Free Republic

Last week, a court in Hong Kong ordered that Evergrande, China’s massive property developer, must be liquidated. Real estate accounts for about one-quarter of China’s GDP, and Evergrande isn’t the only troubled part of the Chinese real estate sector. While I’d always like to see China constrained, not only is a collapsing China dangerous, but real estate collapse also reminds us of what’s happening domestically. Business Insider reported on Evergrande’s liquidation, which has long been expected and which will be carried out in an orderly fashion. The assets are valued at $245 billion (which I suspect is inflated), while the...

Bed Bath & Beyond, the store for seemingly everything in your home during the 1990s and 2000s, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday. “Thank you to all of our loyal customers. We have made the difficult decision to begin winding down our operations,” a statement at the top of the company’s website said Sunday morning. The company’s 360 Bed Bath & Beyond locations, along with its 120 buybuy BABY stores, will remain open for now, as will websites. The company secured a $240 million loan to help fund its operations during bankruptcy. But store closing sales will begin Wednesday, and Bed...

Viridi Funds announced that the Viridi Cleaner Energy Crypto-Mining & Semiconductor ETF (NYSEARCA:RIGZ) will liquidate and de-list from the New York Stock Exchange. RIGZ was actively managed and provided market participants with exposure to the cryptocurrency mining industry and indirect exposure to crypto-assets such as Bitcoin (BTC-USD) and Ethereum (ETH-USD). RIGZ, which jumped out of the gates with a 15% rally in its first 48 hours of trading, caught a wave of upward momentum from the crypto craze. The fund soared 133% in its first four months of trading, alongside Bitcoin’s peak. However, since the fund topped out at $56.63...

As the mournful notes of the cello brought the four minutes of The Dying Swan to a close at The Hague on January 24, 1931, the audience was in tears. Throughout the performance, there had been no dancer — only a moving spotlight emphasizing the absence of Anna Pavlova, the ballerina the world loved. She had died the day before, of a mysterious lung infection that began almost immediately after her train had left Paris. She'd told doctors she suspected she'd been poisoned. Unable to reach a diagnosis, they treated her symptoms but failed to save her. For Soviet émigrés...

After briefly rising above $40,000 this morning following the earlier (and now forgotten) report of some soothing words from Putin over the Ukraine conflict, Bitcoin and the broader crypto sector has slumped to session lows...... following a Reuters report that crypto firms in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are being flooded with requests to "liquidate billions of dollars of virtual currency" as Russians seek a safe haven for their fortunes.According to the report - which cites company executives and financial sources - some Russians are using cryptocurrency to "invest in real estate" in the UAE, while others want to use...

<p>A NEW York City investor jumped to his death from a skyscraper near Trump Tower in an apparent suicide just days after his assets firm once worth $20 billion was liquidated.</p><p>Charles de Vaulx, 59, allegedly took his own life on Monday after leaping from the tenth floor of International Value Advisers' office in midtown Manhattan, where he worked as chairman and chief investment officer.</p>

Sears, the 125-year-old icon, has 24 hours to survive. The employer of more than 68,000 filed for bankruptcy in October. Its last shot at survival is a $4.6 billion proposal put forward by its chairman, Eddie Lampert, to buy the company out of bankruptcy through his hedge fund, ESL Investments. ESL is the only party offering to buy Sears as a whole, people familiar with the situation tell CNBC. Without that bid or another like it, liquidators will break the company up into pieces. But as Lampert stares down a deadline of Dec. 28 to submit his offer, he is...

ALCO stores nationwide, including those in South Hutchinson and 21 other small Kansas communities, are closing. The stores, which typically serve small towns with few other options for everything from clothing to housewares and groceries, began conducting going-out-of-business sales on Friday morning, a day after a U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas authorized ALCO’s owners – Tiger Capital Group LLC, SB Capital Group LLC and Great American Group LLC – to begin doing so. In all, 198 stores in 23 states will close, as will the 113-year-old discount retailer’s 352,000-square-foot distribution center in Abilene. During the liquidation sale, the company plans...

At end of the week, California's State Auditor released its annual financial report for the state. The report, compiled by Auditor Elaine Howle, found the state has a net worth of -$127.2 billion. If the state were a business, it would be a candidate for liquidation. CA's financial situation deteriorated this year, largely because the state spent $1.7 Billion more than it collected in revenue. This over-spending worsened the state's debt picture. "Expenses that exceeded revenues and increased long-term obligations resulted in an 81.4 percent decrease in the total net assets for governmental and business-type activities from the 20-10-11 fiscal...

Hostess Brands Inc. said it likely won't make an announcement until Friday morning on whether it will move to liquidate its business, after the company had set a Thursday deadline for striking employees to return to work. The maker of Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Wonder Bread had warned employees that would file a motion in U.S. Bankruptcy Court to unwind its business and sell off assets if plant operations didn't return to normal levels by 5 p.m. EST Thursday. That would result in the loss of about 18,000 jobs.Snip The Teamsters meanwhile are urging the smaller union to hold a...

Hostess Brands said Wednesday that it will go into liquidation unless bakers striking in protest against a new contract imposed in bankruptcy court return to work by the end of the day Thursday. "We simply do not have the financial resources to survive an ongoing national strike," Hostess CEO Greg Rayburn said in a statement. The liquidation would result in Hostess' nearly 18,000 workers losing their jobs. The bakers' union represents around 5,000. The union did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday, but has called the concessions demanded in the new contract "outrageous." "Our members are on...

After 173 years, insurer swamped by wave of workers’ comp claims. Atlantic Mutual Insurance Co. managed to pay out claims when the legendary Titanic passenger liner sank in April 1912, but the insurer couldn’t survive a wave of workers’ compensation claims, industry publication BestWire reported Friday. The company was placed into liquidation and New York’s superintendent of insurance was appointed liquidator on April 27, according to the website of the New York Liquidation Bureau. Atlantic Mutual Insurance was incorporated under the laws of the state of New York on April 11, 1842. ... Workers’ compensation insurance covers the cost of...

Widely studied in institutions of higher and lower learning, Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle is commonly presented as a first-hand representation of turn-of-the-century (19 to 20) urban life. Go to USA.gov, type in his name in the search engine, and see how many school districts show up in use of his opus. Yet and still, can you trust the fiction of a man who proved himself to be so factually, if not ethically, challenged? “Many of those who later became useful stooges of the party went through their own baptism of mud at the hands of the comrades,” Eugene Lyons...

Liquidation threatens debt-laden MGM By PETER LAURIA Last Updated: 12:28 PM, September 25, 2009 Posted: 1:39 AM, September 25, 2009 The efforts to restructure Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's massive debt load are beginning to play out like a war movie that, at this point, the studio itself could have trouble financing. According to multiple sources, discussions between the studio's debtholders and equity owners have begun on a contentious note, with both sides threatening to force MGM into bankruptcy in order to gain leverage and extract better terms from the other.

Hedge fund Atticus denies liquidation rumors: report Thu Sep 4, 7:28 PM ET Hedge fund company Atticus Capital denied market rumors it was liquidating its positions and closing down and said it had a large net capital position and was looking for investment opportunities, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Atticus's two main hedge funds have been hit with losses of between 25 percent and 32 percent this year through August, but investors are largely sticking with it, according to unnamed investors cited by the Journal. Stocks the Wall Street Journal said Atticus held in recent months, including Burlington...

CBOT Corn Outlook:Sharply Down; Fund Liquidation To Continue Thu, Mar 20 2008, 13:27 GMT http://www.djnewswires.com/eu/ CBOT Corn Outlook:Sharply Down; Fund Liquidation To Continue By Andrew Johnson Jr Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES CHICAGO (Dow Jones)--Corn futures on the Chicago Board of Trade are expected start Thursday's day session on the defensive, plunging on the continuation of speculative fund long liquidation pressure. Analysts expect corn to open 20 cents lower. In overnight electronic trading, May corn was 19 1/4 cents lower at $5.08, July corn was 20 cents lower at $5.19 1/4, and December corn was 20 cents lower at $5.21 1/4....

One of the more stunning developments of the Bear Stearns (BSC: 4.81, -25.19, -83.96%) fire sale is that many of the firm's 14,000 employees, as well as the firms many thousands of shareholders, have just watched their stakes in the company go up in smoke.

Macau may liquidate NKorea-linked bank: report Tue Mar 13, 2:09 AM ET Authorities in Macau could liquidate a bank accused of illicit dealings with North Korea if the United States designates it as a financial institution that laundered money, a report here said. Liquidation would mean that Pyongyang could recover some or all of the 24 million dollars it had at Banco Delta Asia (BDA), the Yonhap news agency quoted an unidentified South Korean official as saying. The United States blacklisted BDA in September 2005, accusing the bank in the former Portuguese enclave of serving as a front for the...

America Radio, the liberal news and talk radio network headlined by the comedian Al Franken, has another week to find a buyer. A lawyer for the network, Tracy Klestadt, told a bankruptcy hearing Monday that the company was in "advanced negotiations with a few parties" about a sale, and expected to have more definitive news on a deal in a week. Under its financing agreement, the network had faced a deadline of this Wednesday to have a deal in place for a buyer, but Klestadt said the network's lender had informally agreed to extend the deadline by about a week....

...The immediate causes of the Northwest and Delta filings are failed labor negotiations and bad luck. Northwest is struggling with striking mechanics who refused to join other unions in negotiating $1.4 billion in annual savings to prevent bankruptcy. Delta has its own high-cost union contracts and has long been bleeding cash. Hurricane Katrina and sky-high fuel costs were the tipping point. But the root of the problem for these "legacy" carriers is the burden of pension costs. And one tantalizing option is to use bankruptcy to pass them off to the taxpayer via the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC)....