Bamboo Innovator

Corporations Have Record Cash: They Also Have Record-er Debt, As Net Leverage Soars 15% Above Its 2008 Peak

Corporations Have Record Cash: They Also Have Record-er Debt, As Net Leverage Soars 15% Above Its 2008 Peak

Tyler Durden on 01/16/2014 15:42 -0500

There is a reason why activism was the best performing hedge fund “strategy” of 2013: as we wrote and predicted back in November 2012 in “Where The Levered Corporate “Cash On The Sidelines” Is Truly Going“, US corporations – susceptible to soothing and not so soothing (ahem Icahn) suggestions by major shareholders – would lever to the hilt with cheap debt and use it all not for CapEx and growth, but for short-term shareholder gratification such as buybacks and dividends. A year later we found just how accurate this prediction would be when as we reported ten days ago US corporations invested a whopping half a trillion in buying back their stock, incidentally at all time high prices. Read more of this post

Charging more, getting less: Lawyers’ biggest customers are discovering that they can haggle

Charging more, getting less: Lawyers’ biggest customers are discovering that they can haggle

Jan 18th 2014 | NEW YORK | From the print edition

THERE were groans in big companies’ legal departments in the mid-2000s, when the fees of America’s priciest lawyers first hit $1,000 an hour. Such rates have since become common at firms with prestige. A survey published this week by the National Law Journal found that they now go as high as $1,800. But the general counsels of large businesses are increasingly finding that they can ignore these extravagant rates, and insist on big discounts.

Read more of this post

Canada housing: On short notice; Record house prices and low interest rates have fuelled fears of a bubble that has excited hedge funds

January 16, 2014 6:07 pm

Canada housing: On short notice

By Camilla Hall

Record house prices and low interest rates have fuelled fears of a bubble that has excited hedge funds

Ben Rabidoux was teaching at Georgian College, a small university an hour’s drive from Toronto, when he started writing a blog about the Canadian housing market. His job teaching economics and finance gave him access to reams of real estate data, which he used to back up his contrarian – and unpopular – case that Canada was in the midst of a housing bubble. Read more of this post

A worrying wobble: Bank regulators should not have weakened rules that limit leverage

A worrying wobble: Bank regulators should not have weakened rules that limit leverage

Jan 18th 2014 | From the print edition

IN THE immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, politicians and regulators from around the world stood shoulder to shoulder and promised to tame the excesses in the banking system that had brought the global economy to its knees. Among the first of their proposed reforms was to have more loss-absorbing capital in banks to reduce the risks of future taxpayer-funded bail-outs. How quickly memories fade. Read more of this post

IPO Fund Lures Record Money in Best Year Since 1999

IPO Fund Lures Record Money in Best Year Since 1999

The best year for U.S. initial public offerings since the 1999 technology boom is driving record money into an exchange-traded fund that invests in newly listed companies from Twitter Inc. to General Motors Co. (GM) Read more of this post

Why Being Able to Compartmentalize Is a Key Ingredient for Risk-taking

Why Being Able to Compartmentalize Is a Key Ingredient for Risk-taking

Jan 14, 2014

It’s a crazy morning at home, and your spouse is furious at you. Harried, you slam the car door shut and race off to work where an important task awaits. Your ability to tune out the situation at home and focus on the job at hand is facilitated by your emotional understanding. It’s a form of emotional intelligence, according to Jeremy Yip, a lecturer and research scholar at Wharton. Compartmentalizing enables a person to identify what is stressing them out and to allow other, unrelated factors in their life to stand on their own merits, Yip says. Read more of this post

China’s ICBC says won’t compensate investors in troubled shadow bank product

China’s ICBC says won’t compensate investors in troubled shadow bank product

Wed, Jan 15 2014

BEIJING/SHANGHAI, Jan 16 (Reuters) – Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world’s largest bank by assets, said on Thursday that it has no plans to use its own money to repay investors in a troubled off-balance-sheet investment product that it helped to market. Read more of this post

Baby DNA Analysis Ushers in Brave New World of Treatment: Health

Baby DNA Analysis Ushers in Brave New World of Treatment: Health

When Kira Walker was three weeks old, her pediatrician noticed a problem. She was frequently hungry and had dangerously low blood sugar for no obvious reason.

Kira was born in Kansas City, Missouri, where her doctors had access to a service few hospitals can match. Her DNA was sent to Children’s Mercy Hospital geneticist Stephen Kingsmore, who is able to determine a diagnosis in a day or two for half the babies with mysterious diseases referred to him. Until recently, these riddles took years to solve, or were never unraveled at all. Read more of this post

Nu Skin Falls as China Newspaper Calls It a Pyramid Scheme

Nu Skin Falls as China Newspaper Calls It a Pyramid Scheme

Nu Skin Enterprises Inc. (NUS), a maker of skin-care and nutritional products, fell the most in more than nine years after a Chinese government newspaper called it a “suspected illegal pyramid scheme.” Read more of this post

Luxury in China loses luster as wealthy flee

Luxury in China loses luster as wealthy flee

6:20am EST

By Clare Baldwin

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Wealthy Chinese are likely to buy fewer luxury goods again this year after the steepest cut-back on spending in at least five years, changing the game for high-end retailers like Louis Vuitton which have staked their growth on China. Read more of this post

China’s policy disharmony

China’s policy disharmony

China was hardly lacking in policy pronouncements in the final months of last year. From the 60-point reform programme issued by the Central Committee’s Third Plenum early last November to the six core tasks endorsed by the Central Economic Work Conference a month later, China’s leaders proposed a raft of new measures to address the daunting challenges their country faces in the years ahead.

BY STEPHEN S ROACH –

15 JANUARY

China was hardly lacking in policy pronouncements in the final months of last year. From the 60-point reform programme issued by the Central Committee’s Third Plenum early last November to the six core tasks endorsed by the Central Economic Work Conference a month later, China’s leaders proposed a raft of new measures to address the daunting challenges their country faces in the years ahead. Read more of this post

China’s dangerous credit addiction

January 15, 2014 6:43 pm

China’s dangerous credit addiction

Time for Beijing to prioritise stability over growth

For the past two decades China’s turbocharged growth has been the envy of the rich world as well as an aspiration for other emerging markets. Surging exports and intensive state-driven investment have lifted millions out of poverty and propelled Beijing into the exclusive club of global economic superpowers. Read more of this post