Our return to the canyon of Manhattan has proven particularly fraught this time. First of all the internet is down in my office but luckily it works in our apartment where I have taken over the household computer from my husband. My system is fromTime Warner which is back on its own after the takeover bid by Comcast was ended on competition grounds.

Then too property value in our largest single holding—our apartment—is under threat from various sides. The coop board election, which took place during our absence in Europe, was apparently stolen by Stash, the Chicago-born board president, to stop any move against his use of the building's capital account and construction budget to enrich himself. Proxies went missing. The dead voted. Obscure rules were cited to block other dissidents. All very like Chicago in the old days.

Getting out from under the lawsuits and grand jury investigations that will require mayl boost our charges for maintenance both in our home and in my office, a maid's room in the same building. Lawyers don't come cheap. It also means bad blood in the elevator with supporters of the board and dissidents staring into opposite corners and making faces at each other.

Moreover a 90-ft building is being planned around the corner from our Sutton Place home. This will be another of those Midtown skyscrapers for newly wealthy oligarchs from abroad, to the detriment of neighborhood quiet, security, tone, and amenities and infrastructure like sewers, school, parking and subway places, greenery.

In London, massive arrival of Russian rich has also brought street shootings, plutonium murders, and suspicious “suicides.” Chinese and French are better behaved, but they still push up real estate values to make anyone with a normal income unable to afford living downtown in the city. New taxes to tap into the nouveau riche element often also hit people who are rich only in property and cannot pay them. Not what I want here.

I would like to arrange for a suicide for our board prexy Stash, but not at the expense of comity in the hallways.

As already reported, I have to move my brokerage account as e-trade has unaccountably opted to stop offering foreign share purchase and sales—or even tracking for non-US stocks unless they are ADRs. Amazingly, this seems to include Canada and Mexico.

Just to add to my woes, my bank, HSBC, being hit with massive fines for misbehavior in France, Switzerland, and both the US and Britain (it has been HQ'd in Britain since the Chinese took over Hong Kong) now threatens to move back to the Pearl River basin in the hope that the Mainland Chinese will accept some of its fuzzy misdeeds to get back a Big Name. That means I will probably now want to open a different bank account.

A comment on “the short of the century” according to Bill Gross, whose Grexit from Pimco was last year's big news in bond funds. He pounded the table in support of shorting German euro-denominated long bonds (20 or 30 year maturities.) Since these bonds have a negative yield under the euroland quantitative easing system, what that means is you pay the interest to the owner of the bonds you short. But since the interest is negative, payable by the borrower, not the lender, in fact you get paid to short the bond.

You will also make money if the negative interest on German euro-bonds goes up. This is a through the looking glass turn on how bonds react to newer bonds coming out at lower interest rates than the ones already being held. If the new bonds have a lower yield (or a higher negative yield), this makes the price of older bonds go up.

Unlike Mr Gross, I am not a bond specialist. I can barely tell a tick from a TAC. But I can see that any theoretical pricing for a negative interest rate environment requires lots of high-risk assumptions. So maybe it is just as well that I am not in Mr. Gross's Pimco any longer. No, don't listen to Gross. He is probably profiting from the inflow into German bond shorts to exit his own positions.

Drugs

*Benitec filed a rule 135 registration with the US SEC to do an initial public offering in this country of more shares. BTEBY which is Australian has a pink sheet ADR but did not raise capital yet in the US for its DNA-directed RNA silencing gene therapy for hepatitis C and other ailments.

*Galapagos NV of Belgium, another biotech startup barely traded in the US, got a transparency notification from BNP Paribas that the French fund manager took a 4.8% stake. GLPYY is developing a potential blockbuster rheumatoid arthritis treatment. We got into it because it hired our former Italy-based biotech maven.

*GlaxoSmithKline reports Weds before the opening. Can it beat the consensus estimate that its core profit and EPS will fall 16-17% year/year. Watch this space.

*Novartis is still being haunted by the misdeeds of its former top brass. AfterExpress Scripts settled a $45 mn suit pundits are saying that NVS will also be charged in the US investigation of how cross-kickbacks were arranged between ES and the Swiss pharma house. The way it worked was that referrals for one drug were rewarded by recommendations for a wholly different drug in the NVS stable. That would make it hard to track backhands.

Non Drugs

*Now about other industries. Israel is still getting a government coalition together so in the interval, the Petroleum Commission has extended the time table and work plan for pending licenses to offshore fields. Delek Group via two subs got an extension for Ruth C, one of its concessions. The big deal to come will be either requiring a new antitrust clearance for DGRLY and Noble Energy's joint operation of Tamar and Leviathan fields, or not.

*This week in London in crores of rupees, Sesa Sterlite officially reported on 2014 fiscal year results under its new name of Vedanta Ltd. However, it reported in crores of rupees and I don't do crores. And my broker seems to be unable to link SSLT to VED. What I do know is that in rupees the dividend was raised 26% to INR 4.1 which translates into a similar rise in US$. This despite the Cairn India takeover and the huge fine for taxes on it still hanging over VED or SSLT. The company also cut its debt and claims that its cashflow (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) is among the best in the metal industry, and that its return on capital expenditure is also.

I will leave it to Abhimanyu Sisodia to report the details tomorrow.

*I am firm in my report last week about another iron and metal firm, Brazilian Vale. Its CEO Murilo Ferreira has been misquoted in English by various analysts who relied on the garbled text/translation produced by seekingalpha.com. I have struggled for years to learn Portuguese and it is certain that Senhor Ferreira (who has the best name you can bear if you are in the iron business) did say that the firm “may cut production if prices fall.” Wisely he did not say at what price he will cut production, which would be grist for his competitors' mill. But he said that VALE will “adjust to market conditions to maximize shareholder value”.

*Nokia has fallen about 17% since it reported a poor Q1 in its main surviving business of making telephone exchanges for cell firms. It clearly lured them in with bargain rates and will probably jack up prices once they are hooked. I am not sure this is a good marketing tactic but I am pretty sure the low profit levels were a one-off.

*New Ireland Fund has still got more money in Ryanair than any other company, at 21.20%. But there is a new No. 2, CRH plc (CRH), at 14.92%. This is not a diversified fund.