2026

One of the most consequential threats to our business is political volatility.  Newsflash?  Hardly.  It’s a threat hiding in plain sight.  We know it’s there; we even periodically dredge it up for a bit of worrying.  Nonetheless, our awareness of the damage that political diktat and policy volatility can cause seems to be muted, perhaps by its shear ubiquitousness.  A threat…

Having written hundreds of thousands of words of CrunchedCredit over the years, it’s possible I’m about to cross a bridge I already crossed long ago, but I thought it was a worthwhile topic in this time and place.  

It’s time we develop a structured warehouse facility for commercial real estate mortgages.  Structured warehouses could provide current…

I’ll admit up front to my luddite tendencies.  Technology and I are not the best of friends.  I sort of understand the argument about Crypto at a very superficial level.  Okay, I get the argument that Crypto is like gold; it’s expensive to make (mine) so becomes a storehouse of value because of its scarcity.  It’s backed by, hey…

At the risk of appearing unduly churlish, I’m annoyed with our obsession with stress and anxiety these days.  So many seem to proudly complain bitterly about having to endure stress in everyday life.  “Not fair!…Why must I endure stress merely to achieve everything I want in life?  It should be easy.”  Sigh.  

The word “stress” appears millions of times…

If “It” is an event causing a riptide of damage to our economy, I don’t see anything horrific anytime soon, but that’s different than saying “we’re good.”  You’ve got to stay frosty.  We almost never notice “It” until we have been smacked up against the side of the head and wonder what the hell happened,  

A couple…

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…

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…

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…