It’s our fault. Well, if not entirely our fault, we certainly enabled it (you business types let this happen with nary a peep of protest). What am I banging on about? Legal documents. The legal documents we use in mortgage finance and securitization are the most turgidly unreadable, repetitious, corpulent, elephantine abuses of the English language of which I
2026
NIMBY Fails: A Black Swan Moves in Next Door
By Rick Jones on
Regular readers of this column may be aware that I have an arguably unhealthy fascination with black swans. To quote the late Donald Rumsfeld, these known unknowns and unknown unknowns can be pesky…at best and pretty horrible at worst (he wasn’t as dumb as people thought he was, was he?).
Black Swans and fat tails are…
Not Every Problem Deserves a Solution And Not Every Solution is a Solution: That’s a Problem
By Rick Jones on
It has worked its way into our cultural gestalt that every problem deserves a solution, created, crafted, implemented and enforced by our increasingly paternalistic government. Our government, for its part, endlessly tells us that indeed, yes, it is the solution to…pretty much everything. We, in the finance community writ large, are often the object of the government…
Some Dystopic Thoughts for the New Year
By Rick Jones on
Things are looking pretty sweet out there right now, aren’t they? The economy seems immune to all the handwringing over jobs and inflation. The stock market is on fire. The financial community, including but certainly not limited to the commercial real estate finance community, is doing cartwheels over the expectation that 2026 will be the year we’ve been…