Salient to Investors: Miller Samuel said: Listings for NY non-luxury apartments – homes under $3 million and 90 percent of the market – have fallen by over 36 percent year-over-year in each of the last 3 quarters, the biggest declines in 12 years of record keeping. Inventory in the top 10 percent
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: DataQuick said home sales priced at over $1 million rose an average of 37 percent in half1, 2013 from a year earlier to the highest level since 2007, and versus 11 percent for houses priced under $1 million. Susan Wachter at Wharton said wealthy purchasers are diving into real estate a
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Simon Johnson at MIT Sloan writes: Optimists say Europe is on the mend – the ECB is maintaining stimulus, Germany’s export potential remains large, France will continue to be a haven for investors, while struggling countries such as Greece and Portugal represent less than 1/10 th of the euro area’s economic output and population. However Italy
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jeremy Grantham’s GMO claims that of the 36 major bubbles it says it tracks, 33 have completely popped, or returned to their prior trends. GMO’s more recent predictions, the Australian and UK housing market bubbles, have yet to pop. James Montier at GMO says investors are being
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Zeng Xianzhao at Everbright Securities said investors are getting mixed signals on the property market and the uncertainty over real-estate policies is dragging the industry lower which in turn is pulling the main index down. Zeng said there is still uncertainty about the strength of the economy. Rhee Chang Yong
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jim O’Neil writes: In April, the BRICS said they would build their own development bank. Their difficulty in cooperating is simply because they are not very alike. Brazil, Russia, India and China are the world’s largest emerging economies, while China is bigger than all the others put together – China effectively
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William Pesek writes: Asians Indonesians, Malaysians, South Koreans and Thais have not gotten over Larry Summers’ role in forcing austerity measures on governments in the late 1990s. Asians were puzzled by the 1999 Time magazine cover heralding Summers, Greenspan and Rubin as “The Committee to Save the World” for their free-market solutions to
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: 50% of surveyed economists say non-performing local-government and corporate debt will significantly impact China’s credit and economic growth, and expect China to deal with bad loans at local governments in the next 18 months by expanding the muni-bond market and letting localities refinance with direct bond sales. JPMorgan
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Joseph Carson at AllianceBernstein said: Household finances are in the best shape in decades, and the US is entering a new, stronger growth phase as healthier finances revive borrowing, spur consumer spending, generate business investment and jobs. Household wealth measured by net worth rose to $70.3 trillion in Q1,
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Author Mark Leibovich writes: Washington works extremely well for its most important citizens, the lobbyists. Money has trumped power as the ultimate currency. Atlantic magazine reported in 1974 that only 3 percent of retiring members of Congress became lobbyists. Today, that number is 42 percent for members of the
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