Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Wednesday June 25 Housing and Economic stories


China’s Property Developers Face Record Wave of Maturing Debt - (www.bloomberg.com) Chinese property developers face a record surge in maturing debt next year, as the country’s banking regulator says it’s monitoring risks from the cooling real-estate market. The amount of dollar-denominated bonds that must be repaid in 2015 will jump to $2.83 billion, the most in data compiled by Bloomberg going back to 1993. Most Chinese builders listed on the mainland or in Hong Kong are behind fiscal-year sales targets and achieved less than 33 percent of their target in the first four months, analysis based on Bloomberg data show. The China Banking Regulatory Commission will monitor the financial and cash-flow conditions of developers, and will support first-time homebuyers’ borrowing needs, Vice Chairman Wang Zhaoxing said at a briefing in Beijing today. Moody’s Investors Service revised its credit outlook for Chinese builders to negative in May after home sales slumped 10 percent in the first four months.

Why Obamacare Can't Be 'Fixed' - (www.bloomberg.com) Monica Wehby, the Republican Senate candidate in Oregon, has fallen prey to a common delusion: that Obamacare can be "fixed." On her campaign website, Wehby, a surgeon, runs through a list of changes she wants made to the president's health-care overhaul. She would, among other things, get rid of the individual mandate to buy health insurance, offer more catastrophic insurance options on the exchanges and make it easier for people to buy insurance across state lines. But she also wants to keep several Affordable Care Act provisions, including the one that bans insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing health conditions. You can see why Wehby would find this mix of policies attractive: Polls find that people dislike Obamacare, but they like the idea of "fixing" it and they like the discrimination ban. (They like it less when pollsters mention the costs of that ban.) In the effort to take the popular side of every health-care question, though, Wehby has come up with a plan that doesn't hang together.

Caesars Receives Notice of Default From Bondholder Group - (www.bloomberg.com) Bondholders sent a unit of Caesars Entertainment Corp. (CZR) a notice of default, intensifying a battle with the largest owner of casinos in the U.S. The notice was sent yesterday by investors owning at least 30 percent of Caesars Entertainment Operating Co. second-lien, 10 percent bonds due in 2018, according to a filing today. The creditors said the company defaulted on its obligations by transferring assets, such as Bally’s Las Vegas hotel, to an affiliate, and by removing the parent company’s guarantee on the operating unit’s debt. There are $3.7 billion of the notes outstanding, according to a filing by Caesars. The notice escalates the conflict between Las Vegas-based Caesars, purchased in a 2008 buyout byApollo Global Management LLC (APO) and TPG Capital, and some of its creditors. The company, which has $23.4 billion in debt outstanding, said the asset transfers followed a rigorous, independent process designed to provide liquidity crucial to its business.

Europe Faces Either A Rotten President Or A Constitutional Crisis
- (www.businessinsider.com)  The European Union is in deep trouble. Growth is sluggish at best, unemployment punishingly high and deflation threatens. The European elections returned many populist, anti-EU members to the European Parliament; public support for the project has plummeted. Against this background, the squabble over who should be the next president of the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, looks an ever more dangerous tragicomedy: Franz Kafka meets Dario Fo.
The front-runner for the job is Jean-Claude Juncker (pictured). The former prime minister of Luxembourg was picked as "lead candidate" by the centre-right pan-European political group, the European People's Party (EPP), in March.
Housing foreclosures caused suicides - (www.sciencedaily.com)  The recent U.S. foreclosure crisis contributed significantly to the nation's jump in suicides, independent of other economic factors associated with the Great Recession, according to a study by Dartmouth and Purdue professors publishing Monday. The study, publishing in the June issue of theAmerican Journal of Public Health and available online now, is the first to ever show a correlation between foreclosure and suicide rates. The authors analyzed state-level foreclosure and suicide rates from 2005 to 2010. During that period, the U.S. suicide rate increased nearly 13 percent, and annual home foreclosures hit a record 2.9 million (in 2010). "It seems that foreclosures affect suicide rates in two ways," said co-author Jason Houle, assistant professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. "The loss of a home clearly impacts individuals and families, and can arouse feelings of loss, shame, or regret. At the same time, rising foreclosure rates affect entire communities because they're associated with a number of community level resources and stresses, including an increase in crime, abandoned homes, and a sense of insecurity."




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