Diners at Mar-al-Lago overheard the President talking with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the latest in a string of idiotic security breaches he's made all by himself:
As Mar-a-Lago's wealthy members looked on from their tables, and with a keyboard player crooning in the background, Trump and Abe's evening meal quickly morphed into a strategy session, the decision-making on full view to fellow diners, who described it in detail to CNN.
News of Pyongyang's launch had emerged an hour earlier, as Trump was preparing for dinner in his residence. Officials had concluded the Musudan-level missile flew 310 miles off North Korea's eastern coast before crashing into the Sea of Japan.
Oy.
Meanwhile, the Sears Death Watch continues:
[B]ecause Sears and its sister company Kmartare merely shells of their former selves after they destroyed so much value over the years for employees, customers, and investors, there may be a group of stakeholders secretly hoping the end comes soon: shopping malls.
While a Sears Holdings bankruptcy might lead malls to suddenly face the prospect of being flooded with zombie retail space, they would have the chance to redevelop the stores themselves and attract new tenants who would pay them, and not Seritage, significantly higher rents.
Of course, a Sears Holdings bankruptcy carries risks for them, too. As noted, many retailers are reducing their footprints, not expanding them, so filling up the space may not be so simple, and for malls not in desirable locations, Sears Holdings' demise could be catastrophic. Credit Suisse says some 184 malls can be classified as "least valuable property" -- meaning at risk of shutting down -- and, concernedly, Sears is the anchor store in 110 of them. A Sears Holdings bankruptcy and the wave of store closings that would follow could very well jeopardize their existence.
Again, oy.
We haven't gotten 25mm of snow in Chicago since December 19th, and the forecast for the next week is precipitation-free—57 days of snow-free weather so far. The record is 83, which we'll break if we don't get that much snow before March 12th. This is unlikely most years, but this year, the climate predictions look promising.
Stay tuned. We could always get a blizzard. It's February, after all.
Not exactly a slow news day:
- Former Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions won confirmation as Attorney General of the U.S. on a 52-47 party-line vote.
- Meanwhile, the Senate told Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to sit down and shut up, but "she persisted," thus beginning her 2020 presidential campaign.
- And though the event was almost 26 full hours ago, yesterday's appeals court hearing in California resulted in a Trump tweet being rebuked by the President's own nominee for the Supreme Court. (The BBC has a really good primer on the U.S. constitutional system of checks and balances, for those overseas.)
- Speaking of the president, it's becoming clear as day that his motivations are very simple, and amount to a total integration of his businesses with the office. Just like we told you.
- Also, we should expect more crises, real and imagined, to scare people into supporting his consolidation of power.
- Closer to home, the building I work in, Willis Tower, has secured a $1bn refinancing that will free up funds for a $500m upgrade. Too bad the company that built it will be dead within two years, according to the bond markets.
And finally, for those of you living in the new, evidence-free world of today, you'll be happy to know that all of these things may have come about because of the lunar eclipse and comet happening Friday night.
Stuff I'll read before rehearsal today:
Back to the mines...
Welcome to February, in which I hope to increase my pathetic blogging rate (currently 1.23 per day for the last 12 months). Of course, even taking a day off to catch up on things doesn't seem to be helping, because I have all of these articles to read:
So, a lot to read. And still almost no time to read it.
And I haven't fully read any of these:
Only a few more hours until we see how much closer to Rome we get.
This is what I saw last night:
As a singer who's performed the original Messiah about 10 times, I pronounce Too Hot to Handel amazeballs, and I will be in the chorus next year.
Via Crain's, Business Insider explains in detail how Eddie Lampert has structured his financial holdings so that he may benefit more from Sears' destruction than from its success:
For all the problems in Sears stores, Lampert has set up his various businesses in a way that means he has other ways to gain no matter what happens to the company.
ESL holds a majority share of Sears, and that stake has lost three-quarters of its value just in the past few years — more than $1.5 billion since early 2015 alone.
But Lampert, through ESL, has loaned Sears more than $1.12 billion and promised an additional $679 million over the past two years to help keep the company afloat. In return, Sears pays origination fees and interest directly to ESL, and, by extension, Lampert. A recent shareholder complaint claims that Lampert and ESL made at least $19 million in fees and interest payments from a $400 million loan in 2014.
Lampert and ESL could potentially seize stores and inventory if Sears can't pay its bills. That $400 million loan, for instance, is backed by collateral of 25 stores valued at $500 million total.
Even if the company went bankrupt, Lampert wouldn't walk away empty-handed, according to bankruptcy experts and former executives.
How on earth did Sears' board allow this to happen? Oh, right—Lampert owns 54% of the company, and so appoints the board.
There are shareholder lawsuits, of course, though it's doubtful they'll succeed. And so the murder continues.
You know, it's hard to feel sorry for anyone who invested in this charlatan's buildings, but still:
Two signs of a slowdown in Trump's signature building have emerged: a decline in sales of condos and a stack of unsold listings that is bigger than in competitive buildings.
At year-end, sales in the building were down from 2015, according to Gail Lissner, vice president of Appraisal Research Counselors, which tracks the downtown real estate market. There were 34 sales in the building in 2016, a drop of almost 40 percent from 2015's 56 sales, according to Lissner.
That's compared to an 11.3 percent increase in sales of all condos priced $650,000 and up, from 1,451 sales in 2015 to 1,616 sales in 2016, according to Midwest Real Estate Data. (Though many condos at Trump are priced in the multimillion-dollar range, the prices on currently listed condos start in the mid-$600,000s.)
The Trump building has the highest percentage of units on the resale market within a group of 10 downtown condo buildings all completed within several years of one another, according to a Crain's analysis.
Investors are out millions, and it seems directly attributable to Trump being Trump. Pity.