The head of CBL & Associates Properties Inc., says the company is always open to prospective buyers but isn’t actively looking for a buyer despite its drop in the price of its stock.
“We’re a public company, so we’re always for sale, so to speak,” CBL CEO Stephen Lebovitz said in an interview at an industry conference reported by Bloomberg Thursday. “Anyone who’s contacted us – we’ve always talked to them, but we’re not actively looking to sell the company.”
The Chattanooga-based shopping center developer has faced mounting challenges as more retailers have closed up shop amid a shift to online shopping. In October, it slashed its dividend for 2019 to 30 cents per share from 80 cents. The stock has lost more than half of its value this year, closing Thursday at $2.44 a share, down from $4.98 at the start of 2018.
CBL’s vision is to transform traditional malls into town centers with a wider variety of businesses as it is doing in Chattanooga with plans for restaurants and offices in retail space being vacated in the next month by Sears.
Record imports boost trade gap
Record imports in October drove the U.S. trade deficit to the highest level in a decade.
The Commerce Department said Thursday that the gap between the United States sells and what it buys from foreign countries hit $55.5 billion in October, the fifth straight increase and highest since October 2008.
The politically sensitive deficit in the trade of goods with China rose 7.1 percent to a record $43.1 billion. The goods gap with the European Union widened 65.5% to a record $17.6 billion.
Led by shipments of medicine and cars, overall imports rose 0.2 percent to a record $266.5 billion. Exports fell 0.1 percent to $211 billion.
President Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to slash America’s longstanding trade deficit with the rest of the world. Despite his import taxes on steel, aluminum and Chinese goods, the deficit so far this year is running 11.4 percent above January-October 2017.
U.S. exports of soybeans, targeted for retaliatory tariffs by China, dropped 46.8 percent in October.
Mortgage rates drop this week
Long-term mortgage rates fell this week amid a steep decline in stock prices.
Continued slides in the stock market and tumbling oil prices have been pushing mortgage rates lower, although home borrowing rates remain much higher than a year ago. Mortgage giant Freddie Mac said Thursday the average rate on the benchmark 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage dipped to 4.75 percent from 4.81 percent last week. The key rate stood at 3.94 percent a year ago.
The rate on 15-year fixed-rate loans declined to 4.21 percent from 4.25 percent the previous week.
Lyft files for stock offering
The ride-hailing company Lyft said Thursday that it had taken a key step toward an initial public offering, confidentially filing a draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The move sets the stage for a busy year of technology IPOs in 2019, as privately held companies known as “unicorns” because of their high growth and valuations get ready to debut on Wall Street.
Uber, the biggest ride-hailing company in the world, is also planning to go public next year and has received proposals from investment banks that say it could be worth as much as $120 billion.
Lyft said it had not yet determined how many shares would be sold or the price range for the offering, which is expected to come after the SEC completes its review.
Lyft’s last fundraising round in June valued it at $15 billion.
Productivity up 2.3% in quarter
U.S. productivity grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in the July-September quarter, slower than the previous quarter but still an improvement over the weak annual gains of the past decade. Labor costs rose at a modest pace in the third quarter.
The third quarter gain in productivity was revised up slightly from an initial estimate a month ago of a 2.2 percent gain, the Labor Department said Thursday. It marks a more modest advance than the second quarter’s 3 percent annual rate of increase. Labor costs were up at a 0.9 percent annual rate in the third quarter following a decline at a 2.8 percent rate in the second quarter.
Productivity, the amount of output per hour of work, has been weak throughout the current expansion.