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CNBC brings you stories that missed the spotlight this week. In today's episode, we'll cover why Americans still feel pessimistic despite signals of a resilient economy. Will the consumer ever regain confidence? Next, find out why Japanese home builders are on a US buying spree, and how it could benefit US consumers. And finally, we'll explore how China is training the workers of the future. Robots, humanoid robots, are gearing up to go beyond entertainment and enter the workforce. This is CNBC In Other News.
Americans never regained their economic confidence after the pandemic. Now the question is, if they ever will. A consumer sentiment survey by the University of Michigan fell to record lows that flies in the face of the fact that the economy keeps growing and consumers keep spending. So, if the economy is in good health on paper, why are Americans still so pessimistic? Since we've been missing on our inflation target, we've been above that 2% goal over the past five years. Individuals have experienced a decade's worth of inflation in that time period. Consumers still feel burned by the runaway inflation seen earlier this decade. Even as they hear about inflation coming down, they're grappling with the fact that
they pay notably more for goods than a few years ago. There's a gap that's emerged in recent years between consumer sentiment and a traditional basket of indicators tracked by PNC. The bank said that's largely due to the effects of higher prices. Inflation has is still above the Fed's target, but it's come down considerably. The way consumers experience inflation is over a much longer time frame, so they're not looking at the contemporaneous inflation rate, they're looking at the prices of movie tickets, grocery items, and they're comparing it to what they were used to seeing before the pandemic. For a lot of these price level shocks, consumers are also hearing a lot more negative news about inflation,
which economists say can exacerbate their sour outlooks. Despite this, consumers have continued to spend, but there's concern that higher gas prices amid the Iran war will cause them to tighten the belt. It takes time for consumers to adjust to an environment with higher prices, but in recent years there's been so many economic jolts that they haven't been able to start feeling stable again. To name a few, there's COVID, President Trump's tariffs, and now, most recently, the Iran war. It does seem that inflation shocks have a shelf life of around three years on consumer psyche, but what we see is that the impact of inflation on consumers halves every year. So, we probably have another three years of this gap
persisting before it starts to converge back towards what we would consider to be normal relationships between sentiment and fundamentals. Japanese home builders are on a US buying spree. So far this year, they've purchased four builders. In the last five years, they've bought 23 as well as several multifamily builders and construction services firms. Why? Well, many reasons. The cost of capital for the Japanese is lower, so they can offer a bigger return. The demographics for US housing are very attractive: high demand, low supply, and the Japanese are just more efficient at building. Add it up, and it's a potent
play. Would I be surprised to see a top 10 US public sell to a Japanese? Absolutely not. I think it's very probable that it will happen here soon. Japanese companies now own 33 home builders that operate in the US. Once the most recent deals are closed, they'll have close to 6% of the US market share. The biggest deal so far this year was the $4.5 billion purchase of publicly traded Tri Point homes by Japanese-based Sumitomo Forestry. Tri Point operates in 12 US states, as well as Washington, D.C. Sumitomo now counts five formerly US home builders in its group, and aims to supply 23,000 homes annually in the US by 2030
Japanese builders are looking to grow outside of their market, because the Japanese home building market, the pie is not getting bigger, and then you have an almost non-existent annual immigration, while Japanese demographics don't favor home building, US demographics do. By some estimates, the US is short about 4 million homes, given the current demand. Japanese builders who are well capitalized are taking advantage of that. You have a thriving home building market, you have builders that are very good at what they do, and they're sitting on a lot of cash, so they're looking to other markets to deploy that cash. The financing is also working in their favor, according to Margaret Whalen, whose Whalen
advisory has worked on several of these deals. Versus the 10 year average, the builders, the publicly traded builders, are trading around one times book value right now. The average is 1.4 Four, so that's a nice discount from the average valuation for a buyer like a Japanese group to come in. Another thing that makes the US market ripe for purchase is that it's simply not doing very well right now due to higher interest rates and overall uncertainty due to the war with Iran. It's not frothy, you have the top 20 or 25 sort of super privates that are the largest privates, and if any of those wanted to sell their business today, they would have a lot of interest and get an extremely attractive price in terms, because they move the
needle, and there's not many of them left. The Japanese have another advantage, they simply build better. The home builders over there are much more efficient from a production perspective, they tend to build every house twice, the first time in d online, reverse engineer it, reduce the waste and the cost to build and time to build, and so bringing those best practices to the US is going to make a big difference to affordability. While large scale US builders haven't changed their construction methods much over the last decades, some startups like Boxable are trying to compete, and even showing the Japanese their methods. Sekis Sui, and I think there's a couple of others, Taiwa Tsumi Tsumo.
We've had their executives here. Paolo Taramani is founder and co-CEO of Boxable, which makes factory-built homes using fast automated production lines. They literally fold down homes into a 12 foot wide stack, which allows them to ship nationally. We've spent two or three years developing a full system that makes from backyard ADU casitas to mansions and apartments, and pretty much anything you can configure in any architectural style, but it hasn't been easy. Taramani admits he was fairly naive when he started five years ago. He looked at national building codes and missed a huge hurdle. We were hit squarely in the face by state and local zoning and jurisdictions. Japan is heavy into factory built and robot enabled, but they've yet
to deploy it in the US companies they've acquired. That methodology factory built works in Japan, some Asian markets, European markets, where you have denser population, and the factories are closer to the homes. In the US, we're just too spread out, and the capital required to invest in a factory makes it very difficult. I think coming over here, they've probably got a little bit of a culture shock of how building construction operates as they purchase some of these companies and see that it's very un Japanese, so I think you're definitely going to see a culture clash between the different managements of the companies that they're purchasing and absorbing in their M&A activities,
Kenneth Wren is training the workers of the future. Only thing is, they're not human. We're essentially teaching robots to think on their own, he says. Wren helps run what state media describe as a humanoid robot school, as China looks to advance its robots beyond entertainment to employment. This center in Beijing trains robots to get ready to work in a variety of scenarios. Foodie Law is one of some 100 instructors. A former art teacher law schools her cyborg students on how to sort items on a factory line using cameras, controllers, and motion capture. She and her fellow instructors guide their AI-enabled pupils through tasks, repeating actions multiple times.
At first, the robot has no awareness, and I have to control it manually, she says. But once my movement generates data, the robot learns, and then can perform the task on its own. The robots are taught skills like housekeeping, massage, organizing store shelves, and metal repair. Who gets tired first? Me, she replies. The robot doesn't know what tired is, but I do. On the same campus, hands are trained with motion tracking and sensors on average 10,000 times to learn a new skill. The creators say our current robotic hand can pick up an egg or even smaller objects and lift a string. He says the training isn't only in school, but on the job. AI-powered robots are being test run as restaurant chefs, bartenders, waiters, even bodega
owners. Right now, the robots rely on human assistance, though their proponents say it's only a matter of time before the droids do the jobs on their own. Our goal is to take on tasks that are dangerous to humans or repetitive work that people are unwilling or afraid to do. He says we have no intention of replacing humans in any field, he.
