KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Monday May 4 Housing and Economic stories

TOP STORIES:

Greek Banks Said to Win More Emergency Cash as Riga Talks Near - (www.bloomberg.com) Greece won access to more emergency funding for its banks as euro-area governments prepared for another round of talks on the country’s financial crisis. The European Central Bank’s Governing Council raised the cap on Emergency Liquidity Assistance by about 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) to 75.5 billion euros in a teleconference on Wednesday, people familiar with the decision said, asking not to be named as the call was private. Stocks and bonds rose. Euro-area finance ministers will meet in Riga on April 24 in their latest attempt to persuade Greece to commit to economic reforms so that aid payments can be released before the country runs out of money. As deposit outflows mount amid the uncertainty, the ECB is supporting the nation’s lenders by allowing the Greek central bank to replenish the cash -- though policy makers have said that can’t continue indefinitely.

China Has a Massive Dept Problem - (www.bloomberg.com) China has a $28 trillion problem. That’s the country’s total government, corporate and household debt load as of mid-2014, according to McKinsey & Co. It’s equal to 282 percent of the country’s total annual economic output. President Xi Jinping’s government aims to wind down that burden to more manageable levels by recapitalizing banks, overhauling local finances and removing implicit guarantees for corporate borrowing that once helped struggling companies. Those like Baoding Tianwei Group Co., a power-equipment maker that Tuesday became China’s first state-owned enterprise to default on domestic debt. Now hold that thought, and consider this: China’s also trying to prop up a $10.4 trillion economy that’s decelerating and probably will continue to do so through 2016, or so says the International Monetary Fund. The economy expanded 7 percent -- the leadership’s growth target for this year -- in the first quarter, the weakest since 2009 and a far cry from the 10 percent average China managed from 1980 through 2012.

Bill Gross's 'Short of a Lifetime' Would Mean Armageddon - (finance.yahoo.com) The trade that George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller pulled off in 1992 by betting against the British pound -- and making $1 billion in the process -- has gained legendary status. So when Bill Gross, the world's best-known bond investor, tweeted yesterday from his current employer Janus Capital that betting against German government debt is the trade of a "lifetime," he reached for that bit of history to benchmark the current opportunity: Overlooking the fact that he got the year wrong (we all make mistakes, right?), here's how the numbers would play out if he's correct. The bet that the U.K. couldn't keep propping up its currency at an artificially overvalued level was Druckenmiller's idea; Soros's contribution was to persuade him that if he was convinced about its potential, he should bet the farm on it. Sure enough, in the middle of September 1992 the U.K. abandoned its efforts to keep the pound trading in a corridor around a central target of 2.95 deutsche marks. At the point of capitulation, the pound was trading at 2.81 marks; in the space of three weeks, sterling had dropped by 14 percent, and was worth just 2.41 marks:

Google cofounder Sergey Brin employs a former Navy SEAL and an ex-Secret Service agent to help keep his family safe - (www.businessinsider.com) Gun rights for the rest of us, but he can hire his own personal Navy SEAL. It takes an army of workers to manage the private affairs of Google cofounder Sergey Brin. According to Bloomberg, Brin employs at least 47 people in his family office, called Bayshore Global Management. Among those 47 employees are philanthropy experts, former bankers, photographers, a yacht captain, a fitness coordinator, and an archivist. He also employs property managers, domestic staff, and a personal shopper.

Police kill more whites than blacks, but minority deaths generate more outrage - (www.washingtontimes.com) Based on that data, Mr. Moskos reported that roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30 percent were black. He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic and 2 percent were Asian and other races. His results, posted last week on his blog Cop in the Hood, arrived with several caveats, notably that 25 percent of the website’s data, which is drawn largely from news reports, failed to show the race of the person killed. Killed by Police lists every death, justified or not, including those in which the officer had been wounded or acted in self-defense. “The data doesn’t indicate which shootings are justified (the vast majority) and which are cold-blooded murder (not many, but some). And maybe that would vary by race. I don’t know, but I doubt it,” Mr. Moskos said on his blog.

OTHER STORIES: