'Where are we going to live?'

The Dominican Republic has unlawfully expelled hundreds of Dominicans to Haiti who have been caught in the middle of a wave of returns and deportations of more than 100,000 people in recent months, Amnesty International said in a new report a year after the Dominican Republic ended a moratorium on deportations on June 18, 2015...
“Since arbitrarily stripping thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent of their nationality, Dominican authorities created a human rights crisis that is leaving tens of thousands of people in an absolute and desperate legal limbo,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International.
More than 40,000 people – including several hundred unaccompanied children -- have been deported from the Dominican Republic to Haiti between August 2015 and May 2016, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Haitian civil society organizations...
Though 85 percent of the total told the IOM they were born in Haiti, 15 percent claim to have been born in the Dominican Republic. The majority are children of Haitian migrants who returned “voluntarily,” but who could be entitled to Dominican nationality. Nearly 1,600 people were verified by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as being entitled to Dominican nationality who have been unlawfully expelled from the country.
Around 2,000 people have been living in six makeshift camps close to the southern Haitian border town of Anse-à-Pitre since August 2015. Conditions in the camps are dire with little access to food, water and sanitation or healthcare facilities. For several months, Haitian authorities failed to take leadership in finding a solution and it was only in mid-February 2016 that a plan was set up to relocate all families towards the areas of their choice.

U.S. doesn't walk the walk

Thus far in 2016, the United States has admitted just more than 32,000 refugees, according to State Department data. The majority have come from Burma (Myanmar), the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia. And, for the record, of those admitted between Jan. 1, 2016, and June 17, 2016, 14,427 are Muslims (including all sects), 14,298 are Christians (including all its major denominations and divisions), and 73 are Jewish. The rest practice other religions or are nonbelievers.
In other words, Muslims make up 44 percent of the refugees admitted to the country this year.

Uber ain't all that

That is a slim pool of potential profits before the company has to pay for drivers' insurance, salaries for employees and other operating costs. Uber posted a loss of US$1.7 billion on US$1.2 billion in revenue over the first nine months of 2015, according to Bloomberg News.
On Tuesday, Uber's chief product officer said the cash-torching habits of the ride-hailing industry would change "when the money train stops."

Shopping malls of the past

After a $144 million loan on the property came due this month, owner General Growth Properties Inc. didn’t make the payment.
The default by the second-biggest U.S. mall owner may be a harbinger of trouble nationwide as a wave of debt from the last decade’s borrowing binge comes due for shopping centers. About $47.5 billion of loans backed by retail properties are set to mature over the next 18 months, data from Bank of America Merrill Lynch show. That’s coinciding with a tighter market for commercial-mortgage backed securities, where many such properties are financed....
CMBS lending, which stalled earlier this year with the volatility in global markets, remains subdued in the face of new regulations taking effect in December. Wall Street banks have sold about $18.5 billion of CMBS deals this year, a 30 percent drop from the same period in 2015, according to Deutsche Bank AG. That’s making borrowing more expensive and choking off funding just as loans from the boom years of 2006 and 2007 come due.
“You’re definitely seeing some problems as the loans reach their maturity,” said Roger Lehman, a debt analyst at Credit Suisse Group AG.
Walking away from a poorly performing mall is often the best thing a landlord can do for its balance sheet, according to Green Street’s Busch. If the debt is greater than the value of the property, it might not make sense to invest in a costly redevelopment, he said.

China dumping equities too

The People’s Bank of China, owner of the world’s biggest foreign-exchange reserves, burnt through 20 percent of its war chest since 2014, dumping about $250 billion of U.S. government debt and using the funds to support the yuan and stem capital outflows.
While China’s sales of Treasuries have slowed, its holdings of U.S. equities are now showing steep declines.
The nation’s stash of American stocks sank about $126 billion, or 38 percent, from the end of July through March, to $201 billion, Treasury Department data show. That far outpaces selling by investors globally in that span -- total foreign ownership fell just 9 percent. Meanwhile, China’s U.S. government-bond stockpile was relatively stable, dropping roughly $26 billion, or just 2 percent.

Flash Boys lose a round

This evening the Securities and Exchange Commission approved an application by a startup called IEX to become a full-fledged stock exchange. By approving IEX, the SEC was giving its stamp of approval to one of the most high-profile challenges to the current Wall Street regime. Co-founded by a Canadian trader named Brad Katsuyama, IEX is designed to be a market free from high-frequency traders who use their speed to skim profits off the orders from ordinary citizens.
The company, and Katsuyama in particular, rose to prominence as the stars of Michael Lewis’ best-selling book, Flash Boys. Lewis argued that modern markets were rigged, allowing high-frequency traders to pay for fast access and use that speed to front-run other traders. As a trader, Katsuyama dealt with the problem first hand. He would place a bid for a stock at a price he saw listed, and then find there were no shares available at that price. “They could detect my order at BATS, race me to the next exchange, and cancel their sell orders while buying whatever is left, then turn around and try and sell stock back to me at a higher price,” said Katsuyama.
Katsuyama and his team devised a speed bump to block these kinds of tricks. At a time when everyone was getting faster, IEX decided to get slower, delaying each trade by 350 millionths of a second, a fraction of the time it takes to blink your eye. No human would notice the difference, but it was enough to throw off systems that were trying to read and then outrun buyers. Suddenly, when Katsuyama went to purchase shares, he no longer found them purchased and flipped back at a higher price. “We solved the problem. We have a product.”
The system, which opened for trading in October of 2013, proved very popular, drawing praise and business from big banks like J.P. Morgan and investors like Franklin Templeton. On the average day, 280 million shares are now traded through IEX, making it the second-largest platform for trading stocks outside of the traditional exchanges. But as long as it remained an alternative trading system, sometimes called a dark pool, IEX could never grow as big as full-fledged stock exchanges. So, last year IEX put in an application to become a stock exchange.
Not surprisingly the incumbent exchanges — NYSE, NASDAQ, and BATS — all mounted a case against IEX. So did high-frequency trading shops like Citadel and Hudson River Trading. The normally sleepy process of approving an exchange application became a heated public battle, playing out in comments to the SEC, editorials in the press, lobbying in Washington, and legal threats. The SEC, under intense pressure from lobbying groups backed by the incumbents, delayed the process twice, extending it six months past the original deadline.
The ability for HFT firms to front-run orders has been widely established, but allowing them to operate can be profitable for nearly everyone but the client who wants to execute a trade.