BG Reads // January 20, 2026

Author

A.J. Bingham
January 20, 2026

faustin a

Presented By

www.binghamgp.com

January 20, 2026

✅ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 Austin marchers say Martin Luther King Jr.'s movement lives on despite Trump administration policies (KUT)

🟪 How one Austin firm helped reintroduce a massive real estate project (Austin Business Journal)

🟪 Trump has promised cheaper oil. Texas’ economy could pay a price. (Texas Tribune)

🟪 Led by Texas, New Hampshire, U.S. states race to prove they can put bitcoin on public balance sheet (CNBC

🟪 Trump plans to lay out how he’ll make housing more affordable (Associated Press)

🟪 Prediction market sites are taking over Washington (NOTUS)

🟪 Americans are the ones paying for tariffs, study finds (Wall Street Journal)

READ ON!

[FROM THE FIRM ]

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

🏛️ City of Austin Memos:

🏛️ Meetings next week:

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

✅ Austin marchers say Martin Luther King Jr.'s movement lives on despite Trump administration policies (KUT)

The climate at this year's Martin Luther King Jr. march and rally was notably different. Many spoke out against the current Trump administration and drew throughlines between the resistance of the Civil Rights Movement and today's pushback on recent efforts at the federal and state levels to diminish the impact of minorities in the U.S.

State Rep. Sheryl Cole, an Austin Democrat, said the current political climate is challenging, but King warned justice would not come easily.

“Let this be a day more than remembrance,” she said. “Let it be a renewal. Let it be a renewal of courage, a renewal of solidarity, a renewal of hope rooted in action. The struggle continues but so does the movement.”

Austinite Rick Hoff said for him, honoring King was about keeping his legacy alive despite efforts at the federal level to minimize its significance… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ City audit calls for upgrades to Austin’s speed safety program (KXAN)

The city of Austin plans to make changes to improve speed reduction and traffic safety after a January audit.

The city auditor’s office said the Austin Transportation and Public Works Department’s (ATPW) current approach to slow down drivers is effective, however key changes should be made to how the city documents and maintains speed management projects.

Sam Sokolow, a senior auditor with the Austin City Auditor’s Office, presented the results at this month’s Audit and Finance Committee meeting.

“We found that the city has a proactive approach to speed reduction,” Sokolow said. “As part of our work, we looked at several of the city’s traffic-calming projects from the past few years. When looking at all segments across the projects, we found that speeds went down most of the time.”… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ How one Austin firm helped reintroduce a massive real estate project (Austin Business Journal)

One of Austin’s newest and largest master-planned developments has changed its name and identity in recent years.

That's no small task.

The Row — once known as Velocity — will encompass 314 acres in Southeast Austin with thousands of residential units and 7 million square feet of commercial space. It's being developed by Presidium, an Austin and Dallas-based firm, as well as California-based PentaGrowth Capital, which is co-developing the retail phases.

At one point, it was envisioned to have 2,700 apartments, 2.9 million square feet of office space, 585,000 square feet of industrial and creative office space and 310,000 square feet for commercial uses. The pivot to naming this project "The Row" coincided with a pivot away from a heavy office use in the project. Now, Presidium is letting market conditions determine future phases of the project, a spokesperson confirmed.

The Austin Business Journal recently sat down with local design firm Asterisk, which helped the project pivot its direction and scope. The design firm has worked on other prominent projects such as the Austin PBS building and the Seaholm building… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Tommie Lee Wyatt, chronicler of Black Austin life, dies at 88 (KUT)

The inaugural year of the University of Austin, or UATX as it’s known, had been marked by the frenzy and occasional chaos that one might expect from a start-up aimed at disrupting American higher education. The audacious experiment — the construction of a new university ostensibly based on principles of free expression and academic freedom — had drawn the interest and participation of a star-studded cast of public intellectuals, academics and tycoons. Even measured against this high bar, however, April 2, 2025, would be a memorable day.

The night before, the campus had hosted a dinner and conversation between the prominent conservative historian Niall Ferguson and Larry Summers, the former Tommie “T.L.” Lee Wyatt, longtime publisher of East Austin’s The Villager newspaper, died in his sleep on Jan. 9 after a long illness. He was 88.

Wyatt arrived in Austin in 1962, a life insurance salesman and former college football player who was inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. He was passionate about uplifting the achievements of Austin’s Black residents and promoting equality at a time when the city was still largely segregated. To that end, he co-founded The Villager in 1973.

“We wanted to put together the historical record of the Black community and the good things about the Black community,” Wyatt told KUT in 2020. “In our daily papers, all you could see when we made the front page is when an African American had done something bad.”

The free community paper has now been in print for more than 50 years, and is still distributed at businesses in East Austin and beyond. The Villager has added considerably to Austin’s record of African American history, as was recognized by an exhibit at the Austin History Center in 2020… 🟪 (READ MORE)

[TEXAS/US NEWS]

✅ Trump has promised cheaper oil. Texas’ economy could pay a price. (Texas Tribune)

After COVID-19 tanked oil prices, Texas’ oil and gas industry rebounded.

By 2024, operators were drilling record amounts of oil. Each barrel sold for at least $70, bringing profits and momentum that enriched the state’s coffers, school districts and local government budgets with billions in tax revenue.

Now, President Donald Trump’s pledge to bring oil prices down to $50 a barrel could decimate that momentum, making trouble — even if temporarily — for the Lone Star State.

Trump, who suggested the U.S. should take control of Venezuela’s oil after the country arrested President Nicolás Maduro, could certainly deliver on his promise to lower fuel costs for consumers by flooding the market with the South American country’s oil… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Led by Texas, New Hampshire, U.S. states race to prove they can put bitcoin on public balance sheet (CNBC)

Led by Texas and New Hampshire, U.S. states across the national map, both red and blue in political stripes, are developing bitcoin strategic reserves and bringing cryptocurrencies onto their books through additional state finance and budgeting measures. Texas recently became the first state to purchase bitcoin after a legislative effort that began in 2024, but numerous states have joined the "Reserve Race" to pass legislation that will allow them to ultimately buy cryptocurrencies.

New Hampshire passed its crypto strategic reserve law last May, even before Texas, giving the state treasurer the authority to invest up to 5% of the state funds in crypto ETFs, though precious metals such as gold are also authorized for purchase. Arizona passed similar legislation, while Massachusetts, Ohio, and South Dakota have legislation at various stages of committee review.

Despite much of the legislation being largely sponsored or co-sponsored by Republicans, the adoption of crypto at the state level is not expected to strictly fall along party lines. The 2024 election cycle was the first time that the cryptocurrency industry played a major role in lobbying in both state and national elections. In fact, it was the largest corporate donor in an election cycle, with support given to candidates on both sides. It is already amassing a war chest for the 2026 midterms. Congress is currently debating a crypto market structure bill, and state-level politicians are as much out to prove that they, and their states, won't be left out of the digital assets boom.

Justin Marlowe, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago, sees the state-level trend as largely one of signaling at present. "If you're a governor and you want to broadcast that you are amenable to innovative business development in the digital economy, these are relatively low-cost, low-risk ways to send that signal. That's why we've seen leaders across the ideological spectrum and all over the country take tangible steps in this direction," he said. Where the state-level crypto efforts can be described as "bigger steps" — Marlowe cited Texas, Arizona, and Florida, as examples — he said it has helped to acknowledge the growing political power of crypto advocates in these states… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Trump plans to lay out how he’ll make housing more affordable (Associated Press)

President Donald Trump plans to use a key address Wednesday to try to convince Americans he can make housing more affordable, but he’s picked a strange backdrop for the speech: a Swiss mountain town where ski chalets for vacations cost a cool $4.4 million.

On the anniversary of his inauguration, Trump is flying to the World Economic Forum in Davos — an annual gathering of the global elite — where he may see many of the billionaires he has surrounded himself with during his first year back in the White House.

Trump had campaigned on lowering the cost of living, painting himself as a populist while serving fries at a McDonald’s drive-thru. But in office, his public schedules suggest he’s traded the Golden Arches for a gilded age, devoting more time to cavorting with the wealthy than talking directly to his working-class base... 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Prediction market sites are taking over Washington (NOTUS)

Before White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt takes the podium for press briefings, users on Polymarket and Kalshi place their bets, hoping to cash in on their predictions about when the briefing will start, how long it will last and what Leavitt will say. Words and phrases like “ICE,” “narco-terrorist,” “Biden,” and “radical left” are popular picks, with thousands of dollars being put up every time she takes the podium.

Users have placed about $33,000 on whether the UFC will host a fight at the White House by the country’s 250th anniversary, $85,000 on what President Donald Trump will say in his State of the Union address, and $372,000 on which Cabinet secretaries will be out by the end of the year. Earlier this month, Leavitt made headlines for ending the briefing seconds before users could cash in bets that it would last longer than 65 minutes.

There were two places in Washington where bets weren’t coming in — at least on WiFi. Polymarket and Kalshi are inaccessible on the “White House Press” WiFi network. They are also restricted on the House of Representatives’ WiFi network, although not the Senate’s. Prediction markets have become a multi-billion-dollar industry, expanding from wagers on sports to political minutiae.

As popularity surges, lawmakers and government institutions are taking steps to limit access and prevent misuse. But experts say the current attempts at regulation don’t go far enough. Legislative efforts to regulate the integrity of the markets became a top priority for lawmakers after an anonymous user on Polymarket wagered thousands of dollars that the United States would capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, hours before it happened and hours before the public became aware of the plan. The user made more than $400,000… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Americans are the ones paying for tariffs, study finds (Wall Street Journal)

Americans, not foreigners, are bearing almost the entire cost of U.S. tariffs, according to new research that contradicts a key claim by President Trump and suggests he might have a weaker hand in a reemerging trade war with Europe. Trump has repeatedly claimed that his historic tariffs, deployed aggressively over the past year as both a revenue-raising and foreign-policy tool, will be paid for by foreigners.

Such assertions helped to reinforce the president’s bargaining power and encourage foreign governments to do deals with the U.S. Trump’s claims have been supported by the resilience of the U.S. economy, which recorded relatively brisk growth and moderate inflation last year, even as growth in Europe and other advanced economies remained sluggish.

The new research, published Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a well-regarded German think tank, suggests that the impact of tariffs is likely to show up over time in the form of higher U.S. consumer prices. The findings don’t mean that the tariffs are a win for Europe—on the contrary. German exports to the U.S., which have rocketed in recent years, have contracted sharply in the past year.

The German research echoes recent reports by the Budget Lab at Yale and economists at Harvard Business School, finding that only a small fraction of the tariff costs were being borne by foreign producers. By analyzing $4 trillion of shipments between January 2024 and November 2025, the Kiel Institute researchers found that foreign exporters absorbed only about 4% of the burden of last year’s U.S. tariff increases by lowering their prices, while American consumers and importers absorbed 96%… 🟪 (READ MORE)

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