Saturday, May 23, 2015

Today's Headlines

Bloomberg: 
  • Greece Won't Accept Unreasonable Creditor Demands, Tsipras Says. Greek economy can't take more recessionary measures, govt won't agree on deal that doesn't solve country's problems, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras says in speech in Athens on Saturday. Greek govt accepts that social security system needs overhaul, this can't be done through pension cuts. 
  • Tsipras Urges European Creditors to Compromise on Greek Deal. Greek society can’t absorb more austerity, and the country’s creditors must compromise to break the impasse over the release of funds for its cash-strapped economy, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said. Tsipras sought to placate critics within his Syriza party after returning from a European Union summit in Riga, Latvia, where talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande failed to yield a breakthrough on measures to unlock bailout funding. Some members of his party advocate defaulting on loans rather than backing down from the anti-austerity policies that swept it to power in January even if that leads the country out of the euro. “We’ve shown willingness to compromise to get to a mutually beneficial solution,” Tsipras said in a speech at the start of a two-day meeting of Syriza’s central committee on Saturday. “But we ask from our partners the same respect and to also make concessions.”
  • Central Bank Less-Is-More Strategy Doubted as ECB Role Debated. The time has come for central bankers to think about widening their focus, economists told monetary-policy makers gathering on the western edge of the euro area. For more than two decades, the dominant reasoning has been that by concentrating mostly, or even exclusively, on keeping inflation in check, central banks can create the conditions for sustainable growth and lower unemployment. Since the financial crisis, the advantages of aiming just at price stability may be waning, and leading economists are calling for a rethink. “The pendulum has swung much too far. While monetary policies are surely not determinative of output outcomes, they can, and in some cases had, have major effects on average levels of output over periods of decades,” Larry Summers, former chief economic adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama, said on Friday. “The failure to well integrate monetary policy-making with other areas of policy has had substantial pernicious effects.”
  • Coal’s Worst Fear Affirmed in Analysis of Obama Climate Plan. A new government analysis of President Barack Obama’s signature effort to fight climate change affirms what critics suspected: the proposal could further weaken an already battered coal industry. Electricity generation from the carbon-intensive fossil fuel would fall by 90 gigawatts, more than twice the decline government analysts had predicted as recently as April, according to a report released Friday by the Energy Information Administration. There were about 292 gigawatts of coal-fired generation capacity in 2014, according to EIA. 
  • GM Ignition Probe Said Advancing as U.S. Mulls Criminal Charges. The U.S. government is determining whether charges will be brought against General Motors Co. or its employees over the handling of a faulty ignition switch, a person familiar with the investigation said. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s office, with assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York, is reviewing evidence tied to the safety defect that was linked to more than 100 deaths, and attempting to determine whether anyone at the automaker broke the law, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public.
  • Square Joins Tech Firms Subleasing San Francisco Offices. San Francisco, where the technology industry has dominated office demand and sent rents soaring, leads the U.S. in sublease space as a percentage of total vacancies, according to Cushman & Wakefield Inc. The share jumped to 13.5 percent in the first quarter, the highest since the financial crisis, from 9 percent a year ago. While the city’s commercial real estate market is among the nation’s strongest, subletting can be an indicator of companies getting too ambitious about their growth prospects. An increase in subleases can be seen as an early warning sign for the real estate market that companies are retrenching. A bubble has formed in San Francisco that has made price gains unsustainable, said Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of brokerage Redfin Corp. “There’s a bubble,” Kelman said in an interview Friday on Bloomberg Television. “There are prices that are too high on companies. There are prices that are too high on real estate. As interest rates go up, you’re going to see a contraction.” Prices for both commercial and residential real estate in San Francisco have climbed so far that companies are evaluating locations in other cities to lower costs, Kelman said.
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