Wednesday February 22 2017 Housing and Economic stories

TOP STORIES:            

Miami condo flippers are getting hit hard by losses - (www.businessinsider.com) Andrew Stearns, CEO of StatFunding, tracks the Miami-Dade market for preconstruction condos along with the money that is being made, or lost, in those transactions; and he tracks the condo units that developers have been unable to sell. He notes in his January report: From 2012 to mid-2015, Miami developers sold all units in each project within months of completion of the project. The inflection points of previous condo cycles have been marked by developers getting stuck with unsold developer units. And that’s now happening. Of nine large projects completed since late 2015, ranging from 90 to 390 units per project, with a total of 2,080 units, developers are still sitting on 400 unsold units, or 19% of the total. Of them, 327 are listed for sale on the MLS.

Biggest Gasoline Glut In 27 Years Could Crash Oil Markets - (www.zerohedge.com) It would be one thing if crude stocks were rising, perhaps because refiners were going offline for maintenance. But if that were the case, then gasoline stocks would draw down on lower refining runs. But if both crude and refined product inventories are going up at the same time, then there should be some reasons for worry. In fact, the glut of gasoline is now the worst in 27 years. At 259 million barrels, U.S. gasoline storage levels are now at their highest level since the EIA began tracking the data back in 1990.

The Unthinkable Just Happened in Spain - (www.wolfstreet.com) Untouchable. Inviolable. Immunity. Impunity. These are the sort of words and expressions that are often associated with senior central bankers, who are, by law, able to operate more or less above the law of the jurisdictions in which they operate. Rarely heard in association with senior central bankers are words or expressions like “accused”, “charged” or “under investigation.” But in Spain this week a court broke with that tradition, in emphatic style. As part of the epic, multi-year criminal investigation into the doomed IPO of Spain’s frankenbank Bankia – which had been assembled from the festering corpses of seven already defunct saving banks – Spain’s national court called to testify six current and former directors of the Bank of Spain, including its former governor, Miguel Ángel Fernández Ordóñez, and its former deputy governor (and current head of the Bank of International Settlements’ Financial Stability Institute), Fernando Restoy. 

Defaults Slash Returns for Online Loan Investors - (www.wsj.com) For online lenders, 2016 was an grueling assemblage blemished by layoffs, chief departures and dropping deal prices. For the assets that purchased their loans, it wasn’t such better. Two of the maximal assets managers in the sector, LendingClub Corp. supplementary LC Advisors and Colchis Capital Management, reportable the minimal returns in their important assets since each launched in 2011, according to investor documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Publicly listed funds that buy online loans, such as P2P Global Investments are trading at deep discounts to their net asset value. At LC Advisors, the Broad Based Consumer Credit (Q) Fund returned 1.83% in 2016, down from 5.76% in 2015 and 8.02% in 2014, according to the investor documents. That was worse than the 2.65% return of the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Aggregate Index, a broad measure of performance of various fixed-income securities that LC Advisors uses as a benchmark.

Global Economy Weekahead: How do you say deja vu in Greek? - (www.reuters.com) It seems as if we have been here before: the euro zone fretting that a crisis with Greece will balloon out of all proportion while the government in Athens says it will not impose one euro more in cuts on its austerity-battered public. Cue a euro zone finance ministers meeting in Brussels. There are differences this time from two years ago when a battery of "last chance" meetings over a new bailout brought Greece to the brink of bankruptcy and default - and threatened the euro zone with its first dropout. When the ministers have their regular meeting on Monday there will be little brinkmanship or fear of failure. For one thing, a bailout is already in place - the argument this time is about compliance and future targets in order to get another tranche of money.

OTHER STORIES:

ECB's Lautenschlaeger: if inflation rise persists, rate hike should come this year - (www.reuters.com)
Merkel suggests euro is too low for Germany - (www.reuters.com)
Remember the debt ceiling? Here it comes again - (www.cnbc.com)

'Massive exodus' continues from active funds, and Vanguard is reaping the gains - (www.cnbc.com)
Money, Power, Family: Inside South Korea’s Chaebol - (www.nytimes.com)
Merkel Defends German Trade Surplus After U.S. Criticism - (www.wsj.com)