KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Wednesday November 18 Housing and Economic stories

TOP STORIES:

Dubai Stocks Enter Bear Market as Mideast Equities Slump on Oil - (www.bloomberg.com) Dubai stocks dropped into a bear market, leading declines across most Middle Eastern equity markets, after Friday’s U.S. labor report increased expectations that the Federal Reserve will lift interest rates this year, pushing Brent crude lower. The DFM General Index slid 3 percent to 3,347.23, the lowest level since December and the biggest drop in more than two months. The gauge has fallen more than 20 percent since a peak in April. Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul All Share Index lost 0.6 percent, closing at the lowest level since January 2013. “When you see an aggressive drop in oil price, it puts people on edge,” said Ahmed Shehada, the Dubai-based executive director for advisory and institutions at NBAD Securities LLC, a unit of the U.A.E.’s biggest bank. “In addition, there are the banks’ results. A lot of operating income has dropped and this is having” an effect across the board, he said.

Dash for debt ahead of US rate rise - (www.ft.com) A spate of jumbo corporate debt offerings has lifted US issuance to a record high as companies seek to lock in financing to fund multibillion-dollar acquisitions before the Federal Reserve lifts rates for the first time since the financial crisis. US multinationals have raised more than $132bn in so-called jumbo-deals — debt offerings above $10bn in size — in 2015, more than a fourfold increase from a year earlier as companies including Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and UnitedHealth take advantage of low interest rates, according to data from Dealogic. The offerings have buoyed overall corporate debt deal values in the US to a record of $815bn, with more than a month and a half to go before year end. The figure surpasses the previous high set in 2014 of $746bn. There has been strong investor appetite for the debt offerings, which have been used to fund acquisitions, buy back stock and pay for dividends, leading bond funds to balloon in size.

Goldman's BRIC Era Ends as Fund Folds After Years of Losses - (www.bloomberg.com) The BRIC era is coming to an end at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The bank’s asset-management unit folded its money-losing BRIC fund, which invests in Brazil, Russia, India and China, and merged it last month with a broader emerging-market fund. Goldman Sachs pulled the plug on the nine-year-old product because it doesn’t expect “significant asset growth in the foreseeable future,” according to a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Fourteen years after former Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill coined the acronym that ushered in an unprecedented investment boom, the biggest emerging markets are now sputtering. Russia and Brazil have fallen into recessions. China, long an engine of the world’s growth, is poised for its weakest expansion since 1990. The downfall of the BRIC fund, which had lost 88 percent of its assets since a 2010 peak, also underscores how the strategy of bundling disparate countries into a single investment theme is losing its appeal among investors.

Hedge-Fund Prodigy Takes a $300 Million Hit - (online.wsj.com) Star money manager Nehal Chopra’s Tiger Ratan Capital Fund LP has fallen 33% in three months. She earned an M.B.A. from Wharton at age 21, won backing from hedge-fund industry heavyweight Julian Robertson before she turned 30 and earlier this year became one of the few women to manage more than $1 billion in an industry long dominated by men. Now Nehal Chopra has reached a less glorious milestone: more than $300 million in paper losses over the past three months, one of the swiftest and most severe money-losing streaks in a bruising year for hedge funds. Chopra’s Tiger Ratan Capital Fund LP fell about 33% over the past three months, wiping out her gains for 2015 and eating into more than half of last year’s profits, according to investor documents and people familiar with the matter.

Short seller who crushed Valeant just slammed another pharma stock - (www.businessinsider.com) Shares of pharmaceutical company Mallinckrodt tanked after Citron Research, a short-selling firm led by Andrew Left, tweeted that it has "more downside than Valeant." Mallinckrodt's share price fell more than 22%. Left told Business Insider: "The market has been so focused on Valeant that they forgot about other platform companies who are levered and face the same headwinds in reimbursement. "We already see these challenges at Malinkrodt [sic], and while Valeant has been taking all the heat, the business model of Malinkrodt [sic] is just as if not more in danger of unraveling." Here is the tweet that set off the share-price drop: The big pharma was among the drug companies to see a sharp sell-off in its share price in the aftermath of the Martin Shkreli saga in mid-September. The overnight price hike of a drug called Daraprim by a biotech company led by Shkreli became national news, with presidential candidate Hillary Clinton describing the move as "outrageous."

OTHER STORIES:

China Delays Economic Liberalization - (online.wsj.com)
Euro-Area Bond Investors Await Growth Data After U.S. Jobs Jolt - (www.bloomberg.com)