Wednesday November 28 Housing and Economic stories

TOP STORIES:

A New Crisis in Spain: Suicides and Homelessness - (www.cnbc.com) The first night after Francisco Rodríguez Flores, 71, and his wife, Ana López Corral, 67, were evicted from their small apartment here after falling behind on their mortgage, they slept in the entrance hall of their building. Their daughters, both unemployed and living with them, slept in a neighbor’s van. “It was the worst thing ever,” Mrs. López said recently, studying her hands. “You can’t image what it felt like to be there in that hall. It’s a story you can’t really tell because it is not the same as living it.” Things are somewhat better now. The Rodríguezes are among the 36 families who have taken over a luxury apartment block here that had been vacant for three years. There is no electricity. The water was recently cut off, and there is the fear that the authorities will evict them once again. But, Mrs. López says, they are not living on the street — at least not yet.

Child’s Education, but Parents’ Crushing Loans - (www.nytimes.com) When Michele Fitzgerald and her daughter, Jenni, go out for dinner, Jenni pays. When they get haircuts, Jenni pays. When they buy groceries, Jenni pays. It has been six years since Ms. Fitzgerald — broke, unemployed and in default on the $18,000 in loans she took out for Jenni’s college education — became a boomerang mom, moving into her daughter’s townhouse apartment in Hingham, Mass. Jenni pays the rent. For Jenni, 35, the student loans and the education they bought have worked out: she has a good job in public relations and is paying down the loans in her name. But for her mother, 60, the parental debt has been disastrous. “It’s not easy,” Ms. Fitzgerald said. “Jenni feels the guilt and I feel the burden.”

NYC to Cut $1.6 Billion to Close Deficit After Blocked Taxi Sale - (www.bloomberg.com) New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has modified the city’s $69 billion budget with $1.6 billion in spending cuts over the next 18 months to close a current $635 million deficit created when a court stopped the city from selling additional taxi medallions. About $600 million of the spending reductions, dated Nov. 9 by the Office of Management and the Budget and announced today by the mayor’s office, plus $68 million in higher-than- previously-forecast revenue, will make up for the lost taxi medallion sales and balance the current budget. For 2014, $1 billion in trimmed spending plus $425 million in taxi-sales revenue will shrink the deficit to about $1.15 billion from the $2.5 billion forecast when the plan passed in June. The city’s fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30 each year.

Special Report: Greece's far-right party goes on the offensive - (www.reuters.com) Arm raised in a Nazi-style salute, the leader of Greece's fastest-rising political party surveyed hundreds of young men in black T-shirts as they exploded into cheers. Their battle cry reverberated through the night: Blood! Honour! Golden Dawn! "We may sometimes raise our hand this way, but these hands are clean, not dirty. They haven't stolen," shouted Nikolaos Mihaloliakos as he stood, floodlit, in front of about 2,000 diehard party followers filling an open-air amphitheatre at Goudi park, a former military camp near Athens.

In This Junkyard, It Seems, There Are No Dogs - (www.bloomberg.com) It’s kind of Orwellian that anyone would rapaciously buy an ETF with the ticker JNK—branding shorthand for “junk,” Wall Street’s sobriquet for high-yield, the riskiest layer of corporate bonds.Nevertheless, JNK, the SPDR Barclays Capital High Yield Bond ETF, and competitor offerings are a hot destinationin these yield-famished days. The appeal is irrefutable: You’ll get precious little income from Treasuries and muni bonds. Creditworthy corporations are borrowing at record lows. Why not then pile into riskier, higher-yielding debt, especially if you can do so via one tidy, exchange-traded ticker? (No need to ring Michael Milken.) What’s more, Moody’s sees the global default rate for “speculative-grade” debt ending the year at 2.8 percent, compared with an average of 4.8 percent since 1983. Yields have fallen 1.65 percentage points this year, to 7.05 percent on Nov. 1, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch data. What’s not to love?

OTHER STORIES:

EU Seeks to Keep Crisis Fight on Track After Greek Vote - (www.bloomberg.com)

Goldman Sachs Says Beware Europe Peripheral Stocks - (www.bloomberg.com)

Samaras Wins Approval of Greek 2013 Budget to Secure Aid - (www.bloomberg.com)

Japanese Economy Contracts at Fastest Pace Since Earthquake - (www.bloomberg.com)

Greece's 'Monster' Debt Problem Haunts Europe - (www.cnbc.com)

China’s Loans Unexpectedly Fall as Money Supply Misses Forecasts - (www.bloomberg.com)

Japan Curbing China Investment as Feud-Weary Firms Flee - (www.bloomberg.com)

India Industrial Output, Exports Decline as Economy Falters - (www.bloomberg.com)

China’s Banking Leaders Seek to Calm Concerns Over Loan Quality - (www.nytimes.com)

Bernanke's stamp on Fed could tie hands of successor - (www.reuters.com)

On edge of brutal ‘fiscal cliff,’ some see an opportunity to end debt paralysis - (www.washingtonpost.com)