Luxury home sales cooled globally in '16
LOS ANGELES -- Global luxury home sales cooled off in 2016 for the second consecutive year, even with a record number of homes selling for more than $100 million.
A report released Wednesday by Christie's International Real Estate shows that sales of homes priced at $1 million or more edged up about 1 percent worldwide last year.
That represents a sharp slowdown from 2015, when luxury home sales climbed 8 percent, and from 2014, when sales vaulted 16 percent.
Despite the sluggish sales growth, Christie's said luxury home prices continued to rise last year, increasing about 2 percent from a year earlier. And for the first time, 11 homes sold for more than $100 million each. The priciest sale, a mansion located in The Peak neighborhood in Hong Kong, fetched more than $270 million.
-- The Associated Press
Yelp slips as advertisers' exit dents year
Yelp Inc. shares fell the most in almost two years Wednesday after the company said a wave of advertisers stopped spending with the online review guide in the first quarter, leading it to a lower forecast for full-year revenue.
Retention of its advertisers is a key metric for analysts to determine Yelp's growth and long-term sustainability. Executives attributed higher churn from the first quarter to a specific group of advertisers that had gone aboard the site about a year ago just as the San Francisco-based company started shifting the way it charged for ads. Some of the new businesses found the transition to a model of charging for actual clicks on ads instead of just views difficult, Chief Operating Officer Jed Nachman said late Tuesday on a call with analysts.
The company began addressing the matter and was able to "course-correct" and saw better results in March and particularly in April, Nachman said.
Still, Yelp cut its full-year revenue forecast and its projection for second-quarter sales were lower than analysts' estimates. The shares fell $6.37, or 18.4 percent, to close Wednesday at $28.33.
-- Bloomberg News
Blacks rejoining job market at fast clip
Black Americans are jumping back into the job market faster than any other race or ethnicity in this economic recovery.
The share of black workers at work or seeking employment touched 62.5 percent in April, the highest level since 2010, a recovery from a more than the three-decade low of 60.3 percent at the end of 2013. Even with that rebound, black labor force participation remains below the overall rate of 62.9 percent.
The unemployment rate among black Americans in the U.S. remains the highest among the races, at 7.9 percent in April, just above its pre-recession low. That's followed by the rate for Hispanics at 5.2 percent, whites at 3.8 percent and Asians at 3.2 percent.
The economic recovery has "finally started reaching people of color in some of the hardest-hit communities," according to the National Urban League's latest annual report on the "State of Black America," which tracks inequality in unemployment.
-- Bloomberg News
Libya's oil output highest since 2014
Libya's crude output exceeds 800,000 barrels a day and could be even higher if not for internal disputes that led to losses in production by Wintershall AG.
The North African country would be pumping almost 1 million barrels a day if it weren't for a disagreement between the state-run National Oil Corp. and Libya's Presidential Council that led Wintershall to shut down its production, according to the National Oil Corp.
"There are no technical reasons for the loss of production," National Oil Corp. Chairman Mustafa Sanalla said in an emailed statement. "Apart from the Wintershall shut-in, we lost a significant amount of production in April from the Sharara and El Feel fields, which were blockaded by units of the Petroleum Facilities Guards."
Libya's oil output is at the highest since October 2014, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The increase adds to the challenge that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and other major producers face after agreeing last year to pump less crude to counter a glut.
--Bloomberg News
Business on 05/11/2017