Thursday May 18 2017 Housing and Economic stories

TOP STORIES:            

Real Estate’s New Normal: Homeowners Staying Put - (www.nytimes.com) For much of last year, Greg Rubin was looking to buy a bigger house. He has been in the same two-bedroom home for 17 years and hoped to upgrade to a place with a guest room, a home office and a workshop for his guitars, radio-controlled planes and gardening equipment. This year, Mr. Rubin has a new plan. He stopped looking and embarked on an ambitious renovation project that will begin with a new kitchen and end with a workshop for all the man toys. “My girlfriend would like to get a larger house, but right now, I’m staying put,” said Mr. Rubin, who lives in Escondido, Calif., and owns a landscaping firm called California’s Own Native Landscape Design. Mr. Rubin is the face of what appears to be a new normal in the real estate business: Homeowners are moving less, creating a drag on the economy, fewer commissions for real estate brokers and a brutally competitive market for first-time home shoppers who cannot find much for sale and are likely to be disappointed during real estate’s spring selling season.

Hit by Run on Deposits, Banco Popular Denies it’s Looking for Rushed Takeover to Avert Collapse - (www.wolfstreet.com) In the world of banking, confidence and trust are a precious currency. The moment a bank loses them, things tend to spiral down quickly. Spain’s sixth biggest and desperately troubled bank, Banco Popular, appears to be well along the process of losing the confidence of its customers, and with it their deposits. Last year the bank lost 6.5% of its deposit base. But now, according to a report by the financial daily El Confidencial, the deposit outflow is swelling from a trickle into a deluge. The bank responded by making its deposits more attractive. Its deposit rates now range between 0.75% and 4%. With the eurobor at 0%, offering such enticing rates will obliterate Popular’s wafer-thin margins. Yet the outflow only accelerated. Last week, when the bank reported a quarterly loss of €139 million, it disclosed that deposits had dropped an additional 5%, to €78.8 billion, in the January-March period.

Vancouver House For Sale: Only 2,099 Bitcoin - (www.zerohedge.com) With one bitcoin now going for roughly $1,800 - and with the PBOC repeatedly cracking down on all forms of bitcoin cross-border flow - this prediction also turned out to be right. So putting the two together, at least one enterprising Canadian homeowner has decided to make life for potential Chinese buyers especially easy, and in a posting on the Hong Kong edition of Craigslist, has listed a relatively modest Vancouver house for the price of 2,099 bitcoin. "Brand new house for sale in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. One of the hottest markets on the planet, Voted #1 place to live in the world. Bitcoin and Ethereal accepted.2099 btc."

Mega-Tech companies have become a drag on economic growth  - (www.atimes.com) Tech companies now sit atop a virtual toll booth and impose a charge on a myriad of transactions. Like water and power companies, they have monopolies, although these monopolies are driven by the price of infrastructure and the network effect. ... I do not believe that regulation or anti-monopoly action is much of a solution to the problem, although it might mitigate some of the baneful effects of the tech monopoly. The trouble is that the United States is still coasting on the impact of inventions first made practical in the 1960s and 1970s: mass-produced integrated circuits, inexpensive lasers, light-emitting diodes, and the Internet itself (a latecomer in 1983). The rise of Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook could not have been anticipated 40 years ago, even after the building-blocks were already on the market. We have yet to invent the next generation of technologies that will displace the existing monopolies. And until we make concerted effort to do so, the American economy will languish in the sort of stasis that the options markets reflect.

Microsoft criticizes governments for stockpiling cyber weapons, says attack is "wake-up call" - (www.cnbc.com) Microsoft criticized governments for stockpiling secret exploits of computer systems, calling the ongoing WannaCry ransomware attack a "wake-up call." The ransomware, also called WannaCrypt, was first noticed on Friday, and has affected at least 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries, including some in hospitals, locking them until their owners pay a Bitcoin ransom to the attackers. Some security experts expect a second wave of the attack to start Monday morning, as employees arrive at work and turn on affected computers.

OTHER STORIES:

Unprecedented Global Cyber-Attack Poised to Spread - (www.bloomberg.com)
France's Macron takes power, vows to overcome division - (www.reuters.com)
How Big Are Mutual Funds’ Puerto Rico Losses? $5.4 Billion - (www.wsj.com)

Apple’s New Headquarters Is a Sign of Tech’s Boom, Bravado - (www.wsj.com)

A Populist Storm Stirs in Italy - (www.wsj.com)

Sentiment Takes Hit From Economic Data, Missiles: Markets Wrap - (www.bloomberg.com)