The Traderszone Network

The homeownership rate fell to 64.7 percent in the Q2 of this year. As the economy improves, more people will buy homes, but millennials will wait longer.

The debate over just what to do about corporate inversions is exposing one fault-line after another in U.S. tax and economic policy. By next year, the main corporate income tax rate will have fallen to 20 percent, from 28 percent in 2010.

Apache Corp and a handful of smaller independent companies are using seismic surveying and horizontal drilling – techniques perfected during the onshore fracking boom – to tap mature fields and find hidden reserves on the shelf. The methods appeal to investors hungry for the quick profits that cannot be delivered by deepwater drilling, where a dozen years of planning and billions of dollars in investment can be required to get oil pumping.

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India has dealt a potentially fatal blow to the World Trade Organization’s hopes of modernizing the rules of global commerce and remaining the central forum for multilateral trade deals. In the longer run, it means trade liberalization may advance — if at all — among narrower groups of countries, denying dissenters a chance to block progress. While the unwieldy 160-member, Geneva-based WTO will survive as a body for enforcing existing multilateral agreements, smaller clubs of like-minded nations are trying to move ahead faster to update the trade rules among themselves.

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The U.S. government is investigating General Motors Co’s (GM.N) auto financing arm over subprime auto loans it made and securitized since 2007, the company disclosed on Monday. General Motors Financial Co Inc said it was served with a subpoena from the Department of Justice directing it to turn over documents related to underwriting criteria. The subpoena, which the company said was in connection with an investigation into possible violations of the civil fraud law FIRREA, also asked for information on the representations GM made about the criteria when the loans were pooled into securities.

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Quote of the day

Brett Steenbarger, “If we’re not regularly surprised by what we read and discuss, the odds are good that our brain’s diet has turned stale.  And that’s a danger zone for confirmation bias.”  (Big Picture)

Chart of the day

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Pilot IKEA store in Hamburg, Germany, aims to draw 60% of shoppers by foot, bike or mass transit has fared almost too well, as majority of parking stalls lie unused.
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