Monday February 6 2017 Housing and Economic stories

TOP STORIES:

Meet The "Bionic Barrista" Whose Mission Is To Terminate Millions Of Minimum Wage Jobs - (www.zerohedge.com) Tired of your barista giving you attitude, spitting in your coffee if you only mention Trump, or misspelling your name on your morning cup of joe? Surely a robot could do better. Well, we are about to find out, because on Monday, Cafe X opened its very first robotic cafe in San Francisco’s Metreon shopping center Digital Trends reports. Promising “precision crafted specialty coffee in seconds, the way the roaster intended,” Cafe X thinks that anything a human can do, its machines can do better. Or rather just one machine. Nicknamed Gordon, after a Cafe X employee, this robot mans, or robots, two standard professional coffee machines in order to serve up espressos and lattes. In the San Francisco location, customers can grab a cup of coffee with beans from AKA Coffee, Verve Coffee Roasters, or Peet’s. While the coffee itself may not make Cafe X stand out from the competition, the startup hopes that the robot’s efficiency and utility will.

Paul Ryan: We can't start on tax reform and infrastructure until spring - (www.cnbc.com) House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that Republican lawmakers will try to push through tax reform and infrastructure bills — two key policies for investors — in the spring after focusing on health care. "It's just the way the budget works that we won't be able to get the ability to write our tax reform bill until our spring budget passes, and then we write that through the summer," Ryan said on "Fox and Friends." He added that an infrastructure package "comes out of our spring budget, as well."

It’s Time We Talked About Our Owners - (www.wolfstreet.com) The world’s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, was splashed across the front pages of the Spanish financial news yesterday. The firm had just raised raised its stake in Spain’s telecoms giant Telefónica to 336 million shares — the equivalent of 6.7% of Telefónica’s total capital, with a market value of just under €3 billion. In the short space of five months BlackRock has almost doubled its holdings and is now the largest owner of Telefónica stock, ahead of Spain’s second biggest bank, BBVA, which holds 6% of the shares. The asset manager has also expanded its participation in Telefónica’s international subsidiaries, raising its holdings in Telefónica Deutschland to 0.76% and Telefónica Brasil to almost 2%, making it the firm’s biggest institutional shareholder.

Say Goodbye to Your Life Savings (Again) - (www.esquire.com) Those nice white "forgotten people" will now be free to have their pensions swindled out from underneath them by sharpies whose bonuses depend on how much money they can steal. They will find themselves paying usurious interest rates on their credit cards because of a clause written in Swedish, in .00009 point type, on the back of their monthly statement. And then, when it all comes crashing down again, they'll have to look for somebody to blame, and it won't be them, and it won't be the charlatan they elevated to the White House.

Deutsche Bank posts $2 billion loss in fourth quarter as litigation costs weigh - (www.cnbc.com) Embattled German lender Deutsche Bank posted a net loss of 1.9 billion euros ($2.05 billion) for its fourth quarter, missing analyst expectations, but reported improved results for the whole of 2016 in what has been a trying year for the bank. Deutsche Bank's full-year net loss was 1.4 billion euros, versus a net loss of 6.8 billion euros in 2015, with chief executive John Cryan saying that the bank "finished 2016 with pleasingly strong capital and liquidity ratios." However, shares of the bank sunk 3 percent as the European session opened Thursday, with the fourth-quarter results disappointing investors. Shares extended losses by 9.00 a.m. London time to trade 6 percent lower.

OTHER STORIES:

Asian Stocks to Gain as China Returns From Break: Markets Wrap - (www.bloomberg.com)
Dollar Pares Drop, Risk Appetite Subdued Ahead of Jobs Data - (www.bloomberg.com)
Carney Says Central Bankers’ 15 Minutes of Fame Is About to End - (www.bloomberg.com)

Exclusive: U.S. expected to impose fresh sanctions on Iranian entities - sources - (www.reuters.com)
Putin accuses Kiev of provoking flare up in fighting in east Ukraine  - (www.reuters.com)
For Europe, There’s a New Threat in Town: The U.S. - (www.nytimes.com)
Passive investing set to claim half of equity and bond markets - (www.ft.com)