Thursday, June 2, 2016

Friday June 3 2016 Housing and Economic stories


A Worrisome Pileup of $100 Million Homes - (www.cnbc.com) One of the latest symbols of the overinflated luxury housing market is a pink mansion perched above the Mediterranean on the French Riviera. The 13,000-square-foot property, built and owned by the fashion magnate Pierre Cardin, is composed of giant terra cotta orbs arranged in a sprawling hive. The home's name befits its price. "Le Palais Bulles," or "the Bubble Palace," is being offered for sale at approximately $450 million. The listing is part of a global pileup of homes listed for $100 million or more. A record 27 properties with nine-figure prices are officially for sale, according to Christie's International Real Estate. That is up from 19 last year and about a dozen in 2014. If you add in high-priced "whisper listings" that are offered privately, brokers say the actual number of nine-figure listings worldwide could easily top 40 or 50.

From $4.5 Billion To Nothing: Forbes Revises Estimated Net Worth Of Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes - (www.forbes.com) Last year, Elizabeth Holmes topped the FORBES list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women with a net worth of $4.5 billion. Today,  FORBES is lowering our estimate of her net worth  to nothing. Theranos had no comment. Our estimate of Holmes’ wealth is based entirely on her 50% stake in Theranos, the blood-testing company she founded in 2003 with plans of revolutionizing the diagnostic test market. Theranos shares are not traded on any stock market; private investors purchased stakes in 2014 at a price that implied a $9 billion valuation for the company. Since then, Theranos has been hit with allegations that its tests are inaccurate and is being investigated by an alphabet soup of federal agencies. That, plus new information indicating Theranos’ annual revenues are less than $100 million, has led FORBES to come up with a new, lower estimate of Theranos’ value.

Behind the Scenes, Billionaires’ Growing Control of News - (www.nytimes.com) At first blush, the secret support that the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel provided for Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker is a salacious yarn about money, power, gossip and revenge. But it is also about something more important: an aggressive bid by the very wealthy to control the American news media at a time when it is in a financially weakened state, struggling to maintain its footing on the electronic frontier’s unstable terrain. Speaking with Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times on Wednesday,Mr. Thiel said he had financed the Hogan lawsuit — which resulted in a $140 million verdict against Gawker — not only because Gawker Mediawrote in 2007, against his wishes, that he was gay, but also because he had determined the gossip site had too often operated with “no connection to the public interest.”

The “Dumb Money” Is Finally Buying New Homes, Just as the “Smart Money” Exits - (www.wolfstreet.com)  New home sales just went up a staggering 16.6% in April: 619,000 new homes were sold – the most since early 2008 just before the worst of the housing meltdown, and the highest rate of growth in 24 years. So is this a sign that the economy is back on track? Don’t count on it. Home sales, like jobs, is a lagging indicator, not a leading one. It’s a sign of where we’ve been, not where we’re going. So this isn’t a big surprise to us. In fact, this is just like stock indicators near a peak. The dumb money is finally pouring in while the smart money is exiting. Except this time, it’s just in real estate.

Negative Rates Failing to Spur Investment at Europe’s Companies - (www.bloomberg.com) A prolonged period of negative interest rates is failing to revive investment at Europe’s companies, with the vast majority of businesses in the region saying the stimulus measures have had no affect at all on their growth plans. Some 84 percent of the 9,440 companies surveyed by Swedish debt collector Intrum Justitia AB for its European Payment Report 2016 say low interest rates haven’t affected their willingness to invest. And perhaps more alarmingly, the number is up from 73 percent last year. “Creating economic growth requires stability and optimism,” Intrum Justitia Chief Executive Officer Mikael Ericson said in the report. “Evidently, the strategy of keeping interest rates record low for more than a year has not created the much sought-after stability.”





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