REAL ESTATE
US home sales decline
Sales of new US homes edged lower last month after a strong rise the prior month, according to US Department of Commerce data released on Tuesday. New sales for single-family homes hit a seasonally-adjusted 464,000 last month, down 2.1 percent from the revised October count of 474,000, the data showed. Last month’s sales rose 16.6 percent compared with a year ago. The median sales price of new houses for last month was US$270,900, while the average price was US$340,300, a record.
SPAIN
King expresses sympathy
King Juan Carlos has used his annual Christmas address to the nation to express sympathy for millions of Spaniards who have lost their jobs amid the nation’s economic crisis and have little relief in sight. The 75-year-old monarch said on Tuesday night that a big effort is needed to jump-start the economy because “we cannot accept as normal the anguish of the millions of Spaniards who do not have work.” The nation has an unemployment rate of 26 percent, and joblessness is more than twice that for Spaniards under age 25.
OIL
BP injury argument rejected
A federal judge has rejected BP’s argument that a multibillion-dollar settlement over the company’s massive 2010 Gulf oil spill should not compensate businesses if they cannot directly trace their losses to the spill. US District Judge Carl Barbier said in a ruling on Tuesday that the settlement was designed to avoid the delays that would result from a “claim-by-claim analysis” of whether each claim can be traced to the spill.
TECHNOLOGY
BlackBerry founder divests
BlackBerry co-founder Michael Lazaridis has trimmed his stake in the troubled smartphone pioneer to just below 5 percent after selling 3.5 million shares. The sales disclosed in a Tuesday regulatory filing came after BlackBerry Ltd announced a third-quarter loss of US$4.4 billion last week. The setback marked the latest sign of the company’s deepening distress as BlackBerry’s products fall further behind the iPhone and devices running on Android software.Lazaridis previously owned a 5.7 percent stake in the Waterloo, Ontario, company that he once ran.
INTERNET
Twitter shares surge
Twitter Inc, the microblogging service that held its initial public offering last month, rose to a record for a third trading day amid optimism that the company has room to expand sales in digital advertising. Twitter jumped 8.4 percent to US$69.96 at the close in New York after rising 7.5 percent on Tuesday. The stock has surged 169 percent since going public at US$26 on Nov. 6, giving Twitter a market value of almost US$40 billion. — larger than Time Warner Cable Inc, media company Viacom Inc and retailer Target Corp.
BRAZIL
Tax to be eliminated
The government is eliminating a four-year-old tax on the issuance of depositary receipts in international markets, Interim Deputy Finance Minister Dyogo Oliveira said on Tuesday.
The 1.5 percent tax on the conversion of local shares into depositary receipts dates from November 2009. It was an attempt to balance out a levy on foreign investments in local stocks that has since been abolished, Oliveira said.
To many, Tatu City on the outskirts of Nairobi looks like a success. The first city entirely built by a private company to be operational in east Africa, with about 25,000 people living and working there, it accounts for about two-thirds of all foreign investment in Kenya. Its low-tax status has attracted more than 100 businesses including Heineken, coffee brand Dormans, and the biggest call-center and cold-chain transport firms in the region. However, to some local politicians, Tatu City has looked more like a target for extortion. A parade of governors have demanded land worth millions of dollars in exchange
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) revenue jumped 48 percent last month, underscoring how electronics firms scrambled to acquire essential components before global tariffs took effect. The main chipmaker for Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp reported monthly sales of NT$349.6 billion (US$11.6 billion). That compares with the average analysts’ estimate for a 38 percent rise in second-quarter revenue. US President Donald Trump’s trade war is prompting economists to retool GDP forecasts worldwide, casting doubt over the outlook for everything from iPhone demand to computing and datacenter construction. However, TSMC — a barometer for global tech spending given its central role in the
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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