Blaine Rollins: Rise and Shine…

Corporate America’s no confidence vote in the President yesterday left financial markets with a lingering hangover today. New questions about the President’s leadership emerged. Early in the day, there was speculation that the President’s National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn may resign. Cohn is the leading contender and likely candidate to replace Janet Yellen as Chair of the Federal Reserve Board. By late morning, White House officials quelled the speculation asserting that Cohn planned to continue remain NEC Director. As uncomfortable as Cohn might be in his current situation, it is widely believed that he wants and will likely get the top position at the Federal Reserve.

The Trump Administration has already been a revolving door with all of the firings and resignations. To this point, no key economic personnel have departed. The Cohn false alarm prompted concern among investors that should high profile Administration officials leave, the President will have a very hard time attracting qualified replacements. This thinking was only reinforced by comments from other public officials. Republican Senator Bob Corker who is generally perceived to be pragmatic remarked that “The President has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful…And we need for him to be successful.”

(Jones Trading)

“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon said Friday, shortly after confirming his departure. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”

(Weekly Standard)

“We are beginning to see the cracks of the high-end residential market in Manhattan,” he said. “The building on 57th Street just went through it’s B-lender. Those deals, and the building going up next to MoMA, those deals are going to be a disaster. So high-end resi in New York really is in trouble.”

Sternlicht, who was quick to point out that Starwood is not exposed to that market, said it won’t be banks licking their wounds in the event of a luxury condo slump. Rather, it’s the hedge funds, private equity firms and alternative lenders chasing high returns who backed projects asking prices of $7,000 to $10,000 a foot.

“There’s a hedge fund that made $1 billion mortgages against some of these properties out of Europe and we will see how that fares,” said Sternlicht, appearing to refer to the Children’s Investment Fund, which has backed the likes of 432 Park Avenue and 76 Eleventh Avenue. “Maybe they like the return, but they will lose capital. They can’t get paid off and they find out their basis is accreting because they are not getting paid currently, obviously….That is not going to end well.”

(The Real Deal)

“Our overall advertising spend is up, lower single digits, but as we’ve essentially made more significant pivot to digital marketing it’s over half our marketing right now. That’s a medium that you can get good insight on the return on your spend and as Craig said, the team just done a great job continuing to increase the return on that spend, so leveraging that low single digit to a much more productive return on overall ad spend”

—Home Depot EVP Ted Decker

(Avondale AM)

The disruption taking place today in our industry and in retail in general is the most significant I’ve seen. The fact is that we’re seeing mobile technology drive shifts in consumer behavior and spending patterns at a faster pace than our industry has been able to keep up with.

With constant access to new influences, trends, information, and ideas, consumers’ attention spans are getting shorter, and we’re seeing that they’re moving from one style to the next faster than ever before.

(Financial Times)

Canadian real estate prices made the largest single-month decline in years. The Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) numbers show that the price of homes are falling across the country. While it’s too early to call it a trend, it’s definitely something worth noting if you’re looking for a home, or you’re in the industry.

(Business Insider)

And that is the real challenge of Brexit for the City: the process of preparing for Brexit has highlighted to many firms how inefficient and expensive it is to have so many support staff who could be based elsewhere taking up space in some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

As one senior banker said a few weeks back, once you have seen that you can never unsee it. Brexit will increasingly provide the occasion — if not the cause — for the industry to make radical changes to its structure and business model. Some firms may even use Brexit as cover for this restructuring.

In future, a lot more business will be conducted in the City with far fewer people being paid far less for actually doing it. And that will make the changes in recruitment from one month to the next look like a rounding error.

(Financial News London)

Contracts, transactions, and the records of them are among the defining structures in our economic, legal, and political systems. They protect assets and set organizational boundaries. They establish and verify identities and chronicle events. They govern interactions among nations, organizations, communities, and individuals. They guide managerial and social action. And yet these critical tools and the bureaucracies formed to manage them have not kept up with the economy’s digital transformation. They’re like a rush-hour gridlock trapping a Formula 1 race car. In a digital world, the way we regulate and maintain administrative control has to change.

Blockchain promises to solve this problem. The technology at the heart of bitcoin and other virtual currencies, blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. The ledger itself can also be programmed to trigger transactions automatically.

With blockchain, we can imagine a world in which contracts are embedded in digital code and stored in transparent, shared databases, where they are protected from deletion, tampering, and revision. In this world every agreement, every process, every task, and every payment would have a digital record and signature that could be identified, validated, stored, and shared.

Intermediaries like lawyers, brokers, and bankers might no longer be necessary. Individuals, organizations, machines, and algorithms would freely transact and interact with one another with little friction. This is the immense potential of blockchain.

(Harvard Business Review)

This joke from “Delirious,” Eddie Murphy’s 1983 breakthrough television special, is all about that summer moment when one drippy cone could make your world right. It’s comedy about pure joy — innocence mixed with profanity.

(NY Times)