Cast your mind back to 2019, when by the idea of terrorizing a quaint English village as a loud, annoying goose. , but it was fairly short and left me wanting more. In another universe, a TV adaptation would have happened already. While that didn’t quite pan out here, we do have a funny proof-of-concept to enjoy.

House House, the game’s developer, a “proof-of-concept for a hypothetical Untitled Goose Programme” on its YouTube channel on Friday. The studio created the short with Playdate maker and Untitled Goose Game publisher Panic and animation house Chromosphere Studio. It’s a great four-minute clip that’s well worth your time. It shows a goose bullying a journalist and groundskeeper during a TV interview. The art style is lovely, the Wallace and Gromit-esque humor is on point and the goose is just as much of a jerk as the one in the game.

Sadly, House House says that the show didn’t gain traction and those involved put the idea on the shelf. But at least we get this very amusing video out of it. If nothing else, it reminded me that I need to play the Panic-published , which seems

“Normally when there are 30 shots in the game, it is the United States with about 25 of ’em. Not today!”

It wasn’t just the ESPN commentator who was shocked.

Heather O’Reilly had scored the game’s final goal, dragging world number ones and two-time champions United States to a 2-2 draw in their opening match at the 2007 Women’s World Cup.

O’Reilly wasn’t surprised by the scoreline though. Or how evenly-fought the game was. She knew it would be tough.

Instead, as the final whistle blew, it was the attitude of the US’s opponents, who saw a chance missed, rather than a point gained, that struck her.

“I remember North Korea seeming disappointed,” says O’Reilly.

“Their body language seemed to say ‘oh my gosh, we were so close to taking down the giant’.”

North Korea is the world’s most isolated country, a state based around the infallibility of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un and a deep suspicion of the outside world.

Yet, despite living standards being well behind most other nations, North Korea has been one of the strongest female football nations on the planet.

When they took on the United States in 2007, they were ranked fifth in the world and amid a run of three Asian titles in the space of a decade.

Their record at youth level is even better. In 2016, they won the U20 Women’s World Cup, defeating Spain, the United States and France in the knockout rounds. That same year, their under-17 team also lifted their age-grade World Cup.

“The game in 2007 was challenging, really super hard,” remembers O’Reilly of her meeting with North Korea’s senior side. “It was hard to get the ball off them, they were buzzing around, very quick.”

There was another challenge though, one that was unique to North Korea.

“It was just such a cloud of uncertainty,” says O’Reilly. “The film we had on them was very limited, even by the standard of the times.

“Every time we played North Korea, it was always a mystery.”

The mystery now is, after a doping controversy and a four-year absence from international football, can North Korea’s women be a force once again?

The IPO market has not roared back in 2024 as many investors hoped it would — not yet, at least. Elevated interest rates (this week’s 50 bps rate cut notwithstanding) and uncertainty related to the U.S. election have prompted many companies to stay private and wait for better market conditions.

But a handful of companies did go public this spring. Enterprise rewards platform Ibotta, which builds the backend rewards program infrastructure for enterprise clients like Walmart and Exxon, was one of them, debuting on the NYSE on April 18. Its IPO priced above its initial price range at $88 a share and debuted at $117 a share. It’s currently trading at $63 a share with a $1.7 billion market cap.

Ibotta’s CEO, Bryan Leach, told TechCrunch that five months after the IPO, he doesn’t regret taking his company public this year. Going public requires months of planning, and he thinks companies trying to time the market are making a “huge mistake.”

“Who knows what the [Federal Reserve] will do?” Leach said. “[Bankers say] it’s always better to wait, but you never know what will happen when you wait. At the end of the day, it’s not a destination, it’s a phase.”

Numerous companies that were expected to go public in 2022 or 2023 are still waiting on the sidelines. Many of these companies are sitting on large valuations that they gained from funding rounds during the boom days of 2021 and they would have to suffer a haircut to go public. There were 310 IPOs in the U.S. in 2021, according to PitchBook data. This has dropped sharply since. There were 80 in 2022, 85 in 2023 and 37 through the first half of 2024.

Leach admitted that some people consider the fact that Ibotta’s stock has dropped nearly 50% since its IPO as a sign that going public at this time wasn’t the right decision, or they might say that the company should have waited. Still, he feels it is too early to draw such conclusions, pointing to how Instacart’s stock is now trading close to its debut price — it hit a 52-week high today — a year after its IPO.

“Things are going great,” Leach said. “We are the largest tech IPO in Colorado history. The stock has gone way up, and gone down, and that sort of settles in over the course of the year. From a company perspective, we’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much value we got out of being a public company.”

Public companies also have an air of legitimacy around them, and Leach said that leverage is useful when it comes to nabbing potential enterprise customers. He said the company’s recent deal with Instacart may not have happened if Ibotta were still private.

“They trust us,” Leach said. “We have a certain amount of legitimacy. They know we have the resources. They can look at our finances. They can see we don’t have any debt. There is a level of comfort that [being a public company] provides.”

He added that the same level of legitimacy applies to hiring, too. Ibotta is no longer offering stock options tied to a private valuation given by investors with no downside protection, and Leach said that makes the company a more attractive option for talent.

Leach said companies on the fence about doing an IPO shouldn’t try to time the market, but they should wait until they are ready to be a public company.

Going public this April was not the company’s first choice, either. During the SPAC and IPO craze of 2020 and 2021, Ibotta’s investors began asking it to go public, and so the company hired bankers and wrote up an S-1, an SEC document that kicks off the IPO process. It was ready to set out on an IPO roadshow in fall of 2021 but decided to hold off.

Ibotta had landed a large deal with Walmart to run a white-label version of its rewards program at the time, Leach said, but he wanted to be able to prove the deal was actually working before going public. Not everyone was pleased with the company’s decision to wait.

Still, Leach feels it was the right choice. Waiting until 2024 allowed Ibotta to go public with six quarters of profitability behind it and get its finances in order. Other late-stage companies in the same boat, he thinks, shouldn’t wait around for a “better” market.

Investors don’t seem to mind companies waiting it out — at least they aren’t expressing otherwise publicly. But the IPO market is bound to open again eventually. Interest rates have started to go down and there is an increase in rumors surrounding companies hiring bankers to start the IPO process. Companies may be done waiting come 2025.

HSBC’s exposure to defaulted commercial property loans in Hong Kong surged almost sixfold to more than $3bn in the first half of this year, underscoring the risks the UK bank faces from a slump in the Chinese territory’s real estate market.

The London-headquartered bank had $3.2bn in “credit impaired” commercial real estate loans to Hong Kong clients as of June 30, up from just $576mn six months earlier, according to its financial report for the first half of this year.

Hong Kong is HSBC’s largest market for commercial real estate lending, accounting for 45 per cent of its exposure, in comparison with 18 per cent for the UK.

The bank’s total global commercial real estate lending was $79bn as of June. The $3.2bn in credit impaired loans made up 9 per cent of HSBC’s total Hong Kong commercial real estate lending.

The leap in defaults is a sign of how the commercial property downturn in Hong Kong, a financial hub that has for years been one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets, has started to hit banks. Prime office rents have fallen more than 35 per cent since 2020, according to commercial property adviser Cushman & Wakefield.

While banks have been under pressure for several years over their exposure to mainland China’s property market, the focus is now shifting to Hong Kong, said David Wong, head of North Asia bank ratings at Fitch.

“We’re a lot more comfortable saying a line has been drawn under [banks’ exposure to] China commercial real estate, versus Hong Kong,” Wong said. “I don’t think we’ve seen the bottom yet.”

Under the bank’s definition, those borrowers have breached the terms of their loan. That can include missing payments but it can also include “non-financial” measures such as the loan-to-value ratio missing an agreed target figure.

Georges Elhedery, who became HSBC’s chief executive in September, said on a call with analysts in early August when he was chief financial officer that the loans were “all performing” even though “a large number” were classed as credit impaired.

However, the bank said “certain borrowers have sought payment deferrals to accommodate debt serviceability challenges” in its financial report for the first half of this year, published on July 31.

HSBC told the Financial Times this week that “a lot” of the borrowers are still paying interest. A spokesperson for the bank declined to provide figures on how many borrowers were paying interest or to offer more detail on Elhedery’s comment.

Standard Chartered, which as with HSBC has more exposure to commercial property lending in Hong Kong than any other region, reported a rise in the proportion of lower-rated borrowers in its most recent earnings, though it did not mark any of the loans as credit impaired.

The lender has cut its unsecured exposure to Hong Kong commercial real estate borrowers by 19 per cent since the end of 2022, it said in filings in July. Standard Chartered declined to comment.

Higher interest rates have put Hong Kong borrowers under pressure at a time when demand for office and retail space has fallen, with China’s economic slowdown and Beijing’s national security crackdown hitting international investor confidence. Tough zero-Covid measures also prompted an exodus of foreign workers during the pandemic.

The HSBC figures show that Hong Kong groups accounted for 45 per cent of the bank’s total credit-impaired commercial real estate lending as of June, up from 13 per cent six months earlier.

Elhedery said on the earnings call that the bank had taken a “probably prudent approach” in reclassifying the loans and was “comfortable and confident in the medium-to-long-term outlook” for Hong Kong’s commercial real estate sector, which would benefit from any rate cuts.

The bank said in its filing that its collateral coverage was strong and “broadly stable” even as valuations fell, and it was making “relatively low” provisions for credit losses on the loans because of high collateralisation.

“I think for those of us living in Hong Kong you can see vacancy rates are higher at this point,” said Ming Lau, the bank’s Asia chief financial officer, on the analyst call. But he said that the loans were structured so that the bank had recourse to “other assets and cash” of the borrowers.

Eleven of Hong Kong’s biggest property developers have written down the value of their investment property portfolios by about $23bn since 2020, according to data compiled by UBS for the Financial Times.

Mark Leung, a property analyst at UBS, said there could be more writedowns for Hong Kong’s developers in the near future. “For offices, rent probably will continue to come down due to the inflated supply issue, and vacancies could edge up,” he said. 

Many of the territory’s property companies are controlled by tycoons and their families. Sun Hung Kai Properties is controlled by the Kwok family, Henderson Land Development by the Lee family, CK Asset by the Li family and New World Development by the Cheng family.

Gary Ng, a senior economist at Natixis, said that while the developers are expected to remain under pressure, most retained “sound financial positions” and could tap “old money” held by the tycoons and their families.