Business

In April we pointed out that due to an already abundant supply of condos on the market, luxury real estate developer Extell Development Co couldn't sell luxury condo's at its One57 tower, in the heart of New York's premier ultra luxury destination.

Extell decided that instead of leasing luxury apartments, it would sell the units as higher end apartments in order to fill vacancies and generate cash. As a reminder, Bill Ackman paid $91.5 million for a condo in One57 in April of 2015 just "for fun" in hopes of flipping the unit at some point. 

Last week the bond market was stunned by the unprecedented demand for sovereign paper issued by the middle-eastern nation of Qatar, which announced it would issue $9 billion in Eurobonds (in three maturities), more than double what had been originally expected by the market, and well below the total demand for Qatar sovereign paper: according to Reuters, the issue was massively oversubscribed, with over $23 billion in soft orders.

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Central bankers must accept the complete and utter failure of their policies if we are to move forward.

By now it is a well-known fact that corporations have no real way of generating organic profit growth in this economy (the recent plunge in Q1 EPS was a stark reminder of just that), so they are relying on two things to boost share prices: multiple expansion (courtesy of central banks) and debt-funded buybacks (also courtesy of central banks who keep the cost of debt record low), the latter of which requires the firm to generate excess incremental cash.

Submitted by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

$50 per barrel oil is clearly less impossible to live with than $30 per barrel oil, because most businesses cannot make a profit with $30 per barrel oil. But is $50 per barrel oil helpful?

I would argue that it really is not.

When oil was over $100 per barrel, human beings in many countries were getting the benefit of most of that high oil price: