Empiric Student Property Share Discussion Threads

[briarberry] 21/3/2012 15:31

But he didn't see AIG coming...


Bernanke: Nothing like AIG failure is on horizon


George Carlin - American Bullsh!t 2008

[briarberry] 21/3/2012 15:29

Last month we were told things were improving ?


The U.K. Office for National Statistics said public borrowing totaled 15.2 billion pounds ($24.2 billion) in February - a record for the month - versus £8.9 billion in February 2011. Economists had forecast borrowing of £7.9 billion.


UK debt stats

[briarberry] 15/3/2012 11:32

Greece - The consensus is that Greece still has too much debt...


Walter J. Zimmerman Jr., head of technical analysis for United-ICAP:

"The euro-zone response to their deflationary debt trap continues to be further loans to the hopelessly indebted, in return for economy crushing austerity programs. So evidently, not content with another mere recession, euro-zone leaders are inadvertently shooting for another depression. And since the euro-zone is, or was, a buyer of 22% of U.S. exports, that puts the U.S. economy at risk."

[briarberry] 14/3/2012 13:22

United States : Current Account

For 2011 as a whole, the current account deficit increased but only slightly to $473.3 billion from $470.9 billion in 2010.

[briarberry] 12/3/2012 19:05

US Treasury Department says last month's budget deficit was a record $231.7bn (versus an expected $229bn), with government expecting the deficit to reach $1.3 trillion when the budget year ends on September 30.

[briarberry] 11/3/2012 18:15

How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can't that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs's reply was unambiguous. "Those jobs aren't coming back," he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president's question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn't just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple's executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that "Made in the U.S.A." is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple - and many of its high-technology peers - are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple's contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple's other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

"Apple's an example of why it's so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now," said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

"If it's the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried."

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone's screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

"The speed and flexibility is breathtaking," the executive said. "There's no American plant that can match that."

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company - and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What's more, the company's decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

"Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn't the best financial choice," said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. "That's disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity."

...

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn't driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia "came down to two things," said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia "can scale up and down faster" and "Asian supply chains have surpassed what's in the U.S." The result is that "we can't compete at this point," the executive said.

[briarberry] 01/3/2012 13:28

House prices - Norway, Finland and Austria all look popular...

The Post-2009 Northern And Western European Housing Bubble

[briarberry] 29/2/2012 13:05

A trillion euros...


Banks gorge on 530 billion euros of ECB funds

In the space of two months, the ECB has now injected more than a trillion euros into the financial system, banishing the threat of a credit crunch.

[briarberry] 25/2/2012 15:56

The Bankers will keep gambling until we stop picking up the tab. They knew we would bail them out, there was a history of it.

I knew a girl who always spent more than she earned. She only started living within her means after her mum and dad stopped paying off her credit card bill.



Privatizing profits and socializing losses

The notion that banks privatize profits and socialize losses dates at least to the 19th century, as in this 1834 quote of Andrew Jackson:

I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. ... You are a den of vipers and thieves.

-Andrew Jackson, 1834, on closing the Second Bank of the United States

[briarberry] 25/2/2012 15:23

It seems that France has some history of socializing bankers losses, and I thought it was just us who were nuts...


Crédit Lyonnais - In the early 1990s it was the largest French bank, majority state-owned at that point

The bank avoided financial disaster by moving its debts and liabilities into a new state-owned company, Consortium de Réalisation (CDR). The creation of the CDR was highly controversial, as many did not believe that the French government should have bailed out the bank.

To allow the bailout, the European Commission imposed severe limitations, principally on the bank's international activities, and the bank was forced to sell many entities in the following years.

On May 5, 1996 a major fire destroyed much of Crédit Lyonnais' Paris headquarters - along with crucial bank archives and computer data.

[briarberry] 13/2/2012 13:48

What happens there often happens here a year or two later...


POOR AMERICA - PANORAMA - BBC1 8:30pm - 9pm

Hilary Andersson meets the school pupils going hungry in the world's richest country, after statistics reveal 1.5 million American children are now homeless. She explores the Las Vegas storm drains some youngsters now call home, and the tented communities springing up across the country.

[briarberry] 07/4/2011 22:32

60 Minutes - The Next Housing Shock (April 3, 2011)

[briarberry] 06/4/2011 20:02

Portugal finance minister says country will need bailout from EU

[briarberry] 06/4/2011 17:56

LPS' Mortgage Monitor Report Shows Enormous Backlog of Foreclosures; Option ARM Foreclosure Rate Higher Than Subprime Foreclosures Ever Reached...


As of the end of February, foreclosure inventory levels stand at more than 30 times monthly foreclosure sales volume, indicating this backlog will continue for quite some time. Ultimately, these foreclosures will most likely reenter the market as REO properties, putting even more downward pressure on U.S. home values.

February's data also showed a 23 percent increase in Option ARM foreclosures over the last six months, far more than any other product type. In terms of absolute numbers, Option ARM foreclosures stand at 18.8 percent, a higher level than Subprime foreclosures ever reached.

Total U.S. loan delinquency rate: 8.8 percent
Total U.S. foreclosure inventory rate: 4.15 percent
Total U.S. non-current inventory: 6,856,000
States with most non-current* loans: Florida, Nevada, Mississippi, New Jersey, Georgia

[briarberry] 05/4/2011 11:28

China central bank ups interest rates 0.25 points

[briarberry] 31/3/2011 11:53

Agricultural Prices up 2.4% in a month...


The preliminary All Farm Products Index of Prices Received by Farmers in March, increased 4 points(2.4 percent) from February.

The preliminary All Farm Products Index is up 33 points (23 percent) from March 2010.

The Food Commodities Index, at 172, increased 7 points(4.2 percent) from last month and 30 points (21 percent) from March 2010.

[briarberry] 31/3/2011 11:39

Anglo Irish Bank confirms $25 billion loss

[briarberry] 30/3/2011 11:13

Portugal 10 Year yeild hits new high above 8%, more talk of haircuts...


Europe opens the floodgates to debt restructuring

By acknowledging that debt restructuring may form a part of any access to the European bailout fund, the European Council has in effect created a self fulfilling prophecy. Wham! Understandably, Standard & Poor's have weighed in with a downgrade to BBB-/A-3.
...

Greece, Portugal and Ireland are all heading for a big debt restructuring, which means that private investors are going to have to bear the costs of a considerable part of the fiscal adjustment. It's what bond markets have been saying for more than a year now, and of course it is what the political left has been demanding too.

[briarberry] 29/3/2011 18:41

Q1 earnings reports kickoff on April 11th when Alcoa reports.

[briarberry] 25/3/2011 22:13

So this is the 3rd voting Fed official who says no QE3...


Fisher is a critic of the Fed's second round of quantitative easing, and said earlier this week that no additional monetary stimulus will be necessary after the central bank completes its asset purchase program in June.

The Dallas regional bank president said "we will complete" the current $600 billion Treasury purchase plan and said "I am worried about inflation."

[briarberry] 25/3/2011 21:52

Chicago Fed's Evans Sees Less Need for More Accommodation

The Federal Reserve has less need to support an improving economy beyond the $600 billion Treasury purchase plan already in place, and any changes to the central bank's stimulative policies should be considered some time after the program ends, said Charles Evans, president of the Fed's regional bank in Chicago.

"The economy definitely continues to improve each month," Evans, 53, said today in a meeting with reporters at the bank. "It would be natural to expect that there would be some period of time between when the $600 billion is completed and an assessment of a change" in the trajectory of policy.

The regional bank chief's comments buttress the position taken last week by Fed officials, who said the economy is on "firmer footing" and signaled they're unlikely to expand the bond purchase plan.