.... the past decade. Wall Street lost trillions, lost 11% of your money. Adjusted for inflation, Wall Street lost 20% of your money.
WIESBADEN – As reported by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) on the basis of provisional data, 75.0% (EUR 746.6 billion) of all goods exported from Germany in 2008 (to the value of EUR 994.9 billion) went to European countries.
The second largest sales market for German goods was Asia with a share of 11.8% (EUR 117.2 billion), followed by America with a share of 10.2% (EUR 102.0 billion).
Only 2.0% (EUR 19.7 billion) of all German exports were sold to Africa and 0.8% (EUR 7.6 billion) to Australia and Oceania.
H/T TGTGT"Europe is emerging phoenix-like from the ashes as confidence in its banks boosts overall confidence in European equities," said Gary Baker, head of European equity strategy at BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research.:-) !
Sun Hung Kai Properties Ltd. (0016.HK) said Monday it sold 900 flats over the weekend at Yoho Midtown, a residential project in New Territories West, for HK$4.2 billion (US$541 million).
The company sold the units at the project in Yuen Long for an average of HK$5,400 per square foot, project director Amy Teo said.
About 40 units were immediately advertised for sale on the secondary market at a premium of up to 20%, the South China Morning Post newspaper reported Monday, citing property agents.
Yoho Midtown is Hong Kong's biggest housing project to go on sale so far this year. It has eight towers containing 1,890 units ranging in size from 400 to 1,400 square feet
Frenzied developers with access to cheap money are creating a glut of premium office space and luxury apartments, priced at about 80 times the average income of the city's residents.
Prospective middle-class homeowners, in panic-buying mode, are snapping up two properties at once, hoping to flip the second one to finance the first. Civic officials are encouraging the building boom.
The sale of vacant lots bolster their municipal coffersThe disturbing phenomenon extends beyond Beijing, where housing prices are far higher than in Dubai's overbuilt property market before that red-hot Persian Gulf economy imploded last year. In December alone, Chinese housing prices rose almost 8 per cent in 70 major Chinese cities, while housing starts leapt by 34 per cent nationwide.
The township of Huaxi in the Yangtze River Delta is a proud symbol of how Chinese communists embraced capitalism to lift 300 million people out of poverty during the past three decades.If the local government in Huaxi really start the "Babel Project" even the biggest "fan" must admit that Beijing has lost control over the provinces....
Its leaders took a farm community with bamboo huts and ox carts in the 1970s and transformed it into an industrial and commercial powerhouse where today many of its 30,000 residents live in mansions and most have a car. Per-capita income of 80,000 yuan ($11,700) -- almost four times the national average -- allows Huaxi to claim it’s China’s richest village.
Huaxi is also emblematic of the country’s construction and real estate boom. Communist Party officials there are building one of the world’s 30 tallest buildings, a 2.5 billion yuan, 328-meter (1,076-foot) tower(Photo Tower ). The revolving restaurant atop the so-called New Village in the Sky offers sweeping views of paddy fields, fish ponds and orchards, Bloomberg Markets reports in its April issue.
Huaxi has an even more ambitious project coming up: a 6 billion yuan, 538-meter skyscraper that would today rank as the world’s second tallest. The only loftier building is the new Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
China's banking regulator has ordered lenders to stop granting loans to investment vehicles backed by local governments, the latest move to tighten credit standards amid mounting concerns of bad loans down the road, according to a state-media report Wednesday.
Banks have also been ordered to review existing loans used to finance projects backed by local governments, the report said.
Firms run by John Paulson, Eric Mindich and George Soros purchased almost half a billion shares in Citigroup Inc. last quarter as more than 120 hedge funds said they bought stock in the bank.
Paulson & Co. reported a stake equal to 506.7 million shares in New York-based Citigroup, up from about 300 million at the end of the third quarter, according to a government filing yesterday. Mindich’s Eton Park Capital Management LP acquired 138 million shares, making the company its largest holding. Soros Fund Management LLC reported 94.7 million shares worth $313.4 million.
Citigroup stock bought by hedge funds outnumbered the amount sold by a ratio of more than 10 to 1 in the October-to- December period, with about 1.2 billion shares added on a net basis, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings compiled by Bloomberg.
The shares traded for an average of $4.10 in the quarter, 24 percent above its closing price yesterday of $3.31, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The company had 28.5 billion shares outstanding as of Dec. 31, the data show.
Taxpayers still own 7.7 billion Citigroup shares....
Citigroup has had to issue almost 23 billion new shares to bolster a weakened capital base. Investors who were shareholders prior to the financial crisis were left with about one-fifth their original stakes.Let´s hope they will still be there when Citi has to issue another round of new shares....... This would be for a change good news for the taxpayer......
H/T FT AlphavilleEuro-priced gold extended earlier gains to hit a record high 816.35 euros an ounce on Tuesday, as investors spooked by fears over the fiscal health of peripheral euro zone economies bought the metal as a haven from risk.Cannot wait for the "Bubble Talk" to heat up again..... ;-)
Collins Stewart has appointed Anthony Dwyer as managing director and chief equity strategist in the U.S., IM Weekly reports. In the newly-created position in the financial advisory firm, Dwyer will use macro-economic and fundamental, technical and historical analysis to advise the institutional clients.I assume this footage will haunt him in the future...... ;-)
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