A glut of empty rooms and panic pricing are taking a serious toll on hotel and resort owners in the Phoenix area.
Foreclosure proceedings were initiated against seven financially squeezed properties, two of them brand new, in the first half of the year. That’s just one less than in all of 2008 and more than double the number in 2007, according to Ion Data, a Mesa real-estate research firm.
There are other signs of financial stress, too, including major liens filed against resorts that recently expanded or renovated, and big projects being put on hold, some midstream.
The worst part: Many experts say the foreclosure woes are likely in the early stages given the volume of big-ticket deals during the boom years, the severity of the hotel downturn in Greater Phoenix and few signs business will solidly rebound anytime soon.
"This is probably still the tip of the iceberg," said Robert Hayward, principal with the Phoenix hospitality consulting and research firm Warnick & Co.
Metro Phoenix, usually a magnet for vacationers and big meetings, continues to post some of the industry’s biggest declines in occupancy, average daily rate and other measures, with many at the lowest levels on record, according to Smith Travel Research.
Preliminary figures show June occupancy was about 45 percent, nearly 10 percentage points, or 17 percent, below June 2008, when occupancy was already hurting. Most are calling it an industry depression, rather than recession.
Richard Warnick of Warnick & Co. said he’d be surprised if nearly all hotels and resorts, here and across the country, weren’t in technical default on their loans, falling below required minimums on debt service coverage, for example, given the sad state of travel. That is often a precursor to more serious financial problems that prompt lenders to foreclose.
Nationally, the number of delinquent hotel loans has been climbing sharply since the recession deepened last fall. The delinquency rate jumped from 0.3 percent of so-called hotel commercial mortgage-backed securities loans in September to 2.8 percent in May, according to Realpoint data provided by real-estate services firm Jones Lang Lasalle.
The big questions are who is going to buy the troubled properties, when and…
Major developing story: Matt Goldstein over at Reuters may have just broken a story that could spell doom if not [for] the entire Goldman Sachs program trading group, then at least those who deal with "low latency (microseconds) event-driven market data processing, strategy, and order submissions." Visions of swirling, gray storm clouds over Goldman’s SLP and hi-fi traders begin to form.
Back-up: This week’s NYSE Program Trading report was very odd: not only because program trading hit 48.6% of all NYSE trading, a record high at least since the NYSE has kept tabs on this data, and a datapoint which in itself was startling enough to cause some serious red flags as I jaunt from village to village in what little is left of Europe’s bison country, but what was shocking was the disappearance of the #1 mainstay of complete trading domination (i.e., Goldman Sachs) from not just the aforementioned #1 spot, but the entire complete list. In other words: Goldman went from 1st to N/A in one week.
Even more odd, this "disappearance" comes hot on the heels of what Zero Hedge reported could be potentially a major change to the way the NYSE provides its weekly program trading report. Of course, Ray over at the NYSE immediately replied to Zero Hedge that all was going to be same as always … Odd, maybe he meant that all is back to normal except the reporting of Goldman’s trades. Either way, it might very well be time for proactive readers to again contact the two employees publicly disclosed by the NYSE as lead-contacts on the issue. Readers will recall that it was these same two who were previously steadfastly assuring anyone who would listen that there would be no change at all in data reporting.
Robert Airo, Senior Vice President, NYSE Euronext at (212) 656-5663 or AleksandraRadakovic, Vice President, NYSE Regulation at (212) 656-4144
Alas, the just released weekly data proves that either theirs was a material misrepresentation of facts, or Goldman simply suddenly decided to stop transacting with the NYSE, or, what would be even more sinister, Goldman notified the NYSE to scrap all their trading data from the prior week. Why would they do that?
Goint back to Matt Goldstein’s story. In a nutshell, on Friday, one Sergey Aleynikov was arrested at Newark…
Did someone try to steal Goldman Sachs’ secret sauce?
While most in the US were celebrating the 4th of July, a Russian immigrant living in New Jersey was being held on federal charges of stealing top-secret computer trading codes from a major New York-based financial institution—that sources say is none other than Goldman Sachs.
The allegations, if true, are big news because the codes the accused man, Sergey Aleynikov, tried to steal is the secret code to unlocking Goldman’s automated stocks and commodities trading businesses. Federal authorities allege the computer codes and related-trading files that Aleynikov uploaded to a German-based website help this major “financial institution” generate millions of dollars in profits each year.
The platform is one of the things that apparently gives Goldman a leg-up over the competition when it comes to rapid-fire trading of stocks and commodities. Federal authorities say the platform quickly processes rapid developments in the markets and uses top secret mathematical formulas to allow the firm to make highly-profitable automated trades.
The criminal case has the potential to shed a light on the inner workings of an important profit center for Goldman and other Wall Street firms. The federal charges also raise serious questions about the safeguards Wall Street firms deploy to protect their proprietary trading systems.
The criminal case began to unfold on the evening of July 3 when Aleynikov was arrested by FBI agents at Newark Liberty Airport, after returning from Chicago. Aleynikov had just started a job with another firm in Chicago, after leaving the big firm in NY in early June. It appears the financial institution allegedly victimized by Aleynikov had alerted federal authorities that its former employee might be up to no good.
On July 4, Aleynikov was processed on a “theft of trade secrets” charge in a criminal complaint that was filed in federal court in Manhattan. As of this afternoon, he was still being held in federal custody pending posting of bail…
The bio information for Aleynikov on LinkedIn says he joined Goldman in May 2007 and was vice president for equity strategy. The bio says he was responsible for “development of a distributed real-time co-located high-frequency trading platform.” In his own words, he goes on to describe the platform as “a very low latency (microseconds) event-driven market data processing, strategy and order submission engine.”
Major developing story: Matt Goldstein over at Reuters may have just broken a story that could spell doom for if not the entire Goldman Sachs program trading group, then at least those who deal with “low latency (microseconds) event-driven market data processing, strategy, and order submissions.” Visions of swirling, gray storm clouds over Goldman’s SLP and hi-fi traders begin to form.
Back-up: This week’s NYSE Program Trading report was very odd: not only because program trading hit 48.6% of all NYSE trading, a record high at least since the NYSE keep tabs of this data, and a data point which in itself was startling enough to cause some serious red flags as I jaunt from village to village in what little is left of Europe’s bison country, but what was shocking was the disappearance of the #1 mainstay of complete trading domination (i.e., Goldman Sachs) from not just the aforementioned #1 spot, but the entire complete list. In other words: Goldman went from 1st to N/A in one week.
Even more odd, this “disappearance” comes hot on the heels of what Zero Hedge reported could be potentially a major change to the way the NYSE provides its weekly program trading report. Of course, Ray over at the NYSE immediately replied to Zero Hedge that all was going to be same as always … Odd, maybe he meant that all is back to normal except the reporting of Goldman’s trades. Either way, it might very well be time for proactive readers to again contact the two employees publicly disclosed by the NYSE as lead-contacts on the issue. Readers will recall that it was these same two who were previously steadfastly assuring anyone who would listen that there would be no change at all in data reporting.
Robert Airo, Senior Vice President, NYSE Euronext at (212) 656-5663 or AleksandraRadakovic, Vice President, NYSE Regulation at (212) 656-4144
Alas, the just released weekly data proves that either theirs was a material misrepresentation of facts, or Goldman simply suddenly decided to stop transacting with the NYSE, or, what would be even more sinister, Goldman notified the NYSE to scrap all their trading data from the prior week. Why would they do that?
Going back to Matt Goldstein’s story. In a nutshell, on Friday, one Sergey Aleynikov was arrested at Newark airport by FBI agents, as he was coming…
I’ve added a few comments at the end, relying on old information, but from the content of this article, there’s been no improvement in the situation in the last 15 years. Thanks to Joe for bringing up this important topic! - Ilene
The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby writes that the Steve Jobs liver transplant, and the fact that he may have put his name on the list of several states in order to ensure maximum odds of getting a liver, is a reminder of how horribly broken and dysfunctional this current system is.
What we need is a market mechanism to compensate and encourage organ donors:
No one would dream of suggesting that medical care is too vital or sacred to be treated as a commodity, or to be bought and sold like any other service. If the law prohibited any “valuable consideration’’ for healing the sick, the result would be far fewer doctors and far more sickness and death.
The result of our misguided altruism-only organ donation system is much the same: too few organs and too much death. More than 100,000 Americans are currently on the national organ waiting list. Last year, 28,000 transplants were performed, but 49,000 new patients were added to the queue. As the list grows longer, the wait grows deadlier, and the shortage of available organs grows more acute. Last year, 6,600 people died while awaiting the kidney or liver or heart that could have kept them alive. Another 18 people will die today. And another 18 tomorrow. And another 18 every day, until Congress fixes the law that causes so many valuable organs to be wasted, and so many lives to be needlessly lost.
The fact that we have so many people waiting for kidneys, waiting on expensive and painful dialysis, is proof of how bad the system is, since healthy people don’t need two kidneys, and since having only one kidney doesn’t increase your own odds of getting sick (kidney failure strikes both at the same time, typically).
Rather than delve into all the details of how it would work in practice, let’s just consider some common objections to organ markets, and why they’re all so hollow.
A market in organs would discourage altruistic donors. While there are some noble souls who donate, it’s ridiculous to be more concerned with the donor, than the recipient. What’s more, organ donation after death is…
I don’t think Al Gore in his wildest dreams could have imagined how successful the “climate crisis” movement would become. It is probably safe to assume that this success is not so much the result of Gore’s charisma as it is humanity’s spiritual need to be involved in something transcendent – like saving the Earth.
After all, who wouldn’t want to Save the Earth? I certainly would. If I really believed that manmade global warming was a serious threat to life on Earth, I would be actively campaigning to ‘fix’ the problem.
But there are two practical problems with the theory of anthropogenic global warming: (1) global warming is (or at least was) likely to be a mostly natural process; and (2) even if global warming is manmade, it will be immensely difficult to avoid further warming without new energy technologies that do not currently exist.
On the first point, since the scientific evidence against global warming being anthropogenic is what most of the rest of this website is about, I won’t repeat it here. But on the second point…what if the alarmists are correct? What if humanity’s burning of fossil fuels really is causing global warming? What is the best path to follow to fix the problem?
Cap-and-Trade
The most popular solution today is carbon cap-and-trade legislation. The European Union has hands-on experience with cap-and-trade over the last couple of years, and it isn’t pretty. Over there it is called their Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). Here in the U.S., the House of Representatives last Friday narrowly passed the Waxman-Markey bill. The Senate plans on taking up the bill as early as the fall of 2009.
Under cap-and-trade, the government institutes “caps” on how much carbon dioxide can be emitted, and then allows companies to “trade” carbon credits so that the market rewards those companies that find ways to produce less CO2. If a company ends up having more credits than they need, they can then sell those credits to other companies.
While it’s advertised as a “market-based” approach to pollution reduction, it really isn’t since the market did not freely choose cap-and-trade…it was imposed upon the market by the government. The ‘free market’ aspect of it just helps to reduce the economic damage done as a…
Joe Biden told "This Week" that the Obama administration "misread how bad the economy was."
He also the administration made this mistake because they just looked at the consensus forecasts at the time…and they proved to be wrong.
If the latter is true, the administration deserves the crap it has been getting. In the months leading up to Obama’s inauguration, the economy fell off a cliff. The credit markets seized up. Several major investment banks went bust. The Fed and Treasury talked of an apocalypse. Everywhere you looked, you heard one analyst after another saying the country was plunging toward another Great Depression.
If anything, the economy since the inauguration has been better than many analysts feared. So this "we didn’t get it" sounds like revisionist history to us.
More likely, in our opinon, the administration concluded that it would never get its huge spending increases passed if its projections reflected the "most likely" scenario for the economy. And so it produced the economic forecasts (growth, stress tests, jobs, etc) that have begun to destroy Obama’s credibility on this critical issue.
Regardless of the thinking behind the over-optimism, Obama has made a serious error here. Recovering from financial disasters like this usually takes years–and it likely will this time, too, regardless of what Obama does.
Above all else on the economy, Obama had to under-promise and over-deliver. By promising a relatively swift recovery, he has set himself up for failure. If the economy does recover, he’ll be fine, but if it doesn’t (which seems more likely), he will increasingly be blamed for failing to fix it. And given the singular importance of this issue to most Americans right now, it is hard to see how his presidency will survive that.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden said the Obama administration "misread how bad the economy was" but stands by its stimulus package and believes the plan will create more jobs as the pace of its spending picks up.
Biden, in an interview airing Sunday on TV network ABC’s "This Week," said the nation’s 9.5 percent unemployment rate is "much too high."
"The figures we worked off of in January were the consensus figures and most of the blue chip indexes out there," Biden said.
"We misread how bad the economy was, but we are now only about 120 days into the recovery package," Biden added. More jobs will be…
The banking industry is exceeding all expectations. The biggest players are raking in profits and planning much higher compensation so far this year, on the back of increased market share (wouldn’t you like two of your major competitors to go out of business?). And banks in general are managing to project widely a completely negative attitude towards all attempts to protect consumers.
This is a dangerous combination for the industry, yet it is not being handled well. Just look at the current strategy of the American Bankers’ Association.
Edward L. Yingling is justifiably proud of his organization’s postion as one of the country’s most powerful lobbies.
His testimony to Congress on the potential new Consumer Financial Protection Agency plainly shows where his group stands. The most revealing quote, highlighted in the ABA’s own press release, reads:
“It is now widely understood that the current economic situation originated primarily in the largely unregulated non-bank sector,” he said. “Banks watched as mortgage brokers and others made loans to consumers that a good banker just would not make and they now face the prospect of another burdensome layer of regulation aimed primarily at their less-regulated or unregulated competitors. It is simply unfair to inflict another burden on these banks that had nothing to do with the problems that were created.”
The premise here is false. If major banks had really not been involved in the mortgage fiasco, we would not have had to roughly double our national debt-to-GDP in order to save the US and world economy.
Within the banking community, and presumably within the ABA’s membership, there is serious tension. The small banks feel – overall with some justification – that the essence of the recent problem was not about them. But they can’t bring themselves to suggest publicly that the economic and political power of the largest banks should be curtailed.
Small banks have always had clout in the American political system, particularly when they work through the Senate. But we have not always had our current kind of crisis. The executives of these banks lived comfortably in the 1950s and 1960s; their kind of banking was boring, stable, and nicely remunerated.
It is the changing nature and power of the largest financial institutions – banks of various kinds – that has damaged our system since the 1980s; the rise in financial services compensation is part symptom and part pathogen. Big banks present the major risk going forward – to both the economy in…
As corporations pour stock on the investing public at a record pace the beneficiaries of this dilution are the underwriters. The conspiracy theorists and Goldman Sachs lovers are going to hate this fact. Oppenheimer is expecting record levels of secondary underwriting this quarter after mass dilutions. Expect the I-banks to once again benefit from the public’s dilution and losses….
July 2 (Bloomberg) — “Equity underwriting returned in spades” during the second quarter and lifted earnings at U.S. investment banks, according to Chris Kotowski, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows U.S. underwriting amounted to $122.6 billion, a ninefold surge from the first quarter, by his estimate. The total was more than double the quarterly average since 2005, based on data from Dealogic that Kotowski cited today in a report.
Revenue from investment-banking fees probably climbed about 20 percent from the first quarter because of the pickup in stock sales, the report said. Bond underwriting was relatively stable after fees more than doubled in the first quarter, he added.
“Investors should skew their financial holdings toward investment banks,” he wrote. Returns on equity, a profitability gauge, are likely to return to normal much sooner at these firms than at most commercial banks, he added… [continue here].
If the Chinese allowed the renminbi to rise, would that make the USA better off? That is the contention of a cabal of critics from Senators to Nobel laureates. Paul Krugman wants to see a 25% tariff on Chinese goods. Today we examine that idea, and look at the real problems that we face. If only it were so easy. The numbers just don't add up. The fault, dear Brutus...
O Canada
But first, and quickly, and in keeping with the spirit of the recent Oly...
Truthfully, I have not surveyed our ursine friends this morning, so I really have no idea if they are emboldened by the low CBOE equity put to call ratio (CPCE), but they should be.
My preferred way of looking at the equity put to call ratio involves using an exponential 10 day moving average (EMA) as a smoothing factor. The 10 day EMA generates the dotted blue li...
As I always do before options expiration I reviewed our Buy List, which, this quarter, is a list of 37 stocks we've been playing since late December and, sadly, after reviewing 37 of our favorite investments very carefully this week - I could only conclude that cashing them out was the only decision I could be comfortable with this week. Of 66 trades we had on our 37 stocks, 64 are winners with an average return since 2/8 of 28% - since most of the trades were designed to make 40% for the year - it just seems silly not to take the money and run now, on March 19th.
You are not supposed to have 64 out of 66 winners in 6 weeks, you are not supposed to make 3/4 of what you anticipate for the year in 6 weeks - that is NOT how the markets are supposed to work! When the ma...
Today’s tickers: BBY, DNDN, GLD, BAC, AET, BA & NBR
BBY - Best Buy Co., Inc. – Shares of the world’s largest electronics retailer rallied 2% to $41.25 during the trading session after receiving an upgrade to ‘buy’ from ‘neutral’ at Goldman Sachs Group where analysts increased BBY’s target share price to $47.00 from $44.00. Options traders employed a few different bullish tactics to position for continued upward movement in the price of the underlying stock through expiration in April. Plain-vanilla call buyers targeted the April $44 strike to purchase 5,100 calls for an average premium of $0.55 apiece. These investors stand ready to accrue profits if Best Buy’s share price increases 8% from the current value to exceed the effective breakeven point on the calls at $44.55 by expirati...
Let's take a look at Insider Buying and Selling over the last week or so. These are screen shots from Finviz - the significant buys against a green background first and significant sells against the pink background second. All the buys fit into my screen shot but the sells did not. Click here to see all the sells.
Note that the largest buy in the group, for KITD was at a price of 9.73 (KITD is currently at 11.54). The buy was part of an Equity Offering rather than an open market purchase. Tuzman Kaleil Isaza's (KITD's Chairman and Chief Exec. Officer) history of buys is http://www.insidercow.com/more from Insider
Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
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coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
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If anything, the economy since the inauguration has been better than many analysts feared. So this "we didn’t get it" sounds like revisionist history to us. 
The banking industry is exceeding all expectations. The biggest players are 
German
Spanish
French
Italian
Portuguese
Japanese
Korean
Russian
Chinese
Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
(