KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Wednesday May 10 2016 Housing and Economic stories

Monday, May 9, 2016

Wednesday May 10 2016 Housing and Economic stories

SF suing Academy of Art over real estate empire- (www.sfgate.com) After years of finger-pointing, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrerasays “enough is enough” and is filing suit against the Academy of Art University, saying the nation’s largest for-profit art school and one of the city’s biggest landlords has illegally converted 22 buildings in amassing a real estate empire. Citing “deliberate noncompliance ... repeated missed deadlines and recurrent unfulfilled promises,” Herrera said it is time for the university to fall into line with city planning laws. “In particular, defendants must return the many housing units they unlawfully displaced to San Francisco’s affordable housing stock,” the city attorney said in the suit he plans to file Friday in San Francisco Superior Court. The lawsuit comes after a decade of bickering between the city, which has imposed hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines against the Academy of Art for alleged planning violations, and the university, which has refused to pay the money.

Biggest Junk-Bond ETF Jolted by Massive Outflows Amid Rally - (www.bloomberg.com) The largest exchange-traded fund that buys junk bonds is flashing a potential warning sign that a three-month rally in the $1.4 trillion market is losing steam. BlackRock Inc.’s iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond ETF has seen 27.8 million shares redeemed, or about $2.6 billion, in the last four days, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Short interest in the fund climbed more than 80 percent since mid-April, according to financial analytics firm S3 Partners. High-yield bonds have been benefiting from a turnaround in sentiment as investors embrace riskier assets amid signs of easing global monetary policy, rising commodity prices and inflows that came flooding back into the asset class. With anemic economic growth still the most likely outcome for the year ahead, some investors may be questioning the exuberance that points to annualized gains of more than 20 percent.

US stock funds suffer $11bn of outflows - (www.ft.com) US equity funds suffered their largest redemptions since the start of the year as investors sought the safety of cash, government debt and gold as sentiment continued to sour during the first week of May. Global equity markets have eased to their lowest level in three weeks, with the FTSE All World index having declined more than 3 per cent since April 19. With markets in Japan and Europe down sharply for the year, the S&P 500 is up less than 0.5 per cent. Portfolios invested in US equities recorded $11.2bn of outflows in the week to May 4, accelerating redemptions from the asset class since January to more than $60bn, according to Lipper. Sentiment has been buffered by dour earnings and guidance from companies against a backdrop of global economic uncertainty.

CLSA Sees China Bad-Loan Epidemic With $1 Trillion of Losses - (www.bloomberg.com) Chinese banks’ bad loans are at least nine times bigger than official numbers indicate, an “epidemic” that points to potential losses of more than $1 trillion, according to an assessment by brokerage CLSA Ltd. Nonperforming loans stood at 15 percent to 19 percent of outstanding credit last year, Francis Cheung, the firm’s head of China and Hong Kong strategy, said in Hong Kong on Friday. That compares with the official 1.67 percent. Potential losses could range from 6.9 trillion yuan ($1.1 trillion) to 9.1 trillion yuan, according to a report by the brokerage. The estimates are based on public data on listed companies’ debt-servicing abilities and make assumptions about potential recovery rates for bad loans.

"Medical Error" Is Third Leading Cause Of Death In America – Estimated At 250,000 Annually - (www.zerohedge.com) This certainly isn’t a comforting statistic. From Bloomberg: After heart disease and cancer, medical errors kill more Americans than anything else, claiming a quarter of a million lives a year, according to a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. If bungles and safety lapses in the hospital were accounted for as deaths from disease and injury are, they would be the third most common cause of death in the U.S., leading to more fatalities than respiratory disease, the report in the British Medical Journal argues. The new estimate, published today, draws on four studies of deaths due to errors that have come out since the 1999 report. The authors extrapolate from those findings to reach their estimate of 251,000 annual deaths. Even that figure, they say, probably underestimates the actual toll, because it includes only deaths in hospitals, not in out-patient surgery centers, nursing homes, or other health care settings.

OTHER STORIES:

How Puerto Rico’s $70 Billion Crisis Is About to Get Catastrophic - (www.bloomberg.com)