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New Zealand's First Booze-Free Bar Flops The first alcohol-free bar in New Zealand has been forced to permanently close after just five weeks of trading after “no one showed up”. Situated in Auckland, Tap Bar – which stands for The After Party – charged NZ$15 for entry and non-alcoholic drinks started from NZ$5. The venue opened at midnight in the hope it would be a hot spot for customers rolling out of local nightclubs at 4am, but those revellers who did frequent the bar drank only water. “We gave it a shot and Auckland drinking culture just didn’t tie in...

Real-estate mogul Donald Trump shot back during Fox News' Republican presidential debate on Thursday night and said he was "very proud" of his business record after he was asked whether his company's bankruptcies disqualified him for the presidency. "I have never gone bankrupt, by the way," Trump said. "I have never." Moderator Chris Wallace questioned whether Trump could be trusted to handle the American economy in light of the fact Trump-related businesses have filed for corporate bankruptcy four times since 1991. The most recent of these incidents occurred in 2009 when Trump Entertainment Resorts declared Chapter 11. "In 2011, you...

Puerto Rico is $72 billion in debt, and it will take a painful process to bring the island's finances back from the brink. It's a massive debt load for such a small territory, and the problem can really be traced to one issue — bad tax policy. After Puerto Rico let one tax break for manufacturers expire almost a decade ago, manufacturers started shutting down operations on the island. That caused a spike in unemployment. On top of that, business-friendly tax policies for some of the companies that remained allowed multinational giants to pay tax rates of little more than...

There’s two interesting little stories in this idea that Saudi Arabia is going to go bust in a couple of years as a result of the sagging oil price. Both are more general economic ideas than just the story of that oil price. The first is that mono-anything in economics is something we don’t really like. We certainly don’t like either monopolies or monopsonies, but we should also be very careful of an economy that relies on any one product or even supplier. The perils of resting an entire economy on the production of just the one commodity should be...

Roman Catholic Archbishop of Milwaukee Jerome E. Listecki, seen here in 2011, announced the archdiocese reached a $21 million settlement with 330 victims of sexual abuse by clergy members. Photo by Amg910/CC MILWAUKEE, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee announced Tuesday it has agreed to pay $21 million to hundreds of victims of childhood sexual abuse by clergy, clearing the way for the archdiocese to emerge from its five-year bankruptcy. Under the agreement, 330 of the 570 who filed sexual abuse claims in the bankruptcy will get financial settlements of varying amounts determined by a court-ordered...

Donald Trump catapulted himself into the spotlight with his gilded real estate ventures and vibrant personality. The latter is what has made his show "The Apprentice" such a huge success. And over the years, he's had an opinion or two about the business world. "In the end, you're measured not by how much you undertake but by what you finally accomplish," Trump once said. But like any successful business person, Trump has had his share of setbacks. Here, we present to you 12 Trump businesses that went belly up or no longer exist.

Greece owes $320 billion to its creditors and cannot repay the loans. Like Greece, Medicare is also accumulating an unaffordable mountain of debt. And both Greece and Medicare are more likely to default on their debts than to adopt the highly unpopular reforms needed to pay them off. Wednesday's news from the Medicare Trustees may not seem that dire. The headline is comforting, but misleading. Medicare's Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund-also known as Part A-will run short of money, but not until 2030. Starting that year, Part A benefits can be paid out only to the extent that money comes...

The future for the coal industry is looking “increasingly bleak,” according to an investor’s note from Macquarie Research. The analysis firm also said that “a wave of bankruptcies” appear to be just over the horizon as coal mining companies deal with mounting debt and a shrinking market. The coal markets have collapsed in spectacular fashion over the last few years due to a perfect storm of factors. U.S. coal producers first had to compete ferociously with shale gas in America’s electric power sector as fracking took off about a decade ago. That forced an array of coal plants to shut...

CHARLESTON, W.Va. Patriot Coal Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Tuesday for the second time in three years. The company made the filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. It had emerged from an earlier bankruptcy case in December 2013 in Missouri. Patriot said it is involved in active negotiations for the sale of its operating assets to a strategic partner. Patriot said it will continue shipping and mining operations and it has received a commitment for $100 million in debt financing from secured debt holders that it did not identify.

NEW YORK--Patriot Coal Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday, the largest casualty of the worst U.S. market for the power-plant fuel in decades. U.S. demand for coal has slumped this year as utilities favored cheaper natural gas, as prices of that fuel hit decade lows amid a supply glut. Coal miners, including Patriot Coal, have slashed production and laid off workers in an effort to match supply to weakening demand. Coal accounted for 35% of U.S. electricity generation during the first four months of the year, according to the Energy Information Administration, down from 44% during the same...

Bidder offers just €10,000 for showpiece in Spanish bankruptcy auction. A Chinese company that was the only bidder for one of Spain's "ghost airports" wants to revive the site as a cargo hub for the Asian market. Ciudad Real airport, one of the most notorious emblems of Spain's economic crash, cost €1 billion (HK$8.4 billion) to build and was on sale at a knockdown price of €40 million. Tzaneen International was the sole bidder in the bankruptcy auction, however, and it offered just €10,000. The facilities of the deserted site, 160km south of Madrid, include a runway long enough to...

There has been so much attention on Greece in recent weeks, but the truth is that Greece represents only a very tiny fraction of an unprecedented global debt bomb which threatens to explode at any moment. As you are about to see, there are 24 nations that are currently facing a full-blown debt crisis, and there are 14 more that are rapidly heading toward one. Right now, the debt to GDP ratio for the entire planet is up to an all-time record high of 286 percent, and globally there is approximately 200 TRILLION dollars of debt on the books. That...

Rapper 50 Cent filed for bankruptcy on Monday. The news came as bit of a surprise since The New York Times just described him as a man of "exceptional business instincts" less than a week ago. In May, Forbes pegged his net worth at $155 million. 50 Cent, aka Curtis Jackson III, reportedly earned between $60 million and $100 million from a stake in Vitamin Water when it sold to Coca-Cola in 2007, according to The Washington Post. Yet in the abbreviated Chapter 11 filing Monday, Jackson's lawyers said that his assets range from $10 million to $50 million, including...

Rapper 50 Cent has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Monday. "In court papers filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Hartford, Conn., Mr. Jackson reported assets and debts each in the range of $10 million to $50 million," reports the Wall Street Journal. The filing comes just three days after the "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" rapper was ordered to pay $5 million to a woman who sued him for posting a sex tape online. Previously, 50 Cent was recently reported to be worth around $270 million, largely thanks to his minority stake in Vitamin Water. In 2007, the...

<p>Jeb Bush apparently doesn’t want people to know that he worked at Lehman Brothers, the now-defunct investment bank whose collapse led to the broader financial meltdown in 2008.</p> <p>That’s the only conclusion I can come to after receiving a series of occasionally bizarre emails from his press people to what I thought was a fairly simple question about Bush’s work before he became a Republican presidential candidate.</p>

Leading House Republicans declared their opposition Wednesday to allowing debt-ridden Puerto Rico access to Chapter 9 bankruptcy protections, raising new uncertainty about how the island can emerge from its financial crisis. A statement from House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia said members of his committee share a concern that “to provide Puerto Rico’s municipalities access to chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code would not, by itself, solve Puerto Rico’s difficulties, which are associated with underlying, structural economic problems.” …

Puerto Rico has two very powerful allies in its debt drama: Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. Both 2016 presidential candidates support giving Puerto Rico the same legal bankruptcy rights that states have. Puerto Rico's governor has been lobbying hard for the change to help deal with the commonwealth's $73 billion debt. There's a bill in Congress to give Puerto Rico what it wants, but it has no co-sponsors. That's why Bush and Clinton's backing could be key. "I think that Puerto Rico ought to be treated as other states are treated as it relates to restructuring," Bush said during a...

Greek voters’ decisive rejection of international creditors’ bailout terms adds to the pressure on foreign exporters already worried about getting paid for imports into Greece during the country’s capital controls. Some exporters have reduced the flow to Greece or insisted on payments upfront, while others keep up the imports into the country despite the increasing chance they won’t get paid. European pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are owed more than €1 billion for drugs and other goods already imported. snip Greece produces just 63% of the pork and 13% of the beef consumed in the country, according to government data. The...

Almost every option facing debt-drenched Greece is bad, but there is only one that will end this Greek tragedy for good. Let Greece go bankrupt. Then let this once-rich nation, hit the restart button to rebuild its economy. What I’m suggesting for Greece is what might be called the Detroit option. Put Greece under receivership and let these new authorities figure out how to manage the debt and decide who will take a haircut and how big. Pensioners, bondholders, welfare recipients, government workers, the International Monetary Fund, all will have to settle for less — maybe a lot less. It’s...

Remember this?Well congratulations! You are now! Except for one thing: after a few non-lethal union concessions, Detroit got the State to bail them and their pensions out. Greece just said “no” to the EU’s demand for concessions, so…this should be fun.Hard to believe isn’t it? The country that founded democracy has discovered how to destroy it. Well actually, Alexis de Tocqueville identified that mechanism a couple of centuries ago: “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.” And we’ve been implementing it incrementally ever since:  Detroit’s giant tire...