The High-Stakes Talks Behind New World's Mega Loan Deal
Over the following months, the real estate giant was locked in high-stakes, monthslong negotiations over a record $11 billion refinancing. Read the story of how New World fought to avoid an imminent crisis — one that could have dwarfed the failure of China Evergrande Group, considering the relative size of Hong Kong's economy. Nobody wanted to be the banker who tipped the financial center's fragile property market into crisis.
In another sign of how the multi-year property crisis in China has increasingly pressured Hong Kong developers, real-estate firm Emperor's shares fell the most this year Monday before paring some losses, after it reported overdue bank loans and said it's talking to banks on a restructuring plan. Property prices in the city have dropped around 30% over the past four years, and are now around a nine-year low, as banks tighten credit lines.
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an hour ago
- Yahoo
Trump's Decision to Fire BLS Chief Echoes Putin's Strategies
U.S. President Donald Trump shake hands with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, on July 16, 2018. Credit - Brendan Smialowski—Getty Images President Donald Trump's firing of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday afternoon just after she delivered a negative jobs report echoes the impulse of many leaders to shoot the messenger. Trump declared, 'I've had issues with the numbers for a long time. We're doing so well. I believe the numbers were phony like they were before the election and there were other times. So I fired her, and I did the right thing.' While Trump may or may not be friends with Vladimir Putin, he is clearly following the Russian President's HR staffing guidelines to eliminate lieutenants who bring bad news. As we've documented before, the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) has a long history of manipulating official economic statistics to please Putin, 'bending over backward to correct bad numbers and burying unflattering statistics' under the pressure the Kremlin has exerted to corrupt statistical integrity, especially since Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The reliability of official statistics from China has also been brought into question, leading analysts to rely on a wide range of unofficial or proxy indicators to gauge the true state of the Chinese economy. Even China's former Premier, the late Li Keqiang, reportedly confided that he didn't trust official GDP numbers. Read More: What to Know About the Jobs Report That Led Trump to Fire the Labor Statistics Chief Like other strongmen, Trump has repeatedly shown a pattern of manipulating data to suit his preferred narrative. Trump's surprise firing of BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer has quickly caught the attention of technical market analysts and economists on both sides of the political spectrum. One side cheers the push to disrupt a slow, bureaucratic federal agency. The other side shouts in dismay over concerns about yet another example of Trump politicizing an apolitical institution. Both responses are warranted. The accuracy of BLS data has long been questioned as major revisions only come in months later. To their credit, the BLS, in addition to other statistical agencies, has publicly recognized a need to modernize its methodology. Unfortunately, though, the severity of job revisions has worsened since the COVID-19 era, with no successful program to address the issue. The downward revision on Friday of more than 250,000 jobs marked the most significant adjustment since the depths of the pandemic. However, Trump's accusations against the BLS of rigging the job numbers to make him and the Republican base look bad, and his subsequent firing of McEntarfer based on a belief that BLS revisions were politically motivated, are yet another step closer to authoritarianism. Introducing his latest conspiracy theory, the President went even further by suggesting McEntarfer, whose career spans two decades across Republican and Democratic Administrations, rigged the numbers 'around the 2024 presidential election' in then-Vice President Kamala Harris' favor. Trump conveniently fails to mention that his definition of 'around' was back in August 2024. Recall, the 2024 presidential election was a full three months later in November. Revisions are not unusual behavior by the BLS. They are a critical part of the natural process for developing an accurate picture of the largest, most dynamic economy in the world. The average size of job revisions since 2003 is not insignificant at 51,000 jobs. And, despite what Trump may want Americans to believe, his tariff policies have created an unprecedented level of uncertainty in the U.S. economy, comparable only to that of 2020, with many economists expecting a recession to follow as a result. Bloomberg reporting has pointed to a possible connection between the severity of negative job revisions and recessionary economic environments. The BLS has also been subjected to DOGE-led hiring constraints and other resource rescissions. In addition, the Trump Administration's disbanding of the Federal Statistics Advisory Committee in March both eliminated one of the main engines for enhancing agency performance and, perhaps, in what should have been a concerning harbinger, abolished the canary in the data integrity coal mine. Complaints about BLS methods are legitimate, like the reliance on enumerators over scanner data, and deserve attention, but this is not how to fix it. Read More: What Trump's Win Means for the Economy This is far from the first time Trump has subordinated statistical integrity to political theater. From crowd sizes to weather forecasts, vote counts to tariff formulas, Trump has discarded facts for fictions that play to his political favor. Trump doesn't just bend the truth—he twists the numbers until they resemble propaganda and then silences those who disagree. As CBS News titan Edward R. Murrow warned 65 years ago: 'To be persuasive, we must be believable. To be believable, we must be credible. To be credible, we must be truthful.' Contact us at letters@
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
He Walked Away From 10 Booming Properties At The Peak Of The Market. 'People Tell Me I'm An Idiot,' Says The Real Estate Investor
Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below. Seth Jones spent nearly a decade building a 10-property real estate portfolio across Florida and South Carolina. He sold every one of them. The Rule Guided His Investments—And His Exit Jones, a former mortgage broker in Port Orange, Florida, followed a simple but strict rule: if a property couldn't rent for at least 1% of its purchase price each month, it wasn't worth buying. "It's very simple, back-of-the-napkin math," Jones, 36, told Business Insider. "On a $100,000 property, am I able to rent it out for $1,000 per month? On a $200,000 property, am I able to rent it out for $2,000 per month?" Shop Top Mortgage Rates A quicker path to financial freedom Your Path to Homeownership Personalized rates in minutes Don't Miss: 'Scrolling To UBI' — Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. Accredited Investors: Grab Pre-IPO Shares of the AI Company Powering Hasbro, Sephora & MGM— He and his wife lived extremely frugally, relying solely on her teacher's salary while using all of his income to save for properties. "We hardly ever ate out and never went to bars," Jones said. After starting with two small homes in 2014, he gradually expanded. By 2019, he owned higher-quality properties in strong school districts, including one out-of-state investment in Lexington, South Carolina, purchased for $138,000. But as the COVID-era housing boom began, Jones started to feel uneasy. "I watched things take off," he told Business Insider. "The fundamentals started to change." He noticed the industry shift away from cash flow toward speculation and appreciation. That didn't sit right with him. "That's just never how I've looked at underwriting deals," he said. Trending: $100k+ in investable assets? – no cost, no obligation. From Landlord To ETF Investor Between 2019 and 2023, Jones sold all 10 properties. One of them, purchased for $190,000, sold for $500,000. Instead of buying more real estate, he moved everything into a diversified exchange-traded-fund portfolio that includes stocks, gold, and both short- and long-term treasuries. "I have no regrets," Jones said. "I think I'll be vindicated once we have some type of correction." Not everyone agrees with his decision. "I have people who tell me I'm an idiot for selling off my properties," he told Business Insider. "They think they could've made 10 times what I did." Even so, Jones said the relief has been worth it. 'From a liability perspective, I have no external worries. No one's going to get hurt. I'm not dealing with late-night phone calls.' He added that while there is still stress in stock investing, life is 'way simpler' now. , The 1% Rule Still Has Value The 1% rule isn't perfect, but it's a common starting point for real estate investors. If monthly rent meets or exceeds 1% of a property's purchase plus rehab cost, it's often seen as having the potential for positive cash flow. For example, if a home costs $170,000 total, an investor should be able to rent it for at least $1,700 per month to meet the rule. While easy to calculate, it doesn't account for factors like mortgage rates, homeowners association fees, or maintenance costs. Other methods, like the 2% rule or the 50% rule, which reserves half of rental income for expenses, offer different perspectives. But for Jones, the 1% rule offered the clarity and discipline he needed to make confident decisions. Read Next: With Point, you can This article He Walked Away From 10 Booming Properties At The Peak Of The Market. 'People Tell Me I'm An Idiot,' Says The Real Estate Investor originally appeared on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Pharma interest can plug NIH funding gap: Illumina CEO
Genetic sequencing company Illumina (ILMN) has had a rough few years. It has battled activist investors, faced off with the Federal Trade Commission, and, most recently, agreed to a $9.8 million settlement with the Department of Justice over a cybersecurity breach. To add to the pile: sanctions in China and the Trump administration cutting National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, which the company relies heavily on for clinical research. The numbers don't lie. The stock is down more than 21% in the past year and sank more than 11% in after-hours trading Thursday after the company reported an earnings miss for the second quarter. The company reported $1.06 billion in revenues compared to expected revenues of $1.05 billion. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $1.19 compared to estimates of $1.01. But CEO Jacob Thaysen told Yahoo Finance he remains positive about the company's near-term growth. Why? Because, in part, pharmaceutical companies can provide a new market. "Now, we're shifting from small things to really big programs. Some of the things making up for the reduction from the NIH is kind of indirect, but pharma is getting more interest in these big programs," he said, noting that 15% of the company is exposed to government research funding. "It's not only about sequencing itself, but really using massive amounts of data ... to really identify new drug targets and understand a disease," Thaysen said. The idea to use patient data to help the pharmaceutical world was also identified by 23andMe, which recently came out of bankruptcy through a nonprofit led by founder Anne Wojcicki. Thaysen said that unlike 23andMe, which he has worked with, his company is not going to pursue drug development on its own. "We have a lot of pharma companies that are very excited to work with us," he said. In addition to genetic testing of patient samples, the company is looking at growing in the preventative side of care with cancer screenings. The oncology business, Thaysen said, will have healthy growth over the next 10 or so years. China China banned importations of the San Diego-based company's sequencing machines earlier this year as part of its retaliatory actions to Trump's tariff war. Thaysen said he is working with regulators to try to reverse that, but "in the meantime, that business is declining, and we are expecting it to be flat." In fact, though China has historically been about 10% of the company's business, it contributed to half of the decline in earnings this past week. "China was never a huge part of Illumina's business. When it was the largest, it was just around 10%. We're down to 5% of the business," Thaysen told Yahoo Finance. But because of the tariff war and China's goals to boost its domestic innovation market, Illumina has faced a setback in its market power there from local competition. "As soon as there is a Chinese alternative that is good enough, then you will see that the Chinese government is pushing for the Chinese population, the Chinese companies to use that technology," Thaysen said. He added that even with the increased competition, China is an appealing market to remain in. Analysts are still waiting to see more progress on Illumina's return to growth. Jefferies analyst Tycho Peterson said in a note to clients that the firm will reiterate its Hold rating until things settle: "While the clinical traction is encouraging, we view clarity on near-term headwinds (A&G, China, Roche) and a path to sustainable HSD growth as key to a more constructive view. Reiterate Hold." Anjalee Khemlani is the senior health reporter at Yahoo Finance, covering all things pharma, insurance, provider services, digital health, PBMs, and health policy and politics. That includes GLP-1s, of course. Follow Anjalee as AnjKhem on social media platforms X, LinkedIn, and Bluesky @AnjKhem. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
