Tag: Music Industry

Rising Ticket Prices of Music Concerts

First, if you’re looking for some clever graphics illustrating the scale of plastic bottle waste, Visual Capitalist has obliged.

Bloomberg – Concerts Are More Expensive Than Ever, and Fans Keep Paying Up – Lucas Shaw 9/9/19

It’s not your imagination: Concert ticket prices are going through the roof.

And not just for the super wealthy who pay thousands of dollars to see the best acts from the front row. Fans of all types are paying more to see their favorite musicians.

The average price of a ticket to the 100 most popular tours in North America has almost quadrupled over the past two decades, from $25.81 in 1996 to $91.86 through the first half of this year, according to researcher Pollstar. Along with pro sports and Broadway shows, concert prices have far outpaced inflation.

Some of that increase was out of necessity. As piracy eroded music sales, artists began to lean heavily on concerts. Stars like Beyonce and Taylor Swift can make more in a couple nights onstage than they can from a year of album sales. But something else was going on, too. Ticket sellers like Ticketmaster and AEG’s AXS began adopting technology that showed fans would pay almost any price for their favorite acts, especially stars who only come around every few years.

“We all undervalued tickets for many, many years,” said Joe Killian, who runs a media consulting firm and founded a concert series in New York’s Central Park.

Higher prices have been good for the concert business. The live-music industry surpassed $8 billion in revenue in 2017, and is on pace for another record in 2019. Live Nation Entertainment Inc., which owns Ticketmaster, touts its ability to charge higher prices. 

It’s not just tickets, either. Music fans also face skyrocketing prices for food, beverages and merchandise. The average fan spent $20 at events in 2016 staged by Live Nation, the world’s largest promoter. This year, that figure is expected to reach $29, an increase of almost 50%.

If artists’ growing reliance on live music has led to any guilt about appearing greedy, the rise of ticket resale sites like StubHub took care of that. For years, entertainers watched as scalpers vacuumed up tickets and resold them for far more on such exchanges. Agents took this as proof that tickets were underpriced — and their artists underpaid.

Ticketmaster and others have since developed the ability to change pricing at any moment, enabling artists to charge more upfront and keep more of the dollars that went to scalpers. They can also reduce prices closer to show time if tickets aren’t selling, or create special windows for true fans.

Not every artist has embraced the new philosophy. Ed Sheeran booked the highest-grossing tour of all time while charging less than $100 a ticket, making him one of the cheapest of the top tours. He is adamant that his show be affordable to all his fans.

June 28, 2018

Perspective

FT – Migrant millennials are redrawing the map of America – Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson 6/26

  • “As a recent analysis by Brookings Institution demographer William Frey found, the strongest growth in America’s millennial population between 2010 and 2015 was not in coastal cities such as New York and LA, but in smaller ones in the south and west. The double-digit increase in 10 large metro areas, from Colorado Springs and Denver to San Antonio and Austin, contrasts with Midwestern cities such as Chicago and St Louis, whose millennial populations rose less than 1%.”
  • “This millennial migration is largely being driven by affordability, says Karen Harris of the macro trends group at Bain & Company, the consultancy. ‘Tier one cities have become incredibly expensive; as a result they have become the province of rich people, single people and empty nesters.’” 
  • “Few places tell this story better than Denver, Colorado. Its middle-of-the-country location, affordable universities, plentiful jobs and easy access to a snowboarder’s paradise in the Rocky Mountains have drawn tens of thousands of millennials in recent years, transforming its population and economy.” 
  • But…
  • “Denver’s residential property prices are 50% above their pre-crisis peak, dividing the city into those who bought and have watched their assets appreciate and those wondering if they will ever get on the housing ladder. Since Colorado legalized recreational marijuana in 2014, Denver has been rife with stories of dispensary owners driving the market up by putting their unbankable cash into property.” 
  • “For now, disillusioned leavers are outnumbered by new arrivals to Denver, but there are signs that its millennial-fueled population boom is slowing. Its growth rate peaked in 2015 and it has dropped down the Census Bureau’s list of fastest-growing cities, which is now topped by San Antonio and Phoenix.” 
  • “Mike Newlands moved to Denver after college in 2006 to work in the sporting goods industry, and is living with a friend while saving for a down payment on a property. He worries that anyone who did not buy by 2010 is effectively priced out of Denver. ‘People are asking now where the next Colorado is,’ he says, listing more affordable alternatives like Jackson, Wyoming, and Boise, Idaho. ‘People like me who make $75,000 a year are going to be gone.’”

Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice

A Wealth of Common Sense – Playing in Traffic – Ben Carlson 5/27

  • “Our brains find it easier to process situations where there’s a clear explanation. Not knowing what’s happening or, more importantly, why it’s happening, makes people extremely uncomfortable.”
  • “Being uncomfortable with uncertainty is one of the reasons a long commute can make people unhappy:”
    • “As Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues, ‘You can’t adapt to commuting, because it’s entirely unpredictable. Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.’”

Markets / Economy

WSJ – Harley-Davidson Is Fighting the Trade Wars on Two Fronts – John D. Stoll 6/25

Real Estate

Bloomberg – Investors Are Piling In to NYC Condos at a Record Pace – Oshrat Carmiel 6/27

WSJ – Looking for an Apartment? It Is a Great Time to Rent – Laura Kusisto 6/27

  • “It is a great time for anyone looking to rent an apartment: vacancy rates are rising and there are little or no rent increases in many major cities.”
  • “For landlords, though, the U.S. apartment market suffered its worst spring since 2010, near the depths of the housing crisis. Driving this dynamic is a flood of new apartments and weakening demand.”
  • “Rents rose 2.3% in the second quarter compared with a year earlier, the smallest annual increase since the third quarter of 2010, according to data from RealPage Inc. scheduled to be released on Wednesday. Rental growth was flat in major cities with otherwise strong economies—such as Austin, Portland, Seattle, Dallas and Washington, D.C.—due to large amounts of new supply.”
  • “Landlords have enjoyed a record 32 straight quarters of annual rent growth on average, as the U.S. economy strengthened and millennials delayed homeownership. But the reports of slowing, which began in a few markets in late 2016, have intensified to the point that the balance is shifting towards renters and away from landlords.”
  • “The cause of the slowdown is primarily new supply. Developers responded to escalating rents by building the most new apartments in 30 years, sending a flood of new high-end units to downtown areas across the country. Developers are expected to add 300,000 new units over the next year across the U.S., Mr. Willett (Greg Willett, chief economist at RealPage) said.”
  • “At the same time as there are signs renter demand is starting to wane because millennials are marrying, having children and buying homes or moving into single-family rentals. The U.S. added 1.3 million owner households in the first quarter over the same period last year and lost 286,000 renter households, according to U.S. Census data released in April.”
  • “Despite the recent slowdown, apartment owners note that the market is far from crashing and rent growth remains just below historic norms.”
  • “Little concern has arisen that the softening could have broader economic repercussions for the U.S. financial system. Compared with the last real-estate crash, owners say there are unlikely to be many foreclosures because they are carrying much less debt.”
  • “Jay Hiemenz, president and chief operating officer of Phoenix-based Alliance Residential, an apartment company, said banks are only giving loans to developers for about 65% of the cost to build a project, compared to 80% or more previously.”

Cryptocurrency / ICOs

WSJ – Daily Shot: Ripple 6/27

  • “Ripple is down 87% since early January.”

Entertainment

WSJ – The Pop Diva Identity Crisis – Neil Shah 10/18/17

Asia – excluding China and Japan

Bloomberg – Hermes Bags, Diamonds Worth $273 Million Taken in 1MDB Raids – Anisah Shukry 6/26

  • “Malaysia’s police seized about 1.1 billion ringgit ($273 million) of items that included Hermes International handbags, Rolex watches and cash in raids linked to former Prime Minister Najib Razak amid investigations into troubled state fund 1MDB.”
  • “Luxury goods such as a 6.4 million ringgit diamond necklace, 51.3 million ringgit worth of Hermes bags and more than 200 sunglasses valued at 374,000 ringgit were taken from five residences and an office linked to Najib, Amar Singh, commercial crime investigation department director at the police, told reporters on Wednesday.”
  • “The police had to form eight teams consisting of more than 150 officers to analyze the items for weeks, even working through the Eid al-Fitr Muslim holiday, Singh said. Valuations may increase as not all items seized have been analyzed.”

FT – Malaysia police value assets seized in 1MDB-linked raids at $275m – Stefania Palma 6/27

China

Bloomberg – Chinese Stocks Enter Bear Market as Trade, Growth Risks Increase – Richard Frost and Jeanny Yu 6/25

November 17, 2017

Perspective

WSJ – Leonardo da Vinci Painting ‘Salvator Mundi’ Smashes Records With $450.3 Million Sale – Kelly Crow 11/16

  • “Leonardo da Vinci’s rediscovered portrait of Jesus Christ sold at auction for $450.3 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold.”
  • “The estimate for the work was around $100 million. But before Wednesday night’s sale in New York, dealers had wagered the image of an enigmatic Christ dressed in a blue robe and holding a crystal orb could sell for far more—given that da Vinci is a household name, fewer than 20 of his paintings survive and this is the last one deemed by him in private hands.”
  • “The price more than doubled the $179.4 million spent two years ago for Pablo Picasso’s 1955 ‘Women of Algiers (Version O),’ as well as an earlier record of $170.4 million for Amedeo Modigliani’s 1917-18 ‘Reclining Nude.’ In private sales, paintings by Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin have commanded as much as $250 million and $300 million, respectively.”
  • “Alex Rotter, chairman of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department, fielded the winning telephone bid after a 19-minute bidding war with at least five rivals in which bids were initially lobbed in $10 million increments. Billionaire collectors in the saleroom watched with their cellphone cameras held aloft as though they were at a rock concert.”
  • “’I’ve been going to auctions for decades, and I’ve never heard that room let out a collective gasp like they did when it sold,’ said Joanne Heyler, founding director of the Broad, a Los Angeles museum. ‘It’s hard for me to even comprehend that level of bidding.’”
  • “’Salvator Mundi’ isn’t instantly recognizable, like da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ or ‘Mona Lisa.’ This painting was considered a plum for its rarity. Auction records show only a trio of da Vinci’s 2,500 drawings have ever even come up for sale—the highest fetched $11.4 million in 2001—and no authenticated paintings have entered the market in at least a century.”
  • “Da Vinci painted the portrait around 1500, and it bounced among European royals for hundreds of years before shoddy cleaning efforts and overpainting rendered it almost unrecognizable.”
  • “When it surfaced in 1958 at Sotheby’s, it sold as a ‘school of da Vinci’ work for only £45 (about $125 at the time). But in 2005 a group of Old Master dealers and a conservator took a closer look and campaigned for its reauthentication. Ultimately, they won validation from museums and da Vinci scholars.”
  • “’Salvator Mundi’ comes from the collection of Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian fertilizer billionaire.”

Bloomberg – Billionaires Stunned as Da Vinci’s Christ Sells for $450 Million – Katya Kazakina 11/16

  • More information on the seller. Rybolovlev purchased the painting for $127.5 million in 2013, part of his $2 billion art collection. Which he has been in the process of trimming.

WSJ – Daily Shot: RadioFreeEurope – Where Do IS Foreign Fighters Come From 11/16

Economist – The rich get richer, and millennials miss out 11/16

  • “Buoyant financial markets meant that global wealth rose by 6.4% in the 12 months to June, the fastest pace since 2012. And the ranks of the rich expanded again, with 2.3m new millionaires added to the total, according to the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s global wealth report.”
  • “The report underlines the sharp divide between the wealthy and the rest. If the world’s wealth were divided equally, each household would have $56,540. Instead, the top 1% own more than half of all global wealth. The median wealth per household is just $3,582; if you own more than that, you are in the richest 50% of the world’s population.”
  • “America continues to dominate the ranks of millionaires with 43% of the global total. Both Japan and Britain had fewer dollar millionaires than they did in June 2016, thanks to declines in the yen and sterling. Emerging economies have been catching up in the millionaire stakes; they now have 8.4% of the global total, up from 2.7% in 2000.”
  • “In the 12 months covered by the report, the biggest proportionate gains in wealth occurred in Poland, Israel and South Africa, thanks to a combination of stock market and currency gains. Egypt is by far the biggest loser, having lost almost half its wealth in dollar terms. Switzerland is still the country with the highest mean and median wealth per person.”
  • “There is a wide generational gap: millennials (those who reached adulthood in the current millennium) have a lot of catching up to do in the wealth stakes. Americans currently aged between 30 and 39 years of age are calculated to have amassed 46% less wealth on average in 2017 than the equivalent cohort had gathered in 2007.”
  • “Higher student debts and the difficulty of getting on the housing ladder have made it harder for millennials to build a nest-egg. That disparity might come back to bite the baby-boomer generation, who are fast moving into retirement. When baby-boomers want to cash in their assets, they may find millennials can’t afford to buy them at current prices.”

Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice

A Teachable Moment – Insanely Expensive Life Insurance – Anthony Isola 11/15

Civil Beat – Here’s What It Really Takes To Survive in Hawaii – Neal Milner 11/16

  • “Hate them if you must, but homelessness, vacation rentals and unlicensed care homes are natural responses to problems plaguing the islands.”

FT – The Zuckerberg delusion – Edward Luce 11/15

  • “Talking about values has the collateral benefit of avoiding talking about wealth.”

NYT – Deception and Ruses Fill the Toolkit of Investigators Used by Weinstein – Matthew Goldstein and William Rashbaum 11/15

Real Estate

WSJ – Daily Shot: Moody’s – Housing Market Valuations 11/16

Finance

WSJ – Daily Shot: Bitcoin 11/15

  • And there it goes again.

Entertainment

WSJ – The Music Industry’s New Gatekeepers – Neil Shah 11/15

  • “Playlist professionals have replaced radio DJs as the new power brokers, as streaming services’ ready-made song lists become hitmakers.”

China

Reuters – Beijing hits brakes on subway boom over debt concerns – Brenda Goh 11/14

  • “China has been in the grips of a metro-building binge with more than 50 cities working on over 1 trillion yuan ($150.8 billion) worth of projects, after population restrictions were loosened last year to allow more cities to have metro systems.”
  • “Such infrastructure spending has helped to shore up economic growth but is now being scrutinized more closely after the government pledged to clamp down on financial risks.”
  • “China has hit the brakes on subway projects in at least three cities and Beijing is asking others to slow down their plans, local governments and media have reported, indicating concerns over high debt from city-level infrastructure spending.”

FT – China’s laid-off workers pose daunting welfare challenge – Emily Feng 11/15

  • “Early retirement for 1.8m in coal and steel sectors imposes heavy burden on state.”

India

Bloomberg – A Dud Diwali For Developers This Year – Purva Chitnis 11/16

  • “Developers hoping for a Diwali revival were left disappointed. Enquiries surged to their highest since demonetization during the festival season. Sales didn’t.”
  • “Fewer apartments were sold in the top eight cities in the quarter ended September, according to property research company PropEquity. Sales declined 13-60% in the three months, according to its data. Sales haven’t picked up since January even as initial cash crunch after the note ban began to ease. New launches that contribute the bulk of the demand plunged as well.”
  • “The housing market continues to hurt from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to outlaw old high-value bills and a new housing law. Demonetization had hit real estate the hardest as buyers had to pay up to 40% cash upfront – unaccounted. The Real Estate Regulation Act that followed protects customers against false promises and bars builders from shifting funds from one project to another (a good thing). A combination of the two triggered a cash crunch, bringing down demand and new launches.”

Japan

WSJ – Daily Shot: Topdown Charts – Japan Labor Force Participation 65yrs and older 11/16

September 27, 2017

If you were to read only one thing…

Bloomberg Businessweek – Ronaldo Is Hawking One of the World’s Riskiest Derivatives – Donal Griffin 9/20

  • The product: Contracts For Difference (CFDs)
  • “CFDs, called ‘a volatile form of gambling’ by an Irish judge in 2014, make up one of the last bastions of opaque, lightly regulated financial speculation in Europe. The contracts, which allow investors to bet on the direction of stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities without buying the underlying assets, aren’t traded on public exchanges and are largely prohibited for retail customers in the U.S. They’ve surged in popularity across Europe since 2010, triggering concerns of regulators, who say customers don’t grasp the risks involved.”
  • “Regulators from the Central Bank of Ireland to Polish markets watchdog KNF are now circling the CFD industry, and several countries have imposed leverage caps, limits on client losses and marketing restrictions. Cyprus (where most of the operators are based) introduced rules last year requiring CFD firms to offer a default leverage amount of no more than 50 times and limit client losses. Still, investors can get more if they ask for it and pass a firm’s ‘appropriateness test,’ according to a statement from the regulator, known as CySEC, which declined to comment further.”
  • “CFD users in Spain lose money 82% of the time, according to a study by the regulator that found about 31,000 traders in the country lost 142 million euros ($170 million) over a 21-month period ended in September 2016, including transaction costs. Other regulators have reported a similar percentage of losing bets.”
  • “Javier Paz, an analyst with Aite Group LLC in Boston who tracks the industry, estimates that European traders have lost about $2.1 billion on the derivatives over the past 15 years.”
  • “‘This is like a casino, and it looks very dangerous,’ Patricia Suarez, president of the Association of Financial Users in Madrid, which campaigns against abusive banking products, said of CFD trading.”
  • “One reason for the losses, regulators say, is the borrowed funds that CFD firms offer investors to magnify their bets. The leverage allows customers to deposit a small percentage of the total value of their trades. The CFD firm funds the remainder of the bet at a specified rate of interest. Trading this way can result in inflated profits, but the client can lose more than his deposit if the market moves even slightly in the wrong direction.”

Perspective

Axios – The large parts of America left behind by today’s economy – Kim Hart 9/25

  • “U.S. geographical economic inequality is growing, meaning your economic opportunity is more tied to your location than ever before. A large portion of the country is being left behind by today’s economy, according to a county-by-county report released this morning by the Economic Innovation Group, a non-profit research and advocacy organization. This was a major election theme that helped thrust Donald Trump to the White House.”
  • “Key findings:”
    • “New jobs are clustered in the economy’s best-off places, leaving one of every four new jobs for the bottom 60% of zip codes.”
    • “57% of the national rise in business establishments and 52% of employment growth from 2011-2015 were in prosperous areas.”
    • “Most of today’s distressed communities have seen zero net gains in employment and business establishment since 2000. In fact, more than half have seen net losses on both fronts.”
    • “Half of adults living in distressed zip codes are attempting to find gainful employment in the modern economy armed with only a high school education at best.”
    • “The healthier the economy, the healthier the person — people in distressed communities die five years earlier.”

FT – Millions mired in poverty as US upturn passes them by, study finds – Sam Fleming and Lauren Leatherby 9/25

  • “More than 50m Americans live in districts that are mired in a ‘deep ongoing recession’, with falling employment and a shrinking business base, according to a report that highlights the fractured nature of the US recovery.”
  • “According to research from the Economic Innovation Group think-tank, one in six Americans resides in a zip code it defines as a ‘distressed community’. These are areas with a falling number of businesses and in which the local population has low median income, poor labor force participation, high levels of poverty and low educational achievement.”

WSJ – Then and Now: The Big Shift at Work – Lauren Weber and Stephanie Stamm 9/2

  • “The biggest share of companies’ output still goes to workers, but that share is shrinking as companies spend less on both employee compensation and capital investment. Meanwhile, investors are getting three times the payout they did 30 years ago.”

Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice

NYT – Tyranny of the Minority – Michelle Goldberg 9/25

The Registry – Leaving Retail – John McNellis 9/26

Markets / Economy

RIAA – U.S. Sales Database: Recorded Music Revenues by Format 9/25

VC – Economic Might by U.S. Metro Area – Jeff Desjardins 9/26

Real Estate

WSJ – E-Commerce Mania Spreads To Warehouse Market – Esther Fung 9/26

  • “E-commerce is setting off a scramble for industrial real estate near urban centers, giving landlords of once-unglamorous properties a chance to push up rents to record levels.”
  • “A well-located last-mile facility ‘has the functional equivalent of a high-end retail store,’ said Hamid Moghadam, chairman and chief executive officer of industrial real-estate investment trust Prologis Inc. Such facilities are productive for the tenant and reduce transportation and labor costs.”
  • “When a company is shipping to individual customers rather than in bulk to stores, most of their costs are in transportation and labor, and reducing them is a priority, said Eric Frankel, an analyst at real-estate research firm Green Street Advisors. Warehouse rent, by contrast, represents just 5% or so of costs in a supply chain.”
  • “Modest levels of new warehouse supply are coming onto the market at a time when some e-commerce companies are expanding rapidly. Amazon is now the largest tenant of Prologis, Duke Realty Corp. , Jones Lang LaSalle Income Property Trust and DCT Industrial Trust by percentage of rental revenue at year-end 2016, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.”

Environment / Science

Bloomberg Businessweek – Climate Change Could Dampen Argentina’s Recovery – Jonathan Gilbert 9/19

Asia – excluding China and Japan

WSJ – Bali Volcano Eruption ‘Imminent,’ Nearly 50,000 Flee – Ben Otto 9/25

  • “The number of people fleeing a rumbling volcano no the Indonesian resort island of Bali rose to nearly 50,000, with the country’s disaster agency saying an eruption appears imminent after a half-century of calm.”

China

FT – WhatsApp messaging service hit by full blockage in China – Hannah Kuchler 9/25

  • “WhatsApp suffered a complete blockage in China this week, prompting suggestions the government was cracking down on the Facebook-owned messaging app ahead of the Communist party congress next month.”

Bloomberg Pursuits – The World’s Best Caviar Doesn’t Come From Russia Anymore – Kate Krader 9/18

September 8, 2017

Perspective

WSJ – Daily Shot: US Auto Fuel Efficiency 9/7

NYT – An Enormous, Urgent Task: Hauling Away Harvey’s Debris – John Schwartz and Alan Blinder 9/6

  • “Of all the challenges that southeast Texas faces after Hurricane Harvey, few will linger longer or more visibly than the millions of pounds of debris already crowding curbs and edging onto streets. The cleanup, needed from northeast Houston’s neighborhoods to the wealthy suburbs southwest of the city, will take months and cost billions of dollars.”
  • “At the same time, Houston officials are asking residents to separate their Harvey-related waste into five piles: appliances; electronics; construction and demolition debris; household hazardous waste; and vegetative debris. A look at these streets suggested that few people seemed to be heeding the city’s pleas.”
  • “Other cities have been through this battle with a storm’s leavings. After floodwaters inundated East Baton Rouge Parish, La., last year, crews collected about two million cubic yards of debris. Superstorm Sandy, in 2012, led to about six million cubic yards of debris in New York State — the equivalent of four Empire State Buildings, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Katrina left behind 38 million cubic yards. Getting the stuff gone is a long process. It was only last month that Baton Rouge finished the debris removal process it organized in the wake of last year’s flooding there.”
  • “In Houston, where city officials say that some eight million cubic yards of debris will need to be hauled away, collection is farther along in some neighborhoods than in others.”
  • “The job of deciding how to move these mountains has been left to county and local officials, who hire debris removal companies to help them dig out. FEMA will reimburse the local governments for 90% of the cost.”

Economist – How government policy exacerbates hurricanes like Harvey 9/2

  • “The bad news is that storms and floods still account for almost three-quarters of weather-related disasters, and they are becoming more common. According to the Munich Re, a reinsurer, their number around the world has increased from about 200 in 1980 to over 600 last year. Harvey was the third ‘500-year’ storm to strike Houston since 1979.”
  • In regard to encouraging less than desirable behavior, “the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has been forced to borrow because it fails to charge enough to cover its risk of losses. Underpricing encourages the building of new houses and discourages existing owners from renovating or moving out. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, houses that repeatedly flood account for 1% of NFIP’s properties but 25-30% of its claims.”

Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice

Economist – Lexington: Our columnist bids farewell 9/7

  • “After five years, which included reporting trips to 46 states, this Lexington offers some parting thoughts on American politics.”

Economist – How to provide a protein-rich diet to a growing population 8/31

  • “What goes onto people’s plates matters. So does what gets fed to animals.”

Markets / Economy

WSJ – Daily Shot: Goldman Sachs – Ownership of US equity market since 1945 9/7

NYT – Milestone for BMI: More Than $1 Billion in Music Royalties – Ben Sisario 9/7

  • “The organization, whose hundreds of thousands of members include stars like Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and Sting, announced on Thursday that it had $1.13 billion in revenue and distributed $1.02 billion in royalties during its most recent fiscal year, which ended in June. BMI and other performing rights organizations, like its rival Ascap, collect money whenever songs are played on the radio, streamed online or piped into a restaurant.”

Real Estate

Bloomberg Quint – India Trumps Hong Kong as No. 1 for Home-Price Gains in Asia – Pooja Thakur 9/6

  • But when you look at the last 5 years…

Finance

WSJ – Daily Shot: Global High-Yield (HY) Corporate Bond Issuance 9/7

Bloomberg – Bennett Goodman Builds $95 Billion Credit Machine – Nabila Ahmed, Sridhar Natarajan, and David Carey 9/5

China

WSJ – China’s Bad Banks Show It Still Has a Big Bad Loan Problem – Anjani Trivedi 9/7

  • “There are Chinese banks and then there are China’s bad banks. To understand just how worrying the country’s bad-loan problem has become, it’s worth taking a look at the latter.”
  • “China Cinda Asset Management , the second-largest of four asset managers set up in the 1990s to clean up China’s then already large pile of souring loans, is still at it two decades on, managing and restructuring distressed assets offloaded by banks. The company’s latest results offer a lens into the rapidly deteriorating asset quality in China, that’s at odds with the relatively rosy picture of China painted for investors by its near-7% growth and corporate profits that have surged to multiyear highs.”
  • “The current pace at which Cinda is acquiring distressed assets is far outpacing the rate at which it can dispose of these assets. That has pushed down the price at which it can sell bad-loan portfolios to close to 20 cents on the dollar from 30 cents this time last year. Its income from disposing bad assets dropped 64% on the year, with returns on restructured assets falling to 8.7%in the first half from 10.6% a year ago. Losses from impairments on its assets more than doubled in the first half, driven by a more-than 10-fold increase in provisions.”
  • “These trends suggest China’s bad-loan problem is rather more severe than investors would guess from looking at the big banks’ results: The likes of ICBC and Bank of China actually reported improving nonperforming loan ratios in the first half. One reason they were able to do so is that they have been offloading bad assets to the likes of Cinda, which picks up around 60% of its distressed assets from the big banks.”

Japan

Bloomberg – Japanese Companies Cut Bonuses, Pushing Overall Wages Lower – Yuko Takeo and Yoshiaki Nohara 9/5

Russia

FT – Russia seeks to close Ukraine’s window to the west – Jeffery Mankoff and Jonathan Hillman 9/6

  • “Last month, Russia completed a railway that bypasses Ukraine. The project was entrusted to a special military unit and completed a year ahead of schedule, underscoring its importance to the Kremlin. It is the latest of several Russian-led infrastructure projects that, coupled with the devastation wrought by the conflict with Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region, risk turning Ukraine, historically a bridge between east and west, into an island.”
  • “Isolation from emerging east-west connectivity could be one of the most enduring and most damaging consequences of the war for Ukraine, one that both Kiev and its western partners need to pay more attention to overcoming.”
  • “A UN assessment in November 2014 found that 53 bridges, 45 road sections, and 190 railway facilities had been damaged. Altogether, infrastructure losses were estimated at $440m, and while some repairs have been carried out, funding constraints and security challenges have limited reconstruction.”
  • “For both sides in the conflict, altering patterns of trade and transit is a means of shaping Ukraine’s political and economic destiny. While military forces have destroyed critical infrastructure such as bridges and railways, the governments in both Kiev and Moscow are building new connections that will re-orientate trade flows.”

South America

WSJ – Daily Shot: Brazilian CPI YoY Change 9/7

  • “Brazil’s CPI was lower than expected, which solidified the expectations for another rate cut.”