SST reports on several stories of negative equity situations happening in Auckland. That’s when the value of a house is less than the money owed to the bank. “One home had mortgages to ASB for $723,000 and Finance Assist for $150,000. It sold for $535,000. … “The mortgage was to Property Finance Securities (in receivership) …
Continue reading “Judgment Day is here: negative housing equity”
Bugger. That was an obvious short on the housing market, in spite of a very interesting game changing revenue model.
By abandoning paid content on TVNZ OnDemand, TVNZ’s Jason Paris demonstrates that he gets it. Jason’s a smart guy, and it seems that the people have spoken – by watching ad-supported content and staying away from the paid content. Well done – a good step. Of course Jason et al are seriously constrained by obsolete …
Continue reading “TVNZ begins to get it right, but still plenty wrong”
The Yahoo and Rio Tinto deals have one thing in common, besides being abnormally large. They are both being initiated by new CEO’s where the predecessor has just departed. This makes it seem that they are trying to stamp their own mark on their companies, and that is perhaps true. It is probably likely that …
OK – so I’m almost always picking the bearish side for investments, but this one seems pretty clear. It’s a case of a lousy company buying a lousy company. First let me explain what the implicatons of that are, and secondly lets breifly look at why Microsoft and Yahoo will be a hard combination to …
Apparently it is the third try for AOL to launch in Australia. Here’s the Beta website: It looks a lot like Yahoo7’s website: Can’t really see the point myself – AOL have no lock in downunder so unless the website is associated with a source of traffic then it just seems irrelevant. That’s a shame …
Massive changes today announced for eBay’s economic model, in response, I take, to the increasing power of Amazon and Google. Listing fees down 25 to 50%, especially for bigger sellers Gallery is free final value fees (commissions) are up – 8.25% under $25, which is up from 5.25% and huge. Most sales are in this …
What can you say about a company that just didn’t make hay from what now are the most sought after products in the world? Finally it appears that Renaissance has lost exclusive Apple distributorship in NZ, and I have to say that I’m glad. Their service was really not up to scratch, and they lost …
If you are the boss of a financial institution that holds a position of 50 billion euros from a ‘rogue trader’, then you do not deserve to be there. Neither do the senior and relevant junior people responsible for risk management and auditing and the line staff above said trader. Neither does the board of …
Interesting. Lloyd Morrison gets a COO for Infratil, and Bogoievski gets to stay in Wellington, stay in a job where political influence is important and work for a growing company that shares the spoils. Meanwhile Infratil have landed the ex-NZ boss of Lang LaSalle to boss Infratil Property. It looks like Infratil will try their …
People can die, and you can go to jail. These guys from Black Reef Mine face sentencing tomorrow for failing to ensure the safety of workers. But meanwhile Police are pondering whether to reopen the case and lay more serous charges. It is good to see legal pursuit of the mine manager and consultant geologist, …
International people are those who travel a lot, or live between two different countries. This tends to happen a lot in Europe, and is just generally more and more common with the cheap price of travel these days. Indeed there were over 800m international tourist arrivals in 2006 – clearly not a trivial market. Steve …
Continue reading “Apple is clueless about international people”
AA bought into Bookabach – so what are they getting and how much is it worth? I’m arguing they got a bargain, even though I don’t know how much they paid for what % or even how much bookabach makes. Here’s the reasoning and estimation: The site looks great – very well laid out and …
via calculated risk this chart – showing the huge size of the US Trade Deficit. Sure Petroleum is bad, but that red line is hovering around the the thirty billion a year mark. Meanwhile on the same blog we see that a major US apartment owner is in big trouble, risking default on $900m in …
Great: AirNZ runs a giant charity Auction each year Dumb: using Sellmefree as the vehicle. Here, for example, is 2 month’s worth of Business Class travel for two people. It was added 3 days ago, and should be attracting a bunch of traffic. The value of this to the right buyer is big. It costs …
Lance Wiggs 