KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Thursday April 2 Housing and Economic stories

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Soros Says Greece Is Now ‘Lose-Lose Game’ After Being Mishandled - (www.bloomberg.com) The chances of Greece leaving the euro area are now 50-50 and the country could go “down the drain,” billionaire investor George Soros said. “It’s now a lose-lose game and the best that can happen is actually muddling through,” Soros, 84, said in a Bloomberg Television interview due to air Tuesday. “Greece is a long-festering problem that was mishandled from the beginning by all parties.” Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government needs to persuade its creditors to sign off on a package of economic measures to free up long-withheld aid payments that will keep the country afloat. Since his January election victory, he has tried to shape an alternative to the austerity program set out in the nation’s bailout agreement, spurring concern that Greece may be forced out of the euro.

S&P Downgrades Kaisa to Default After Missed Coupon Payments - (www.bloomberg.com) Standard & Poor’s downgraded Kaisa Group Holdings Ltd. to default after the troubled developer failed to make coupon payments on two of its dollar-denominated bonds. “We do not anticipate the company will make the payment within the 30-day grace period, given its stressed liquidity,” the ratings company said in an e-mailed statement Tuesday, adding that it also doesn’t expect Kaisa to pay its other debt obligations, considering its ongoing negotiations with onshore and offshore creditors. If Kaisa doesn’t pay the about $52 million interest that was due March 18 and March 19 on its 2017 and 2018 notes, it would become the first Chinese real estate company to default on its U.S. currency debt. A near-default on its 2020 securities last month highlighted the relatively weak position of foreign investors when it comes to bankruptcies in Asia’s largest economy.

These Junk Bond Outflows Show Just How Jumpy Buyers Have Become - (www.bloomberg.com) The promise of low borrowing costs for longer just doesn’t pack the punch it used to. Last week should have been fantastic for the $1.3 trillion U.S. junk-bond market: the Federal Reserve scaled back its prediction for how quickly it will raise benchmark interest rates while also expressing confidence in the world’s biggest economy. That’s almost an ideal world for junk bonds. And yet investors yanked $1.3 billion from mutual funds that buy the debt last week, and they’ve pulled $2.9 billion this month, according to data compiled by Wells Fargo & Co. Dollar-denominated high-yield bonds, while rallying some immediately after the Fed statement was released Wednesday, have lost about 1 percent in March after gaining 2.4 percent the month before, Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data show.

Obamacare's reckoning: Time to pay the tax man - (www.cnbc.com) For millions of people this tax season, Obamacare won't be quite a "50-50" proposition, but it will sure come close. Half of the households that received federal subsidies to help pay for their health insurance in 2014 will have to repay some money back to the government when they file their tax returns, a new analysis released Tuesday estimates. The average repayment owed by those people will be $794, the Kaiser Family Foundation study found. The repayments will be owed because those households' actual incomes ended up being higher for the year than what they had estimated when they applied for the subsidies. Another 45 percent of households that received such subsidies will be owed a refund, because they should have received more of those tax credits last year based on their final annual incomes. Their estimated average refund will be $773, Kaiser said.

You 'can't trust' Social Security: Fmr. Official - (finance.yahoo.com) According to a former top government official, your retirement could be at risk, and the escalating costs of Social Security, public pensions and health care are the primary reasons why. The Social Security Administration itself confirms as much, recently warning that part of Social Security-the Disability Insurance Trust Fund-could run out of money as early as next year. That could leave the nearly 11 million people who depend on disability payments without necessary funds. David Walker, the former Comptroller of the United States, echoed those concerns in an interview with CNBC's "On the Money" recently. "According to the trustees, it's supposed to go to zero, the so-called trust fund in 2016," he said. From 1998 to 2008, Walker served as Comptroller General of the United States, and head of the Government Accountability Office. In an interview, Walker predicts that Congress, as a temporary fix, will probably reallocate payroll revenues from the retirement portion to the disability portion. However, he argues that won't solve the problem.

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