Tag: Bike Sharing

April 3, 2018

Perspective

Visual Capitalist – Visualizing the Average Commute Time in U.S. States and Cities – Jeff Desjardins 4/1

Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice

FT – Columbus shows Trump how to thrive in the new world order – Rana Foroohar 4/1

  • “The city’s success shows why industrial policy, not tariffs, is the winning strategy.”

Project Syndicate – Will China Really Supplant US Economic Hegemony? – Kenneth Rogoff 4/2

Seeking Alpha – Tesla Model 3 Costs More To Charge Than A Gasoline Car – Anton Wahlman 4/1

WSJ – U.S. Fiscal Future Won’t Be Like Its Carefree Past – Greg Ip 3/28

Energy

FT – Wary shale investors warn against drilling at all costs – Ed Crooks 4/1

Finance

WSJ – Daily Shot: FRED – Federal Reserve Total Assets (Balance Sheet) 4/2

WSJ – Daily Shot: FRED – Commercial and Industrial Loans 4/2

Cryptocurrency / ICOs

WSJ – Daily Shot: Investing.com – Bitcoin v. Bitcoin Cash 4/2

Entertainment

WSJ – Dominant Box Office Run of ‘Black Panther’ Underscores a Growing Hollywood Problem – Ben Fritz 4/1

  • “This year’s box office so far has been a story of one completely dominant movie, ‘Black Panther,’ highlighting a potentially troubling trend for Hollywood in which ticket sales are increasingly concentrated among just a few ultra-successful pictures.”
  • “With $650.7 million and counting, ‘Black Panther’ is on track to become the third highest grossing movie ever in the U.S. and Canada. It accounted for 23% of all ticket sales in the first three months of the year, ending Saturday, according to comScore. That is the second-highest percentage ever behind only ‘Titanic,’ which took 25% in the winter of 1998.”
  • “’Black Panther’ is an extreme example of the trend that Hollywood has been struggling with for some years. In 2015, 2016 and 2017, the top 10 movies raked in between 32% and 35% of total box office, comScore said. Previously, that figure never exceeded 30%. So far this year, it is 58%.“

Health / Medicine

Axios – Opioid prescription rates dropping across the country – Stef W. Kight and Lazaro Gamio 3/31

Canada

Bloomberg – Toronto’s Tale of Two Markets Is Hot Condos and Cold Houses – Natalie Wong 3/29

  • “After a decade as one of the world’s hottest housing markets, Toronto is moving in two directions. Transactions have certainly cooled since May as the government introduced new rules to tame runaway prices. But the impact has been largely on big, expensive detached homes, with sales plunging 41% in February from a year earlier, and prices dropping 12% since hitting a record last year. Condo prices, in contrast, soared about 20% since last February.”
  • “The deviation is largely as a result of mortgage regulations that went into effect on Jan. 1 as well as rising interest rates. The rule requires that even people with a 20% down payment, who don’t require mortgage insurance, prove they can make payments at least 2% points above the rates under which they go into contract.”
  • “That’s pushing buyers out of the detached segment and right into the condo market.”

China

FT – China’s P2P lenders brace for renewed regulatory crackdown – Emily Feng 4/1

  • “Thousands of online lenders could be facing extinction as China rolls out a new licensing framework, amid complaints about a lack of clarity on how the regime will work.”
  • “P2P platforms match borrowers with investors online. China’s P2P lending industry recorded transactions valued at $445bn in 2017, according to Online Lending Club, a data company.”
  • “Many P2P lenders, including one of the largest, Hongling Capital, were weeded out in crackdowns in 2016 and 2017 after agencies reporting to China’s central bank began closing fraudulent platforms and those selling high-interest loans.”
  • “Of more than 6,000 online lending platforms launched over the past several years, fewer than 2,000 were still in operation at the end of February, according to Online Lending House, a data provider — a sign of how regulation, competition and fraud have thinned the industry’s ranks.”
  • “As part of the regulatory overhaul, P2P lenders are barred from guaranteeing principal or interest on loans they facilitate; are limited to loans of no more than Rmb1m ($159,000) for individual borrowers and Rmb5m for companies; and must use custodian banks.”

FT – China revives long-stalled property tax to combat housing bubble – Gabriel Wildau and Yizhen Jia 3/31

  • “After years of delay and quiet opposition from vested interests, China will push ahead with a property tax that is viewed as crucial to taming the country’s housing bubble.”
  • “House prices in major Chinese cities are among the highest in the world in terms of price-income ratios, with speculative demand from Chinese investors — who see few other good places to park their savings — as a major driver. The result is an estimated 50m empty homes, according to a broad survey by researchers from Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu.”
  • “A landmark blueprint for economic reform that the Communist party leadership approved five years ago included a pledge to push ahead with a property tax. But a subsequent slowdown in the economy, including a housing-market downturn in 2014-15, prompted authorities to shelve those plans.” 
  • “Quiet opposition from wealthy urbanites, including government officials who own multiple homes, also hindered progress.” 
  • “’When will the tax actually come out is difficult to say, but at least the intention has strengthened,’ said Chen Shen, head of property research at China Securities in Shanghai. ‘Two years ago everyone was discussing whether it would ever happen, but now it’s very clear that it will’.” 

Japan

WSJ – Daily Shot: @NickTimiraos – Change in Home Prices – Japan & U.S. 4/2

Other Interesting Links

WSJ – Dockless Bike Share Floods into U.S. Cities, With Rides and Clutter – Eliot Brown 3/26

 

November 27, 2017

Perspective

NYT – The Typical American Lives Only 18 Miles From Mom – Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller 12/23/15

Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice

NYT – Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, at Last – Thomas Friedman 11/23

NYT – Where Brexit Hurts: The Nurses and Doctors Leaving London – Katrin Bennhold 11/21

Vanity Fair – The End of the Social Era Can’t Come Soon Enough – Nick Bilton 11/23

Real Estate

Investment News – Nontraded REITs to post worst sales since 2002 – Bruce Kelly 11/21

  • “Sales of nontraded real estate investment trusts are headed for their worst year since 2002, with the industry on track to raise just $4.4 billion in equity in 2017, about $100,000 less than a year earlier, according to data from Robert A. Stanger & Co.”
  • “Making matters worse for the industry is that one newcomer to selling nontraded REITs, The Blackstone Group, has the highest sales for the year to date through September. Blackstone had almost $1.4 billion in sales with its new REIT, the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, over the first nine months of the year, according to Stanger.”
  • “That means traditional nontraded REIT managers – including Griffin Capital Co., Carter/Validus Advisors, Cole Capital and others – will likely raise about $3 billion this year, about one third less than the 2016 total. And independent broker-dealers are struggling without the lucrative commissions formerly generated by product sales.”
  • “In 2002, $3.8 billion worth of nontraded REITs were sold. Nontraded REIT sales were $11.5 billion in 2007, according to Stanger, just as the real estate crash was beginning. Sales of nontraded REITs hit their peak in 2013, when independent broker-dealers sold $19.6 billion of the products.”
  • In addition to an accounting scandal at industry behemoth, American Realty Capital (ARC), new securities rules have hurt sales.
  • “New securities industry rules and regulations, including the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, have hurt sales of high commission products like nontraded REITs. The fiduciary rule has flattened the levels of commissions that brokers charge clients for products such as mutual funds.”
  • “The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority also recently put into place a new rule, known as 15-02, that makes pricing of illiquid securities like nontraded REITs more transparent to investors. In the past, client account statements showed illiquid securities like REITs at the value they were bought by the client and did not subtract commissions, which were high.”
  • “With the DOL fiduciary rule flattening commissions, many REIT managers began selling T shares, which cut the upfront load by more than half. After initially paying a 3% commission, the broker is then paid up to 7% over several years. An annual commission of 80 basis points is paid from the return generated by the REIT manager.”

Finance

Investment News – Nontraded BDC (Business Development Companies) sales in worst year since 2010 – Bruce Kelly 11/22

  • “The illiquid product’s three-year decline is partially due to new regulations and poor performance.”

WSJ – A Decade After the Crisis, King Dollar Is the World’s Tyrant – Jon Sindreu and Mike Bird 11/26

  • “Many economists have long predicted an end to the dollar reign that was established after World War II, especially after President Richard Nixon unpegged the greenback from gold in 1971. The creation of the euro in 1999 and the breakneck growth of the Chinese economy led many analysts to say the dollar would need to share the limelight.”
  • “But the euro became politically unpopular during the European debt crisis, and Chinese capital controls to peg the yuan are anathema to global investors. Meanwhile, the share of official reserves held in dollars recently stopped its multiyear decline, and in the second quarter of 2017, foreign-country dollar-denominated debt rose to an all-time high of $8.6 trillion, according to the BIS.
  • “’The dollar’s downward trend of the last 40 years is over,’ said Paresh Upadhyaya, fund manager at Amundi Pioneer, Europe’s largest asset manager.”
  • “A one-currency dominance challenges economic models that see global financial markets as a flat surface where, on average, investors shouldn’t be better or worse off depending on which currency they trade.”
  • “Reality tends to show something else.”

Fortune – Nearly 4 Million Bitcoins Lost Forever, New Study Says – Jeff John Roberts and Nicolas Rapp 11/25

NYT – Warning Signs About Another Giant Bitcoin Exchange – Nathaniel Popper 11/21

Shipping

Visual Capitalist: MarineTraffic – Visualizing Every Ship at Sea in Real-Time – Jeff Desjardins 11/23

Britain

FT – The UK’s hidden one-child-per-family university policy – Martin Lewis 11/23

  • “Supporting two children studying at university could cost much more than you think.”

China

The Guardian – Chinese bike share graveyard a monument to industry’s ‘arrogance’ – Benjamin Haas 11/24

South America

FT – Surge in cargo theft hits the bottom line in Rio de Janeiro – Andres Schipani and Joe Leahy 11/21

  • “The thefts — which occur on average more than once an hour and are often staged by scores of criminals carrying assault rifles — have reportedly forced the national postal service to stop street deliveries in some neighborhoods of Rio, while supermarkets have raised their prices by up to 20 per cent to pay for the losses.”
  • “Recession-induced budget crises across governments in Latin America’s largest economy have led to the spike in crime, analysts say. One state — Espírito Santo — recorded 128 murders during eight days of uncontrolled street crime in February when police went on strike after budget cuts.”
  • “Cargo theft in Rio de Janeiro, whose greater metropolitan area has a population of 12m people, has increased sharply from 5,890 incidents in 2014 at the start of the economic downturn to a record 9,862 last year, says the local industry association Firjan. The state is on track to top a similar number this year, with food, beverages, electronic appliances and cigarettes among the preferred targets.”
  • “According to a 2017 report by the Inter-American Development Bank, crime and the efforts to combat it cost Brazil some $120bn a year, three times the toll on Mexico, which is ravaged by drug-cartel violence.“
  • Is this what happens when a society becomes too unequal? Politicians play their hand at their ability to regulate with intent to collect personal payoffs – graft becomes endemic – the people go on a corruption hunt – political infrastructure suffers – basic services decline – theft and looting become common place. I would imagine that the walls around the wealthy compounds are getting higher with more armed guards.