1 China loses No 2 creditor rank to Germany (Straits
Times) Germany edged out China as the world's second-largest supplier of
external credit for the first time in at least a decade last year as the Asian
giant's authorities went to great lengths to support a weakening yuan.
China's net foreign assets fell to $1.6 trillion at
the end of last year, while Germany's rose to $1.62 trillion, according to
calculations by Bloomberg. Japan, the top creditor since 1991, remained the
biggest with $2.82 trillion.
The shift underscores the global implications of
last year's turbulence in China, where almost $1 trillion of capital is
estimated to have fled with the central bank burning through $513 billion of
its foreign reserves to prop up its currency. Yet it's likely a bump in the
road rather than a reversal in fortunes, with China set to eclipse Japan to
become the world's largest net creditor in coming years, according to the
Washington-based Brookings Institution.
While China has sold reserves since the hoard peaked
at $4 trillion in 2014, it is still accumulating net foreign assets evident in
the large current account surplus, according to a report this month from Mr
David Dollar, a senior fellow at Brookings.
2 Millennials aren’t buying homes (Suzanne McGee in
The Guardian) Somebody is buying houses in the US – but it sure isn’t
millennials. Just ask their parents. They’ll be the ones worrying in the
kitchen about whether their little darlings will ever leave.
Purchases of single-family homes posted a whopping
16.6% jump during April over March’s levels, the largest such one-month gain
recorded in more than eight years, and the median price point hit a record
$321,100.
Prices and sales should be rising. Mortgage rates
remain close to record lows, the private sector created 160,000 new jobs in
April – and the national unemployment rate is now only 5%. Even taking into
account all the debate over the ways in which that unemployment figure
understates the actual rate (and fails to capture underemployment by swaths of the
population), that’s not to be sneezed at.
Still, there’s one demographic group that, notably,
isn’t touring open houses or scouring online listings in search of their new
homes. No prizes for guessing which one. Far from buying new homes, millennials
increasingly aren’t even renting. The proportion of this demographic – aged
around 18 to 35 – who end up living with their parents has been on the rise
steadily since the Great Recession, peaking at about 36%, according to the Pew
Research Center.
Now, for the first time in 130 years, living with
your parents has become the most common living arrangement for young men and
women aged 18 to 34, Pew reported this week. No wonder voters are turning, in
their millions, to “protest candidates” such as Donald Trump and Bernie
Sanders, who promise (in very, very different ways) to upend the economic
system as it exists today.
Apartment List, an online rental marketplace, ran
some numbers and calculated that it would take an average of a decade for
millennials to come up with the required 20% down payment to buy a home in the
dozen or so most in-demand urban locales.
It’s also a challenge to corporate interests. For
every business that figures out a way to cater to this new way of living –
millennials won’t own cars, so Uber and Zipcar will thrive; millennials won’t
buy homes, so co-living projects such as those developed by WeWork might be the
model of the future, not suburban developments of semi-detached houses – scores
won’t.
3 Sports stars as tech-preneurs (Jaia Thomas in San
Francisco Chronicle) The average National Basketball Association salary during
the 2015-2016 season was a cool $4,021,836. But not all athletes are out buying
big cars and bigger houses, as the stereotype goes. Instead, they're becoming
busy entrepreneurs.
Indeed, as the current NBA season comes to a close,
many players are using a portion of their salaries to launch and invest in tech
companies for the coming off season. Professional athletes across all sports,
from the NBA to the National Football League, in fact, are investing time,
energy and effort into the tech space.
Golden State Warriors superstar Steph Curry is a
high-profile example. Curry was perhaps best known this season for his three
pointers on the court. However, many may not know that he is also the co-owner
of two tech startups off the court -- Slyce and CoachUp.
Social media maven and New York Knicks center Kevin
Seraphin is another athlete heavily involved in the tech space. A few years
ago, he launched Thorolgraffix, a photo-editing app that allows users to add
filters, masking and various effects to their social media postings. Seraphin
is currently beta-testing a new social networking app called Looks.
Various associations, such as the National Football
League Players Association (NFLPA), are doing their part to expose more players
to the tech space. Earlier this year, the NFLPA facilitated a "Tech
Tour," arranging site visits and meetings for NFL players in Silicon
Valley. Players met with tech companies that focus on such areas as social
media, gaming, mobile apps and wearable technology.
Rob Wilson, CEO of Wilson Insight, says he believes
that more and more athletes are jumping into tech because today’s generation of
professional athletes have grown up with tech as a significant part of their
lives. They came up in the explosion of mobile devices and social media, so
they are a much more tech-savvy generation.
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