Note (1) the “house”/“home” distinction and (2) the absence of either when foreclosure arrives.
(kudos to Calculated Risk)
Daily Archives: 08-07-15
Like printing money
under LDCs, government, money
(Note the expiration date.)
[Begin update: And that date was optimistic. What a difference a few short months makes. From thisiszimbabwe.com:
End update.]
At the request of the German government, Giesecke and Devrient GmbH (motto: “Creating confidence”) has been supplying currency-quality paper to Zimbabwe. According to the AP’s (so sue me!) Matt Moore, G and D
said it would stop delivering bank note paper to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe “with immediate effect.” It said the decision came in response to an official request from the German government and calls for international sanctions by the European Union and United Nations. “Our decision is a reaction to the political tension in Zimbabwe, which is mounting significantly rather than easing as expected, and takes account of the critical evaluation by the international community, German government and general public,” chief executive Karsten Ottenberg said in a statement.
Greatest hits from G and D’s corporate “Code of Conduct” include (ellipsis elided—rename then read the PDF for yourself):
How to think about narcocracy
under agriculture, finance, government, military
FT (Adam Thomson, “Drugs cartels targeting Mexico's democracy, says intelligence chief,” 14 July ’08; BBC pickup here):
The head of Mexico's intelligence service has warned that the country's democratic institutions, including the national Congress, are under threat from powerful drugs cartels.
At some point, subverted governmental entities would make an announcement like this in order to undermine faith in the governmental entities they hadn’t penetrated yet. So, in the absence of detailed, reliable knowledge—an unavoidable condition in this context—which would you guess is more likely to be subverted, Congress or the national intelligence service?
Bitten
under architecture, finance
Mall owners pay tenants to “improve” spaces then don’t audit how the money’s spent. WSJ (McCracken, Lattman, Hudson, “Retailer's Collapse Hits Mall Owners,” 14 July ’08):
For mall owners, large anchor spaces, which were once occupied almost exclusively by department stores, are especially important. Their role is to draw lots of shoppers into malls, enabling owners to rent their smaller spaces to specialty stores. When anchor spaces go dark, clauses in the leases of smaller tenants often permit them to pay lower rents.
That dynamic played a critical role in the surprising rise of Steve & Barry’s, which opened its first store in Philadelphia in 1985 to peddle discount University of Pennsylvania apparel, then spread to several other university towns. [...]
Steve & Barry’s was “primarily going into previous department-store locations, and in today’s market, there are not a lot of department stores left to fill those voids,” says Ross Glickman, chief executive of Chicago-based Urban Retail Properties LLC, which has Steve & Barry’s stores in three of its shopping centers.
Mall owners have always viewed anchor stores as loss leaders—owners offer favorable deals to big stores in exchange for bringing traffic to the malls. Financial inducements often come in the form of tenant-improvement allowances, which are upfront payments that retailers use to outfit the interiors of their stores. Landlords seldom monitor how the money is spent.
The mall owners welcomed Steve & Barry’s with open wallets. One former Steve & Barry’s executive recalls company co-founder Barry Prevor jumping up on his credenza with joy at company headquarters after negotiating the first multimillion-dollar payment in 2003.
We need a new name for “broken windows” that’s specific to malls.