Bamboo Innovator

Billionaire Mikitani’s Kenko Sues Japan Government on Online Drug Sales Curbs

Billionaire Mikitani’s Kenko Sues Japan Government on Drug Curbs

Kenko.com Inc. (3325), a unit of billionaire Hiroshi Mikitani’s Internet retailer, said it filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government to fight restrictions on the online sale of some drugs. The government’s ban is “unconstitutional,” and the lawsuit was filed at the Tokyo District Court, Rakuten Inc. (4755) unit Kenko said in a stock-exchange statement yesterday. The cabinet approved a bill yesterday that would limit some sales. Read more of this post

Beaujolais Bath Marks Japan as Benchmark for New Vintage; The Japanese turned crazy for the vintage in the late 1980s, when France let bottles of the weeks-old and barely fermented wine be shipped and stored overseas in advance of the release date at midnight on the third Thursday of November

Beaujolais Bath Marks Japan as Benchmark for New Vintage: Retail

Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrive! Or at least, the inaugural shipment of this year’s batch touched down last week in Japan, the biggest buyer of the fruity red wine. It’s also the first market of note that will begin the business of drinking the stuff in eight days’ time. With Japan accounting for more than half of overseas sales, the scale of post-party hangovers will be a barometer for the central French region’s most famous vintage. While Japanese imports gained 10 percent a year over the past three years, volumes remain about a third off their 2004 peak, and a weaker yen is creating headwinds for this year’s crop. Read more of this post

Essar Billionaires Cut Exports on Refiner Glut: Corporate India

Essar Billionaires Cut Exports on Refiner Glut: Corporate India

Billionaire brothers Shashikant and Ravikant Ruia, who run India’s second-biggest oil refinery, will increase fuel sales at home as capacity additions in China and the Middle East shrink export margins. Essar Oil Ltd. (ESOIL) will reduce overseas sales from its 400,000-barrel-a-day plant as it predicts local demand for gasoline and diesel will rise in the year ending March 31, Managing Director Lalit Kumar Gupta said in an interview. The end of an above-normal monsoon in India will help revive diesel demand in Asia’s second-biggest energy consumer, he said. Read more of this post

Korea Intervention Bets Prompt Aberdeen to Dump Won: Currencies

Korea Intervention Bets Prompt Aberdeen to Dump Won: Currencies

Aberdeen Asset Management Plc dumped its holdings of South Korean won as the nation’s central bank said last month it may intervene to stem the currency’s gains. Aberdeen says it sold the won, the best-performing developing-nation currency since June, at 1,061 per dollar. La Francaise Asset Management, which oversees about $51 billion, cut half its Korean bond holdings on Oct. 30 as officials said they may act to counter the “herd behavior” of speculators. Read more of this post

Scripps Howard News Service, which fed syndicated stories to papers across the U.S. since World War I, plans to shut down, becoming the latest symbol of readers’ shift away from print media.

Scripps Howard News Service Will Cease Operation After 96 Years

E.W. Scripps Co. (SSP)’s Scripps Howard News Service, which fed syndicated stories to papers across the U.S. since World War I, plans to shut down, becoming the latest symbol of readers’ shift away from print media. McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, a joint venture of McClatchy Co. (MNI) and Tribune Co. (TRBAA), will take over Scripps Howard’s clients, according to a statement today. The transition is expected to be completed by January, the companies said. Read more of this post

Zell Says Buyers Lulled Into State of ‘Kumbaya’ by Easy Money

Zell Says Buyers Lulled Into State of ‘Kumbaya’ by Easy Money

The Federal Reserve’s effort to jolt the U.S. economy to life by pumping cash into the financial system is causing price gains on everything from stocks to apartment buildings to outpace growth, according to billionaire real-estate investor Sam Zell. “There is a little bit too much Kumbaya,” in markets today, Zell, founder of Equity Residential, the largest publicly traded U.S. apartment landlord, said today at the Talmage Credit Conference in New York. “The enormous liquidity is distorting values.” Read more of this post

NYSE’s New Boss Says 221-Year-Old Market Must Act Like Startup

NYSE’s New Boss Says 221-Year-Old Market Must Act Like Startup

IntercontinentalExchange Inc. (ICE) completed its purchase of NYSE Euronext at the close of today’s trading session, and its chief executive officer said the deal will usher in a swift shift to a more aggressive culture at the 221-year-old owner of the New York Stock Exchange. Jeffrey Sprecher, the CEO of Atlanta-based ICE, wants the combined entity to act more like a startup than a venerable institution with roots in the 18th century. His new employees should take more risks, adopting an approach that made ICE one of the world’s biggest exchange operators just 13 years after its founding, he said. Read more of this post

Bayer to Lanxess’s Plastic Creations Fail to Rescue Industry

Bayer to Lanxess’s Plastic Creations Fail to Rescue Industry

Plastics makers such as Bayer AG (BAYN) and Lanxess AG (LXS) have created everything from a plastic saxophone that can be played in live concerts to Harley Davidson engine parts made entirely of the synthetic material. The push to introduce new plastic offerings — as new manufacturing techniques allow the replacement of metal, fibers and wood in many products — can’t mask the fact that a drop in demand, coupled with over-optimistic spending on new plants, is prompting Europe’s biggest producers Bayer, Lanxess and Evonik Industries AG (EVK), to cull at least 3,700 jobs. Read more of this post

NYC’s World Trade Tower Opens 40% Empty in Revival

World Trade Center Tower Debuts in Manhattan Leasing Test

The first skyscraper at lower Manhattan’s World Trade Center is set to open with two days of ceremonies to mark the renewal of the area after its destruction by terrorists. When the fanfare subsides, the task will be filling the 40 percent of the tower that’s empty. “We feel a real sense of accomplishment for having made it to this place,” said Janno Lieber, president of the company that built the 72-story 4 World Trade Center, opening tomorrow. It means the site is “really becoming part of New York again.” Read more of this post

Norwegian Housing Bubble Seen by Shiller Deflating: Mortgages

Norwegian Housing Bubble Seen by Shiller Deflating: Mortgages

Trine Dahl, a broker at Norway’s second-largest realtor DNB Eiendom, says the number of potential buyers at her viewings has fallen by 50 percent in the past year and she now has to make as many as 15 calls to sell an Oslo apartment. A year ago, Dahl says, selling was as easy as sitting at a cash register. “The change came in the summer and since August and September, it has been really different,” Dahl said in an interview at DNB Eiendom’s office on Oslo’s upscale west side. “It’s very hard to say which property is a difficult house to sell and which is easy. In a normal market, that’s easy to do.” Read more of this post

Norway’s $800 billion oil fund is under pressure to show it can handle the risks associated with emerging markets as the world’s biggest sovereign wealth investor looks for ways to boost returns

World’s Biggest Wealth Fund Told Return Target Raising New Risks

Norway’s $800 billion oil fund is under pressure to show it can handle the risks associated with emerging markets as the world’s biggest sovereign wealth investor looks for ways to boost returns. The government-appointed Strategy Council yesterday cautioned against underestimating the risk of expanding into emerging markets. The comments come amid concern that unprecedented stimulus from central banks in the biggest economies has skewed asset prices as investors chase yield in riskier markets. Read more of this post

London, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur in three-way fight for Islamic finance crown

London, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur in three-way fight for Islamic finance crown

8:52am EST

By Bernardo Vizcaino

DUBAI (Reuters) – When the British government said last month it would issue its first Islamic bond, the implications went far beyond the debt market: it was a signal that London will not back down in an escalating tussle among cities for Islamic financial business. London has long been the default center for international firms to issue sharia-compliant bonds, part of a fast-growing Islamic finance sector that will be worth $2 trillion globally next year, according to consultants Ernst and Young. Read more of this post

Loeb Says Central Banks Provide Global Put, Aiding Stocks

Loeb Says Central Banks Provide Global Put, Aiding Stocks

Billionaire hedge-fund manager Dan Loeb said easy-money policies by central banks in the U.S., Asia and Europe are providing protection for equity investors in the near-term, even as stock prices surge. Loeb, the founder of New York-based Third Point LLC, highlighted the European Central Bank’s decision Nov. 7 to cut its benchmark interest rate to a record low, along with programs in place by other central banks around the globe. ECB President Mario Draghi has pledged to hold down borrowing costs to combat pressure from weakening prices. Read more of this post

Blackrock’s Fink Says Fed Should Start Tapering in December or Risk Bubble

Fink Says Fed Should Start Tapering in December or Risk Bubble

BlackRock Inc. (BLK) Chief Executive Officer Laurence D. Fink said the U.S. Federal Reserve should start reducing its unprecedented asset purchases next month or risk creating a bubble. “I actually believe there’s a need to begin tapering,” Fink said today at the annual meeting for the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association in New York. “That sounds like a bubble to me when you buy over 100 percent of all public and private debt issuance.” Fink said the Fed bought about 80 percent of all public and private debt issuance in 2012. If the U.S. deficit decreases by about 30 percent as projected, the central bank will be buying more than 100 percent of debt issuance, Fink said. The Fed should continue to keep the interest rate at zero, he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alexis Leondis in New York at aleondis@bloomberg.net

Lady Gaga for Free Online Shows Boom Missed by U.S. GDP: Economy

Lady Gaga for Free Online Shows Boom Missed by U.S. GDP: Economy

Since completing a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 2009, Ti Zhao, a self-described “education junkie,” has continued to take classes. The total price tag for the last eight in which she enrolled: $0.00. “It’s hard for me to imagine ever paying for a class again,” said Zhao, who has taken advantage of free studies provided by edX and Coursera Inc., including a public-health course taught by a Harvard University professor, after hearing about online education services through a friend. The 27-year-old San Francisco resident had been spending about $500 a class to enroll in a local university’s continuing-education program. Read more of this post

Facing up to the impending property market correction

Facing up to the impending property market correction

Owning a condominium — or, for the really ambitious, landed property — is many a Singaporean’s dream. But anything that is not an hour’s commute from the city centre can be eye-wateringly expensive and out of reach for most of my generation (those born in the 1980s).

BY CHARLES TAN MENG YEAH –

3 HOURS 29 MIN AGO

Owning a condominium — or, for the really ambitious, landed property — is many a Singaporean’s dream. But anything that is not an hour’s commute from the city centre can be eye-wateringly expensive and out of reach for most of my generation (those born in the 1980s). Read more of this post

Emerging-Market Banks Threatened by End of Credit Boom

Emerging-Market Banks Threatened by End of Credit Boom

The world’s largest emerging markets recovered quickly from the 2008 financial crisis because consumers and companies went on a borrowing binge. Now that credit spree is coming back to haunt banks in those countries. As economies cool, delinquent loans are rising from Turkey to South Africa. India is injecting money into state-run lenders facing a surge in soured debt, while Chinese banks have been told to increase provisions for the same reason. Read more of this post

Default ‘Wave’ of $1.6 Trillion Looming for Junk, Fridson Says

Default ‘Wave’ of $1.6 Trillion Looming for Junk, Fridson Says

Almost $1.6 trillion of junk bonds globally will default between 2016 and 2020, according to Martin Fridson, chief executive officer of New York-based FridsonVision LLC, a research firm specializing in speculative-grade debt. With historical evidence indicating default rates will surge between 2014 and 2016 and persist, implying a rate of more than 30 percent cumulative during four years, Fridson estimated in a report for Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ Leveraged Commentary and Data that the face value of total defaults will be $1.576 trillion. That’s a market value of $752 billion, according to Fridson, who started his career as a corporate debt trader in 1976. Read more of this post

Who You Calling a BRIC?

Who You Calling a BRIC?

I spent last week in Indonesia, working on a series for BBC Radio about four of the world’s most populous non-BRIC emerging economies. The BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — are already closely watched. The group I’m studying for this project — let’s call them the MINT economies — deserve no less attention. Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey all have very favorable demographics for at least the next 20 years, and their economic prospects are interesting. Read more of this post

Ex-Bank Executive May Face Death in Vietnam Fraud Trial

Ex-Bank Executive May Face Death in Vietnam Fraud Trial

A Vietnam court will consider the death penalty for two former executives if they’re convicted in a $25 million fraud scheme, signaling an aggressive stance as leaders seek to clean up the banking system. The People’s Court of Ho Chi Minh City may hand down the death penalty for Vu Quoc Hao, the former general director of Agribank Financial Leasing Co. (FLKO) No. 2, who is charged with embezzling 531 billion dong ($25 million) of state property, the official Vietnam News reported yesterday. Dang Van Hai, the former chairman of a construction company, also faces the death penalty in the case, the newspaper said. Read more of this post

Korean subcontractor of Singapore’s Downtown MRT line goes bankrupt

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 12, 2013

SMEs stranded as rail sub-contractor goes bust

$2m cheques issued by Samdaiyang Development to local firms bounce

MINDY TAN TANMINDY@SPH.COM.SG

Just months after a Downtown line main contractor went bust, a sub-contractor working on another part of the rail network has also become insolvent – PHOTO: SPH

[SINGAPORE] Just months after a Downtown line main contractor went bust, a sub-contractor working on another part of the rail network has also become insolvent. This has left a handful of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore holding some $2 million in bounced cheques. Read more of this post

Indonesia Rate Rise Signals No Current-Account Relief for Rupiah

Indonesia Rate Rise Signals No Current-Account Relief for Rupiah

Indonesia’s surprise interest-rate increase signals a wider-than-anticipated current account gap that threatens to deepen the rupiah’s three-week plunge, according to United Overseas Bank Ltd. and Barclays Plc. The rupiah, Asia’s worst performing currency this year, has tumbled 5.7 percent to 11,596 per dollar since trading at a seven-week high Oct. 25. In a move that was predicted by only one of 25 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, Bank Indonesia raised the reference rate to a four-year high of 7.5 percent yesterday, a day before officials are slated to release third-quarter current account figures. Read more of this post

M’sia lost nearly 2 trillion litres of water in 2012

M’sia lost nearly 2 trillion litres of water in 2012

Wednesday, November 13, 2013 – 10:26

Patrick Lee

The Star/Asia News Network

PETALING JAYA – Leaky, ageing pipes are taking a huge toll on the country, with close to two trillion litres of treated water lost to seepage, poor water quality and frequent disruptions at the consumer end. And it’s going to get worse. Much of the problem lies in the 43,890km of ageing pipes around the country. Made of asbestos-cement (AC), these pipes were installed in vast numbers decades ago. Read more of this post

Miner to Pay in Bitcoins for Work at Tungsten Project

Miner to Pay in Bitcoins for Work at Tungsten Project

A Canadian mining company agreed to pay a contractor in Bitcoins for exploration work to be carried out at a property that contains tungsten. Alix Resources Corp. (AIX) said today in a statement it will pay Ridge Resources Ltd. for the work at its Windy property about 15 kilometers (9 miles) north of Cassiar, British Columbia. Read more of this post

Venezuela Bonds Plunge as Military Takes Over Electronics Store to quell inflation that’s soared above 50 percent

Venezuela Bonds Plunge as Military Takes Over Electronics Store

Venezuelan bonds tumbled, sending yields to a 22-month high, after President Nicolas Maduro dispatched the military to take over a retail chain as part of his effort to quell inflation that’s soared above 50 percent. The country’s benchmark bonds due 2027 fell 3.9 cents to 72.1 cents on the dollar as Maduro’s seizure of electronics retailer Daka and his warnings to other businesses to cut prices to “fair” levels deepened investor concern that growth is being choked off by government controls. Yields on the bonds soared 0.79 percentage point to 13.82 percent, the highest since January 2012, at 3:19 p.m. in New York. Read more of this post

Buffett’s favorite market tool is flashing red

Buffett’s favorite market tool is flashing red

This little-known valuation metric has entered familiar territory. Here’s why investors should share the Oracle of Omaha’s concerns — and how they can protect themselves.

By David Sterman

In the go-go days of 1999, Warren Buffett grew very concerned. Not because his value style of investing had grown unpopular, but because investors were becoming delusional in their zeal for further gains. In a speech he made to friends, as recounted in a 1999 article in Fortune magazine (that was published just a few months before the market peaked and then plunged), Buffett warned that “once you reach the point where everybody has made money no matter what system he or she followed, a crowd is attracted into the game that is responding not to interest rates and profits but simply to the fact that it seems a mistake to be out of stocks.” A simple test of how much stocks were loved: The aggregate value of the largest 5,000 U.S. companies (as measured by the Wilshire 5000) exceeded the GNP of the U.S. economy. In fact, a market melt-up took this ratio up to 150% by early 2000 (meaning the Wilshire 5000 was 50% larger than the U.S. economy), which set the stage for one of the most painful corrections ever for investors. Read more of this post