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STORIES:
Greek unemployment surges to 24.4 percent in June, police step
up protests - (www.washingtonpost.com)
Thousands of police marched
through Athens on Thursday, chanting “thieves, thieves” and carrying black
flags, to oppose planned pay cuts under a huge new austerity package meant to
save Greece from defaulting on its mountain of debt. The 4,000 protesters, who
also included firefighters and coast guard officers, lit flares, blared
spray-can horns, and set up mock gallows outside parliament. The peaceful
anti-government demonstration came amid deepening social gloom as official
figures showed Greece’s unemployment rate surged to 24.4 percent in June,
including more than 1.2 million people out of work, many of them youths.
Prepare
For The Coming Housing Collapse Part Two - (www.businessinsider.com) The supply of repossessed properties for sale
has been intentionally constricted by the servicing banks, the GSEs and by
HUD. So buyers have been forced to turn more to short sale listings as
well as to non-distressed properties. Remember, many are all-cash
investors who have been lured from Canada, California and just about every
other state for several years by the collapsed prices in Phoenix. That is why
short sale listings plunged from 11,000 in January 2011 to under roughly 1,000
in July 2012 . This has pushed the average price-per-square-foot for
distressed and non-distressed homes up from their lows of 2011. Leif
Swanson also informed me that the average price-per-square-foot for short sales
in July was $76. That hardly seems like the stuff of a roaring housing
market. This was actually lower than the average price-per-square-foot
for repossessed home sales. Leif explained to me that the short sellers
don’t care, don’t maintain their homes and sell them “as is.” Does this
mean that the Phoenix market has actually bottomed? No way. At some
point, the banks will have to unload their REOs onto the market. Much
more important is the shadow inventory of seriously delinquent underwater
properties about which I have written extensively. We’ll take another
look at this important overhang briefly.
Investors
yank $3.7 billion out of stocks - (money.cnn.com)
According to the preliminary
data that is frequently revised, investors yanked more than $14 billion out of
the stock market in August, the most since April.
While
investors have been fleeing U.S. stock mutual funds, they've been plowing into
bonds, which are considered safe haven investments. In fact, bond funds raked
in $6.6 billion last week, according to ICI data, and attracted more than $29
billion throughout August.
Woodward's
new book details debt ceiling fiasco - (money.cnn.com)
"The Price of
Politics," due out Sept. 11 by Simon & Schuster, details the
tension-laced partisan battles over raising the nation's borrowing capacity. Failure to
raise the so-called debt ceiling would have spurred a massive U.S. default on
loans, shut down the federal government and shaken confidence in financial markets around
the world. Some economists have said the political stalemate caused so much
uncertainty in the financial marketsthat it helped dampen
economic growth last year.
Vietnam Risks Biggest East Asia IMF Rescue Since 1990s: Economy
- (www.bloomberg.com) Vietnam risks
becoming the biggest East Asian economy to seek an International Monetary Fund
rescue loan since the region’s financial crisis more than a decade ago as it
moves to support a faltering banking system. The nation may need IMF aid to
recapitalize banks and must act quickly to clean up bad debt or risk “prolonged
stagnation,” the National Assembly’s economic committee said in a Sept. 4
report published on its website yesterday. The financial system needs an
injection of 250 trillion dong ($12 billion) to 300 trillion dong, according to
the 298-page report that included recommendations to address economic risks.
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