According to The Real Deal, "The 44-story tower was built in 1990 as the headquarters of German publisher Bertelsmann. In 2006, Vornado Realty Trust bought the retail space for $260 million. A year later, Harry Macklowe paid the Blackstone Group $830 million for the office portion of the property. Macklowe lost the property to his lender, Deutsche Bank, which sold it to CBRE Global Investors."

... In 2010, a 49 percent stake in the property was purchased by HSBC, in a deal that valued the office space at $520 million. Then in 2011 the remaining 51 percent was acquired in a deal valuing it at $660 million, respectively. Adobe Systems, Viacom, Verizon, Pillsbury Winthrop and Duane Morris are among the tenants of the building.

We expect the results will not be great. The commercial market is definitely on the rocks, and an office tower just a flew blocks north of Times Square -- recently financed -- is already distressed (reported a few months ago).

"Almost all my friends born since the 1980s and 1990s are racing to buy homes, while those who already have one are planning to buy a second," Mai, 33, said. "Very few can be at ease when seeing rents and home prices rise so strongly, and they will continue to rise in a scary way."

...

The rush of millions young middle-class Chinese like Mai into the property market has created a hysteria that eerily resembles the housing crisis that struck the United States a decade ago. Thanks to the easy credit that has spurred the housing boom, many young Chinese have abandoned the frugal traditions of earlier generations and now lead a lifestyle beyond their financial means.

...

"It's an incomplete sentence ," Hussman wrote in a recent blog post. "Unfortunately, the convenience of investing-by-slogan, rather than carefully thinking about finance and examining evidence, is currently leading investors into what is likely to be one of the worst disasters in the history of the U.S. stock market."

Hussman calculates that stock valuations are stretched 175% above their historic norms, and predicts the S&P 500 will see negative total returns over the next 10 to 12 years. Along the way, the benchmark index will experience an interim loss of more than 60%, he estimates.''

The difference? Puerto Rico is effectively a colony of the United States. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) happens to help a lot of millionaires.

For that reason, the NFIP has historically been a rare spot of cross-aisle agreement, with loyalties divided more along geographic lines than partisan ones. Because homeowners living in floodplains are required to purchase flood insurance, the politicians who represent coastal constituencies tend to favor keeping rates low in order to keep them happy.

One of the U.S. proposals unveiled this week would require that 50 percent of the value of all NAFTA-produced cars, trucks and large engines come from the United States, people briefed on the negotiations said.

The same proposal calls for a sharp increase in NAFTA's regional automotive content requirement, boosting it to 85 percent from the current 62.5 percent. The existing level is already the highest local content requirement of any trading bloc in the world. [L2N1MO0U5]

Meanwhile, the Trump administration's call for a so-called NAFTA sunset clause would effectively trigger a renegotiation of the pact every five years.

...

One of Lighthizer's predecessors, Robert Zoellick, said he thought there was a 50-50 chance Trump would quit NAFTA. "He's trying to go back to make trade agreements fix the bilateral trade deficit. I don't believe he can be successful in doing that," Zoellick, now non-executive chairman of AllianceBernstein, told a banking conference in Washington on Saturday.''

...

The bank is one of the last firms not to have settled with regulators and the Justice Department over its handling of home loans in the run up to the housing crisis. It said in August that it was increasing its estimate for what it deemed "reasonably possible" legal charges beyond reserves in part because of "existing mortgage-related regulatory investigations."

...

Wells Fargo also had trouble in its underlying businesses. Revenue in the third-largest U.S. bank's community banking division, the home for all the lending it does to America's consumers, fell to $12.1 billion, the lowest since the quarter after news broke about the fake accounts. Net income in the unit, which generates the majority of Wells Fargo's profit, plunged 31 percent to $2.23 billion.

...

The government may be hell-bent on reducing the number of low-skill migrants but it isn't telling us how it plans to deal with the consequences. People might not complain too much when they can't get salad on a hot day but when their hospital is full and they can't get help for their elderly relatives they will blame the government.

...

There are early signs that this policy of devaluation is already being put into place. The yuan has dropped sharply in the past month from 6.45 to 6.62. This resembles the stealth devaluation of late 2015, but is somewhat more aggressive... Once the National Party Congress is over in late October, President Xi will have secured his political ambitions and will no longer find it necessary to avoid rocking the boat.

...

Both Trump and Xi are readying a "gloves off" approach to a trade war and renewed currency war. A maxi-devaluation of the yuan is Xi's most potent weapon.

Finally, China's internal contradictions are catching up with it. China has to confront an insolvent banking system, a real estate bubble, and a $1 trillion wealth management product Ponzi scheme that is starting to fall apart.

A much weaker yuan would give China some policy space in terms of using its reserves to paper over some of these problems. Less dramatic devaluations of the yuan led to U.S. stock market crashes. What does a new maxi-devaluation portend for U.S. stocks?

... Trump's move to decertify could end up the way his push for health-care reform did--with a whole lot of posturing and debate and false starts in Congress, and little to show for it. It could amount to Trump head-faking to a campaign promise and making a political statement about the folly of his predecessor without actually undoing that predecessor's policy.

... The gambit could also backfire in the opposite direction--by blowing up the Iran deal even if that's not what Trump wants. The elaborate decertification plan "suggests an elegance of plotting that the administration has given little evidence of possessing," Kori Schake writes in The Atlantic. "Congress is unlikely to trust the president enough to make a brave choice--which remaining in the agreement after the president decertifies it would be--they suspect he would then publicly castigate them for."

...

[As the article says:] "Aided by an 8% drop in the U.S. currency, the dollar-denominated capitalization of worldwide shares appreciated in 2017 by an amount -- $20 trillion -- that is comparable to the total value of all equities nine years ago. And yet skeptics still abound, pointing to stretched valuations or policy uncertainty from Washington to Brussels. "

$20 trillion. That's a lot of dough. It's what all equities in the world combined were ‘worth' 9 years ago. It's also, oh irony, awfully close to the total increase in central bank balance sheets, through QE etc. Might the two be related in any way?''

...

The cycle begins with small-time investors such as Schild, who's bought more than 30 waterlogged houses for an average $175,000 apiece. Then Wall Street swoops in. Gary Beasley, former chief executive officer of Waypoint Homes, also sees an opportunity. He's pitching private equity firms and pension funds on the potential profit in buying flooded homes, repairing them, and renting them back to homeowners.

Bain Capital LP and billionaire Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com Inc., are backing Beasley's two-year-old company, Roofstock Inc. It runs a website where investors can buy and sell single-family rental properties. Beasley thinks owner-occupants may be interested in selling there, too, and that flooded neighborhoods are the Next Big Thing. "It's much like the housing crisis, when the institutional guys came in to buy homes nobody wanted," he says. Like other investors, Beasley and Schild view themselves as helping homeowners to move on and Houston to rebuild.

The most far-reaching element of the order instructs a trio of Cabinet departments to rewrite federal rules for "association health plans" -- a form of insurance in which small businesses of a similar type band together through an association to negotiate health benefits. These plans have had to meet coverage requirements and consumer protections under the 2010 health-care law, but the administration is likely to exempt them from those rules and let such plans be sold from state to state without insurance licenses in each one.

Among those in the plan's crosshairs is a long-standing provision that lets you deduct from your reported income the money you pay in state and local taxes on income, real estate or sales of big-ticket items.

...

Proponents of the deduction have long argued that, without it, taxpayers would be hit twice for each dollar of income, by their state and by the U.S. Treasury. Opponents argue that the deduction benefits the richest taxpayers at the expense of those with lower incomes, or who don't own a home or make large purchases that carry a big sales tax.

...

The growth of e-commerce has hit retailers hard. In Elmira, N.Y., the local mall is struggling to find new tenants and attract shoppers. But in weaker markets where vacancies are higher, it is more difficult for landlords to find complementary retailers, and churches are becoming palatable options.

...

According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of August 2017 data from the Directory of Major Malls that tracks about 8,200 retail centers in the country, at least 111 malls and open-air centers have a church in them. Some have two or more.

...

Churches usually weren't in the mix. Shopping center owners prefer tenants that draw foot traffic on a daily basis and often consider churches to be second-tier tenants because they aren't typically open all week. What's more, if rents aren't paid, landlords might find it harder to evict a church than another tenant.