KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Wednesday June 15 2016 Housing and Economic stories

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Walgreens ends relationship with Theranos in latest blow for start-up founder Elizabeth Holmes – (www.cnbc.com) Drugstore chain Walgreens said on Sunday it would end its relationship with Theranos, in another blow for the blood-testing company that was once lauded for its innovative approach but has increasingly come under scrutiny. Walgreens said it would shutter all 40 Theranos Wellness Centers at its stores in Arizona, having already stopped Theranos laboratory testing services at its location in Palo Alto, California. The latest announcement meant Walgreens would no longer offer Theranos services at any of its stores. "In light of the voiding of a number of test results, and as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has rejected Theranos' plan of correction and considers sanctions, we have carefully considered our relationship with Theranos and believe it is in our customers' best interests to terminate our partnership," Brad Fluegel, Walgreens senior vice president and chief health care commercial market development officer said in a statement.

Brazil’s Fiscal Accounts Were a Nasty Surprise to Temer’s Team - (www.bloomberg.com) Brazil’s fiscal accounts were in worse shape than initially thought after the suspension of Dilma Rousseff, underscoring the challenge facing the country’s new economic team, acting President Michel Temer said. “It was surprising, in a negative way, what we encountered,” Temer told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper in an interview published Saturday on its website. “The fiscal accounts were worse than we imagined, Petrobras was broken, the Postal Office broken, Eletrobras broken, and I still have faced an aggressive campaign against me.” The forecast for this year’s budget gap, revised by Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles to a record 170 billion reais ($49.7 billion), forced Temer’s team to propose a cap on the increase in spending for next year to control Brazil’s growing debt. The spending bill is expected to be presented at Congress next week. The size of the deficit was the worst surprise Temer found when he took over, he told Folha.

Hedge Fund Managers Work to Stanch Loss of Investors - (www.nytimes.com) Hedge fund titans once ran their firms like elite private clubs, picking who made it past the velvet rope and how much they would pay for access to supercharged performance. Years of poor performance have now led a number of funds to consider something more like general admission. Some big-name investors — MetLife, American International Group and the New York City pension plan, among them — have recently begun to withdraw their money from hedge funds in larger numbers. And the investors who stay are getting a chance to sit at the negotiating table and dictate lower fees and better terms for sharing in the returns that managers make. It’s an unusual position for many hedge fund managers, who as a group are not known for sharing well with others. For decades, hedge funds operated on a “2 and 20” model: Investors paid fees of 2 percent of assets under management and 20 percent of any gain in any year. When performance was good, the founders of the biggest firms were catapulted to the top of global wealth rankings.

Brexit would cause big problems for German banks - German financial watchdog - (www.reuters.com) A British vote to leave the European Union would hit large German banks, given their heavy exposure to London, the head of German financial watchdog Bafin said in an interview with German newspaper Tagesspiegel. Bafin President Felix Hufeld told the newspaper in an article to be published on Monday that he hoped Britons would vote to remain in the European Union. If not, "the biggest banks would have the biggest problems," the newspaper quoted Hufeld as saying. "They have the most activities in, and with, London," he said. Hufeld said the European Central Bank planned to closely monitor the situation and the banks themselves had internal groups looking at the possible consequences. Deutsche Bank AG and Commerzbank AG are the German banks with the largest business dealings in Britain.

A Critical and Ignored 2008 Email by Ben Bernanke on the Lehman Collapse - (www.wallstreetonparade.com) A little noticed 2008 email from former Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, raises serious questions about his official narrative on the collapse of Lehman Brothers. We’ll get to the email in detail, but first some necessary background. A lot of eyes rolled on Wall Street last October when Ben Bernanke, who chaired the Federal Reserve in the lead up to and during the financial collapse in 2008, released his memoir of the financial crisis with the title: “The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and its Aftermath.” Many Wall Street observers felt the title would have more correctly captured the facts on the ground had it read: “The Lack of Fed Courage to Supervise Mega Banks Led to an Epic Collapse.” (In the leadup to the crisis, the Fed allowed Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill and JPMorgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon, to sit on the Board of its Federal Reserve Bank of New York, among numerous other conflicts of interest.) Throughout his memoir, including Chapter 12 titled “Lehman: The Dam Breaks,” Bernanke goes to great pains to paint a portrait of the Fed and himself as being intensely on top of the situation at Lehman Brothers from March 2008 forward, following the Bear Stearns collapse and its absorption by JPMorgan Chase.

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