Aurelia Butler

LONDON (Reuters) – British house prices registered the most widespread falls in 13 years last month as buyer demand and sales activity weakened more sharply than expected in the face of higher borrowing costs and the risk of a recession, a survey showed on Thursday.The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) house price balance, which measures the difference between the percentage of surveyors seeing rises and falls in house prices, slumped to -42 in December from -26 the previous month.December’s figure was the lowest since October 2010 and below the -30 that economists had forecast in a Reuters poll.Looking at the year ahead, the balance for price expectations edged down further from November. Simon Rubinsohn, chief economist at RICS, said the survey “highlights challenges in the housing market as new buyers grapple with more costly finance terms and uncertainty over the outlook of the economy.”Prices fell across all English regions with East Anglia and the South East reporting the sharpest net balance declines.Overall in Britain, agreed sales continued to weaken, RICS said, falling to -41. New buyer enquiries dipped marginally while the number of people putting their house up for sale was the weakest since September 2021. The survey results echoed other signs of house price weakness. Mortgage lenders Halifax and Nationwide have both shown prices falling in monthly terms as inflation and rising interest rates squeeze home-buyers. A Reuters poll of economists and analysts in November predicted house prices would fall around 5% this year having surged by 28% since the start of the pandemic in 2020.In contrast to property price falls, rents are expected to push up, RICS said. Demand in the rental market was set to slow further after sinking to its weakest in nearly two years last month, but fewer landlords were offering properties.RICS also said sellers were putting a price premium on energy-efficient homes with more than half of respondents stating this was due to better market value retention.Energy bills in Britain and other countries have soared in recent months, hitting disposable incomes for many households. More

Neal Stephenson, who coined the term in his 1992 novel “Snowcrash”, and Chris Cox, the chief product officer at Meta, laid out an array of engineering breakthroughs needed to allow millions of people to move seamlessly through immersive virtual worlds displayed on head-mounted devices.”We’re in the very early version, the Xerox (NASDAQ:XRX) PARC era,” said Cox at a World Economic Forum panel, referring to the company that developed the mouse and other fundamental computer technologies 50 years ago. “We’ve got a ways to go,” said Stephenson, who as well as writing science fiction has worked for technology companies including rocket maker Blue Origin. “It’s really just in the last couple of years that everything has come together.”Cox, whose company is spending billions of dollars developing software and hardware for the metaverse, said one of the biggest problems is the trade-off between speed and graphics quality.Virtual environments such as a comedy club, for example, need to support large numbers of user avatars to engagingly simulate the real-world atmospherics of chatter and laughter. But updating those avatars in synchronicity with the movements of their operators limits the processing power available for high-quality graphics.”We’re trying to figure out if comedy can work,” he said.A DECADE TO PAY OFFMeta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said he expected his metaverse investments to take around a decade to pay off. By that time, Cox says people will be able to take a walk with friends and family in virtual worlds as readily as they now make video or voice calls.Meta racked up losses of $9.44 billion at its Reality Labs metaverse unit from January to September last year and is expected to see that number grow significantly in 2023.That has hammered its shares and contributed to its decision to cut 11,000 jobs.The ability to move fluidly between experiences in different virtual worlds while retaining clothes and other items associated with an avatar is an issue Stephenson is trying to address through a company he has founded to develop blockchain applications. He said a key question was whether the metaverse was going to be a decentralized technology built from the bottom up or one created top-down by a single company. “A more open metaverse is better,” HP (NYSE:HPQ) Chief Executive Enrique Lores said on the panel. “If someone controls the full metaverse the ability for others to add value is much smaller.”For daily Davos updates in your inbox sign up for the Reuters Daily Briefing here More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. authorities said on Wednesday they have arrested the majority shareholder and cofounder of Hong Kong-registered virtual currency exchange Bitzlato Ltd for allegedly processing $700 million in illicit funds.Anatoly Legkodymov, a Russian national living in China, was arrested in Miami on Tuesday on charges that he operated the exchange as an unlicensed money exchange business that “in his own words, catered to ‘known crooks,'” a top Justice Department official said. Prosecutors said Bitzlato exchanged more than $700 million in cryptocurrency with Hydra Market, which they described as an illicit online marketplace for narcotics, stolen financial information, fraudulent identification documents and money laundering services that U.S. and German law enforcement shut down in April 2022.”Whether you break our laws from China or Europe or abuse our financial system from a tropical island — you can expect to answer for your crimes inside a United States courtroom,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told reporters at a news conference at the Justice Department.Bitzlato also received more than $15 million in ransomware proceeds, prosecutors said. It was not immediately possible to contact Hydra Market for comment. “Despite it being a small name, it carries a lot of weight,” said Chen Arad, the chief operating officer at Solidus Labs, a crypto market surveillance company. “Small actors are not safe and they carry just as much risk as any big-name exchange (or) platform,” he said. Authorities described Legkodymov as the cryptocurrency exchange’s cofounder, saying the 40-year-old Russian helped run the company from the Chinese city of Shenzhen. Legkodymov did not immediately respond to an email with questions, and messages left on Bitzlato’s automated Telegram support chat service were answered with the phrase, “Oops, sorry.” Bitzlato has processed $4.58 billion worth of cryptocurrency transactions since May 3, 2018, prosecutors said, adding a substantial portion constitutes “the proceeds of crime.”It also broke rules requiring significant vetting of customers and failed to meet requirements aimed at preventing money laundering, authorities said. Archived versions of Bitzlato’s website noted that the site’s clients could register using “only your email.”Prosecutors said Bitzlato knowingly serviced U.S. customers and conducted transactions with U.S.-based exchanges using U.S. online infrastructure. For at least some period of time, it was being managed by the defendant while he was in the United States, they said.The charges were filed in conjunction with the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which said it has prohibited certain transmittals of funds involving Bitzlato by any covered financial institution after labeling Bitzlato Ltd a “primary money laundering concern” related to Russian illicit finance.”Identifying Bitzlato as a primary money laundering concern effectively renders the exchange an international pariah,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said at the news conference.Adeyemo said Bitzlato has repeatedly facilitated transactions for Russian-affiliated ransomware groups, including the gang behind Conti, which he said has links to the Russian government and Russia-connected darknet markets.Cari Stinebower, a former Treasury Department official now a partner at law firm Winston & Strawn, said the penalties imposed are akin to those under Section 311 of the U.S. Patriot Act and will make Bitzlato untouchable by U.S. and foreign banks.”None of the mainstream financial institutions will deal with an entity identified as a primary money laundering concern,” she said.”While U.S. financial institutions will refuse to engage in business with Bitzlato, (one would expect that) other financial institutions will follow suit,” she added. “The impact will be to freeze Bitzlato out of the global financial sector almost immediately.”By midday Wednesday, Bitzlato’s website was replaced by a notice saying that the service had been seized by French authorities “as part of a coordinated international law enforcement action.” More

(Reuters) -Federal Reserve policymakers on Wednesday signaled they will push on with more interest rate hikes, with several supporting a top policy rate of at least 5% even as inflation shows signs of having peaked and economic activity is slowing.”I just think we need to keep going, and we’ll discuss at the meeting how much to do,” Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester said in an interview with the Associated Press. The remarks appeared to reflect a widely shared view among her fellow policymakers, most of whom as of December had penciled in a 5.00%-5.25% policy rate in coming months.Mester said that for her part she expects the Fed’s policy rate to need to go “a bit higher” than that, and stay there for some time to further slow inflation.The Fed’s benchmark overnight lending rate currently sits in a target range of 4.25% to 4.50%, and investors expect the Fed to lift that rate by a quarter of a percentage point at the end of its Jan. 31-Feb. 1 meeting. But slowing spending, inflation, and manufacturing – all reported earlier on Wednesday – have helped stoke expectations that the Fed will end its current round of rate hikes sooner than Mester and most of her colleagues expect, with the policy rate just shy of 5%.The central bank began raising borrowing costs last March, when the policy rate was in the 0%-0.25% range and inflation was starting to make a climb that would see it rise to 40-year highs, several times the Fed’s 2% target. ‘WHY STALL?’Like Mester, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard, speaking with the Wall Street Journal earlier, said he too sees the policy rate rising to the 5.25%-5.50% range, and added that policymakers should get it above 5% “as quickly as we can.” Several Fed officials have expressed support for slowing to quarter-percentage-point rate increases, after last year’s much faster pace of rate hikes in mostly 75-basis point and half-point increments.Bullard expressed more impatience. Asked if he was open to a half-percentage-point increase at the Fed’s upcoming meeting, he asked “why not go to where we’re supposed to go? … Why stall?”The answer may in part be found in the latest “Beige Book” report published by the Fed on Wednesday. The compilation of survey data from the central bank’s districts around the country showed that while prices continued to increase, the pace in most districts was reported to have slowed. And while employment continued to grow at a “modest to moderate” pace in much of the country, and several Fed districts reported modest economic growth, the New York Fed reported a contraction in activity, four other districts reported slowdowns or slight declines, and most expected little growth ahead. Still, Fed policymakers say the mistake they do not want to make is to stop short of defeating inflation, only to have to raise rates even more to do the job later on, as happened in the 1970s and 1980sEven Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker, who is generally less hawkish than Mester or Bullard and wants the Fed to switch to quarter-percentage-point hikes ahead, sees “a few more” rises in borrowing costs before a pause.Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan also supports a slower rate hike pace ahead because of the uncertain outlook and the need to be flexible. But she also signaled the Fed may need to raise rates higher than is widely expected to keep financial conditions tight enough to press down on inflation.”I believe we shouldn’t lock in on a peak interest rate,” Logan said in Austin, Texas. She added that even once inflation is headed convincingly down to 2% and the Fed does stop raising rates, the risks will be “two-sided” and that further rate hikes could be in the offing. In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, outgoing Kansas City Fed President Esther George said she felt rates would have to move higher than many of her colleagues anticipate, but that she also would have been willing to move in smaller increments.“People’s expectations about inflation are beginning to move down,” George said, an observation based on conversations with contacts in her Midwest district. “So I’m comfortable beginning that stepped-down process … I’d be happy to do 25s if I were there.” George will retire right before the Fed’s next meeting and will not participate in it.But she added, “we still have upside risk to inflation. I don’t think I’ve reached a point where I think it is clearly falling. There are enough issues out there to say we have to guard against them.”Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday and is experiencing mild symptoms from the virus, said after last month’s policy meeting that the inflation battle had not been won and that more rate hikes were coming in 2023. More