huffington coined the phrase “Davos Man” in 2004, but WEF has become synonymous with the global elite, who aren’t much in favor these days. At the same time, the organization itself has undergone a major change that could affect how things are run. This year is BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s first year at the WEF’s helm after longtime chair Klaus Schwab stepped down last spring.