Monday August 15 2016 Housing and Economic stories

TOP STORIES:

Chilling Thing Twitter Said about San Francisco’s Office Bubble - (www.wolfstreet.com) Twitter is shaking up San Francisco. It’s the city’s 10th largest employer, and second largest tech employer, after Salesforce. But it hasn’t yet figured out, despite a decade of trying, how to make money. Last October, it announced that it would lay off 8% of its workforce. A couple of weeks ago, it reported a second-quarter net loss of $107 million along with disappointing user metrics and lousy projections. Its shares have lost 74% since their miracle-IPO-hype peak at the end of December 2014. And now Twitter is dumping nearly one third of its total office space on the San Francisco sublease market. It leases a number of floors in the two buildings at Market Square. The four floors it put on the sublease market total 183,642 square feet of “fully furnished” office space with workstations for 1,416 employees, according to a marketing brochure by corporate real estate firm CRESA.

In Last-Ditch Effort To Save The Economy, Venezuela’s Maduro Hires Marxist "Jesus Christ Of Economics" - (www.zerohedge.com) When socialism fails, your citizens are starving and all hope is lost, you look for… Marxist Jesus? Nicolas Maduro has hired what he calls the “Jesus Christ of Economics” Alfredo Serrano, a 40-year old Marxist economist from Spain as his new main economic advisor. The previous economic advisor, Miguel Pérez Abad, was fired last week after he endorsed the plan, which called for direct subsidies to the poorest families, the elimination of foreign-exchange controls and a reduction of price controls according to the WSJ. In a pivot guaranteed to bring a tear to Paul Krugman's eye, Serrano instead calls for even more state controls on manufacturing and food supply have largely shaped the president’s response to the country’s economic crisis. He travels with Maduro, writes his speeches and proposes ministers. According to senior Venezuelan officials, Serrano has blocked any attempts to coordinate efforts with the private sector.

There's a Big Dollar Crunch Brewing in Markets - (www.bloomberg.com) "I need a dollar dollar, a dollar is what I need," Aloe Blacc sang back in 2010. Japanese banks might now be humming a similar refrain as efforts to insulate big investors known as money market funds from a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis have resulted in a sharp rise in the cost of interbank lending and U.S. dollar funding. The dollar London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, has risen to the highest level in seven years while the cost of converting Japanese yen into greenbacks has surged ahead of U.S. money market reform that will come into effect this October.

Brazil Real Falls on Report Acting President Tied to Graft Probe - (www.bloomberg.com) Brazil’s real declined after a magazine reported that acting President Michel Temer was accused of receiving illegal campaign donations, tarnishing the image of a new government that investors had bet would pull the nation out of economic and political crisis. The real weakened 0.4 percent to 3.1790 per dollar at 10:23 a.m. in Sao Paulo. Marcelo Odebrecht, the former chief executive officer of Brazil’s largest construction company who was jailed on allegations of bribery, linked Temer to a 10 million-real ($3.2 million) illegal campaign donation in 2014, Veja reported Saturday, citing part of the executive’s plea-bargain deal with prosecutors.

It’s Getting Uglier in Spain - (www.wolfstreet.com) With all the world’s attention focused on the slow-motion disintegration and belated — and possibly ill-fated– “rescue” of Italy’s financial system, other somewhat smaller but nonetheless important crises are going unnoticed in Europe’s hinterlands. They include the gathering problems in government-less Spain. Last time Madrid had an elected government was 232 day ago. Even after a second round of elections in June, there is no guarantee that Spain’s two major parties, the Popular Party (PP) and the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), will find enough common ground to form the so-called Grand Coalition that the country’s banks and corporations have their hearts set on. And without that, a third round of elections, in December, is almost inevitable. The task of setting a stringent, Troika-approved budget for 2017 — by far the European Commission’s biggest priority for Spain — will have to be put on ice, just at a time when the country’s public debt remains perilously close to record highs. According to the Bank of Spain’s raw figures, i.e. before “adjustments,” Spain’s total debt surpassed €1.5 trillion euros at the end of the first quarter of 2016. That’s over 140% of GDP, more than triple what it was in 2007.

OTHER STORIES:

Stocks a Screaming Buy in Fed Model That May Never Prove Right - (www.bloomberg.com)
Quantitative Easing: Central Banks’ Old Faithful - (www.wsj.com)
Online Lenders Have a Tough Job Ahead - (www.wsj.com)

US companies tap global demand for bonds - (www.ft.com)
The victory for gold bulls is only just beginning - (www.ft.com)
Why Europe’s banks will never be the same again - (www.ft.com)