Sunday, November 22, 2015

Monday November 23 Housing and Economic stories


Hedge Fund Hotel SunEdison Is Crashing Again - Now Down 86% In Three Months - (www.zerohedge.com) How the mighty have fallen. Once (and still) "no brainer" hedge fund hotel, sponsored by any and all talking head; now sub-$5 share price 'languisher in the basement' of the last few years. SunEdison (down 14% today) is now down 86% from its July 20th highs as an armada of leveraged speculators flood through the straits of first-mover advantage...  How the mighty have fallen. Once (and still) "no brainer" hedge fund hotel, sponsored by any and all talking head; now sub-$5 share price 'languisher in the basement' of the last few years. SunEdison (down 14% today) is now down 86% from its July 20th highs as an armada of leveraged speculators flood through the straits of first-mover advantage... Down 14% today (after yesterday's 22% drop)...

We’re in the Early Stages of Largest Debt Default in US History - (www.wolfstreet.com)  We are in the early stages of a great debt default – the largest in U.S. history. We know roughly the size and scope of the coming default wave because we know the history of the U.S. corporate debt market. As the sizes of corporate bond deals have grown over time, each wave of defaults has led to bigger and bigger defaults. Here’s the pattern. Default rates on “speculative” bonds are normally less than 5%. That means less than 5% of noninvestment-grade, U.S. corporate debt defaults in a year. But when the rate breaks above that threshold, it goes through a three- to four-year period of rising, peaking, and then normalizing defaults. This is the normal credit cycle. It’s part of a healthy capitalistic economy, where entrepreneurs have access to capital and frequently go bankrupt. If you’ll look back through recent years, you can see this cycle clearly…

A divorce and an accident left her with nothing - (www.cnbc.com) But too many Americans act like trapeze artists without nets when it comes to saving. Some 60 percent of American workers said they and/or their spouse have less than $25,000 in total savings and investments, and just 3 percent reported having $75,000 or more, according to research by the Employee Benefit Research Institute and Greenwald & Associates. Barbara Tantillo, 49, a registered nurse who worked for years for pharmaceutical companies, was decidedly not in that 3 percent. She married young, and the couple soon had three sons. But after 18 years she and her husband divorced. Tantillo was focused on retaining custody of her boys, so she allowed her husband to dictate key terms of the divorce settlement. As a result, while she got the house and the car, she said she also got the bills — and her husband got to keep his pension and savings from the Air Force Reserves.

Ex-taxi driver buys $170M artwork with credit card NYT  - (www.cnbc.com) Liu Yiqian, a former taxi driver turned billionaire art collector, confirmed on Tuesday that he was the buyer of the painting of a nude woman by Amedeo Modigliani that sold for $170.4 million at Christie's New York on Monday night. Speaking by telephone from Shanghai, the Chinese collector said he planned to bring the work back to the city, where he and his wife have two private museums. "We are planning to exhibit it for the museum's fifth anniversary," he said. "It will be an opportunity for Chinese art lovers to see good artworks without having to leave the country, which is one of the main reasons why we founded the museums."

What Copper Just Said about China - (www.wolfstreet.com)  China accounts for about 40% of global copper demand. Copper goes into nearly everything built or manufactured that uses electricity: office complexes, apartments, homes, cars, electronics, machinery, infrastructure projects, airports, high-speed rail, kitchen appliances, wires of all kinds, even water pipes. Copper has been a strategic metal in China. It has been stockpiled. Without access to copper, China’s economy would grind to a halt. China’s economy grew officially at a phenomenal 6.9% rate in the third quarter, and you’d think with this kind white-hot growth, China would heat up demand for copper and push up its price. But no. Something is mucking up the equation, and the price of copper plunged to a new six-year low.



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