KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Friday May 8 Housing and Economic stories

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Even Ireland’s Weakest Bank Can Raise Money in This Bond Market - (www.bloomberg.com) The first Irish lender to sell Europe’s riskiest type of bank bond is also the nation’s weakest. Permanent TSB Group Holdings Plc, which failed European financial stress tests last year, is selling 125 million euros ($136 million) of so-called additional Tier 1, or AT1, bonds this week. The undated securities convert into shares should capital drop below a certain threshold and carry coupons that issuers can just decide not to pay. The sale will nonetheless “will go down extraordinary well,” said Liam Dunne, a fixed-income trader at Merrion Capital in Dublin. “The world has changed. There is huge demand for Irish assets at the moment.” Coming less than the six years after Irish banks started to impose losses on junior bondholders as the financial system flirted with collapse, the sale demonstrates the renewed appetite for debt across the euro region. The market for the riskiest bank debt has swollen to about $80 billion in Europe since Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA sold the first AT1 note two years ago.

[NYT] Burdened With Debt, Law School Graduates Struggle in Job Market - (www.nytimes.com) Jonathan Wang has not practiced law since he graduated from Columbia Law School in 2010, but he did not plan it that way. When he entered law school, the economy was flourishing, and he had every reason to think that with a prestigious degree he was headed for a secure well-paying career. He convinced his parents, who work in Silicon Valley, that he had a plan. “I would spend three years at school in New York, then work for a big law firm and make $160,000 a year,” said Mr. Wang, 29. “And someday, I would become a partner and live the good life.” Mr. Wang, who works in Manhattan as a tutor for the law school admissions exam, is living a life far different from the one he envisioned. And he is not alone. About 20 percent of law graduates from 2010 are working at jobs that do not require a law license, according to a new study, and only 40 percent are working in law firms, compared with 60 percent from the class a decade earlier. To pay the bills, the 2010 graduates have taken on a variety of jobs, some that do not require admission to the bar; others have struck out on their own with solo practices. Most of the graduates have substantial student debt.

Cuts to pay and perks trigger flight from China's state banks - (www.reuters.com) Bankers at China's top state lenders are quitting in increasing numbers because of cuts to their pay and perks, and moving to a new breed of financial firms such as leasing companies, trusts and online platforms, bankers and headhunters say. As part of an austerity, anti-graft drive, Beijing last year dictated pay cuts of up to a half for senior-level state bankers. Some state-owned lenders have since quietly cut salaries across the board. The declining popularity of bank jobs could make it difficult for state lenders to hire and retain talent, making them less able to compete with newer lending institutions. "In the past we wouldn't see CVs from the state sector, but now we do," said Maggy Fang, managing director of executive compensation Asia Pacific at Towers Watson, a professional services company, noting that most of these resumes are from mid-level, thirtysomething bankers.

Government Watchdog Calls The Clinton Foundation "A Slush Fund" - (www.zerohedge.com) "The Clinton Foundation’s finances are so messy that the nation’s most influential charity watchdog put it on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits last month... It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons." The hits keep on coming. Just last week, in the post, More Clinton Foundation Cronyism – The Deal to Sell Uranium Interests to Russia While Hillary was Secretary of State, I referred to the Clinton Foundation as “a veritable clearinghouse for cronyism masquerading as a charity.” Here’s the full opening paragraph to the piece:

If you looked at the U.S. economy under a microscope, what you’d see is a gigantic cancerous blob of cronyism surrounded by tech startups and huge prisons. If you zeroed in on the cancerous tumor, at the nucleus you’d see a network of crony institutions like the Federal Reserve, intelligence agencies, TBTF Wall Street banks and defense contractors. Pretty close to that, you’d probably find the Clinton Foundation. A veritable clearinghouse for cronyism masquerading as a charity.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not the only one who has come to such a conclusion. In a New York Postarticle from Sunday that is generating a lot of buzz, Bill Allison, a senior fellow at nonpartisan, nonprofit government watchdog group the Sunlight Foundation, is quoted saying: It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons.

An independent research firm says this company's stock is worth $0, and now it's crashing - (www.businessinsider.com) The independent research firm Gotham City Research is out with a new report Tuesday in which it says shares of Endurance International Group, a cloud solutions provider, are worth $0. After this report, shares of Endurance were down as much as 27% on Tuesday. Back on July 1, Gotham City published a report on the Spanish Wi-Fi provider Let's Gowex, calling the company a fraud; On July 6, Let's Gowex said it was insolvent. In its report Tuesday, Gotham City said it thought "40%-100%+ of reported profits" at Endurance were "suspect," adding that the company's normalized profits would not be enough to cover its interest expenses. As a result, Gotham City believes Endurance shareholders will be wiped out. Gotham City doesn't explicitly say whether it is short shares of Endurance, but it says in a disclaimer that readers should assume the firm stands to profit "in the event the issuer's stock declines." Harkening back to its earlier reports, which in addition to Let's Gowex include reports on the companies Sino-Forest, Quindell, and Tile Shop, Gotham City writes in Tuesday's report that Endurance has a common characteristic all these other companies shared: "material-related party transactions with captive or quasi-captive entities."

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