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Among the losers in the housing debacle is Pacific Investment Management Co., the world’s biggest bond fund firm. Pimco said in a June 30 investment report that its holdings in Mexican homebuilders were partly to blame for a 6.6 percent loss in the second quarter of 2013 in its $1.6 billion Pimco Emerging Markets Corporate Bond Fund. (PEMIX) It was the fund’s worst quarter ever.
In addition to Pimco, losers in Mexican-housing stocks, bonds, loans and derivatives contracts included London-based Barclays Plc (BARC), BlackRock Inc.’s funds, New York-based Citigroup Inc., Zurich-based Credit Suisse Group AG and Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG. None of the firms will disclose the impact on their portfolios of their Mexican-housing investments.
“It went from a compelling business thesis to one that got bigger and bigger and borrowed more, and then the music just stopped,” says William Perry, a portfolio manager at Stone Harbor Investment Partners LP, which oversees $55 billion in emerging-markets debt and which finished selling its Mexican homebuilder bonds in May.
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Deutsche Bank says Urbi didn’t make a $3 million payment on a $55 million loan and also failed to pay $1.55 million in interest on two loans.
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Don't you just feel for those poor duped investment companies?
8 comments:
Mexico just passed a new tax on mining companies. As if the mining industry was not already suffering enough with falling resource prices, this is going to push a few more over the edge into BK.
I guess I should try to be a little bit more on topic. regarding housing in Mexico, I have second-hand experience through family and friends with owning property in Mexico - and my takeaway is that Mexico does not have a functional property rights system - unless you count squatter's rights as a property rights system.
ATF Ruins the Lives of Disabled Teenagers to Solve a Problem the Bureau Created
Aaron Key wasn't sure he wanted a tattoo on his neck. Especially one of a giant squid smoking a joint.
But the guys running Squid's Smoke Shop in Portland, Ore., convinced him: It would be a perfect way to promote their store.
They would even pay him and a friend $150 apiece if they agreed to turn their bodies into walking billboards.
Key, who is mentally disabled, was swayed.
He and his friend, Marquis Glover, liked Squid's. It was their hangout. The 19-year-olds spent many afternoons there playing Xbox and chatting with the owner, "Squid," and the store clerks.
So they took the money and got the ink etched on their necks, tentacles creeping down to their collarbones.
It would be months before the young men learned the whole thing was a setup. The guys running Squid's were actually undercover ATF agents conducting a sting to get guns away from criminals and drugs off the street.
The tattoos had been sponsored by the U.S. government; advertisements for a fake storefront.
The teens found out as they were arrested and booked into jail.
D'fuq?
WARREN BUFFETT: George W. Bush Made The Greatest Economic Statement Of All Time
George Bush said, “If money doesn’t loosen up, this sucker will go down” – [Buffett thought] this was the greatest economic statement of all time.
Coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth in Antarctica: -94.7C (-135.8F)
Most of the time researchers need to breathe through a snorkel that brings air into the coat through a sleeve and warms it up "so you don't inhale by accident" the cold air, Scambos said.
Everyone Is a Criminal: On the Over-policing of America
If all you’ve got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. And if police and prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone will be treated as criminal. This is increasingly the American way of life, a path that involves “solving” social problems (and even some non-problems) by throwing cops at them, with generally disastrous results. Wall-to-wall criminal law encroaches ever more on everyday life as police power is applied in ways that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago.
It starts in our schools, where discipline is increasingly outsourced to police personnel. What not long ago would have been seen as normal childhood misbehavior—doodling on a desk, farting in class, a kindergartener’s tantrum—can leave a kid in handcuffs, removed from school, or even booked at the local precinct. Such “criminals” can be as young as seven-year-old Wilson Reyes, a New Yorker who was handcuffed and interrogated under suspicion of stealing five dollars from a classmate. (Turned out he didn’t do it.)
Even as simple a matter as getting yourself from point A to point B can quickly become a law enforcement matter as travel and public space are ever more aggressively policed. Waiting for a bus? Such loitering just got three Rochester youths arrested. Driving without a seat belt can easily escalate into an arrest, even if the driver is a state judge. (Notably, all four of these men were black.) If the police think you might be carrying drugs, warrantless body cavity searches at the nearest hospital may be in the offing—you will be sent the bill later.
Office and retail work might seem like an unpromising growth area for police and prosecutors, but criminal law has found its way into the white-collar workplace, too. Just ask...Judy Wilkinson, hauled away in handcuffs by an undercover cop for serving mimosas without a license to the customers in her bridal shop.
The past decade has also seen immigration policy ingested by criminal law....This novel application of police and prosecutors has broken up families and fueled the expansion of for-profit detention centers, even as it has failed to show any stronger deterrent effect on immigration than the civil law system that preceded it.
As for the Internet, for a time it was terra nova and so relatively free of a steroidal law enforcement presence. Not anymore. The late Aaron Swartz, a young Internet genius and activist affiliated with Harvard University, was caught downloading masses of scholarly articles (all publicly subsidized) from an open network on the MIT campus. Swartz was federally prosecuted under the capacious Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for violating a “terms and services agreement”—a transgression that anyone who has ever disabled a cookie on his or her laptop has also, technically, committed.
Sex is another zone of police overkill in our post-Puritan land. Getting put on a sex offender registry is alarmingly easy—as has been done to children as young as 11 for “playing doctor”...
Why Millennials Are Headed To The Suburbs
Green activists hope this parting of the ways between the new generation and the preferences of their parents will prove permanent. The environmental magazine Grist even envisions “a hero generation” that will escape the material trap of suburban living and work that engulfed their parents.
Less idealistic types, notably on Wall Street, see profit in this new order, hoping to capitalize on what Morgan Stanley’s Oliver Chang dubs a “rentership society”; in this scenario millennials remain serfs paying rent permanently to the investor class.
MSNBC’s Alternative Universe
“Biased” doesn’t cut it. To watch MSNBC for an afternoon is not so much to be given a slanted account of what is happening here in America, but instead to witness a series of discussions about current events in parallel America II — a rather silly place in which the political center of gravity and all things Good are defined by the preferences of the faculty at Berkeley and the comments section of the Daily Kos and in which anyone who dissents from this position is believed to possess two heads, a black heart, and a pocket copy of Mein Kampf.
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