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As is our tradition here at Crunched Credit, each year, about this time, we award our Golden Turkey Awards.  Once again, I must say that we are utterly blessed with so many worthy candidates. The truly deserving have once again wrangled with vision and astounding persistence to earn a spot on our acclaimed list.  To…

It’s that time again for Dechert’s CrunchedCredit Annual Golden Turkey Awards. In a year made most remarkable by the extraordinary performance of the US economy, idiocy, silliness, pigheadedness and stupidity have tended to be somewhat obscured by the economic good news machine. At the other end of the spectrum, the continued high volume of outrage over almost everything from both the left and right (and I’m sure the middle would do their fair share here if there was anyone at home) makes it harder to suss out the truly memorable and award-winning, but it’s our job to try. As we have said in the past, this would be really hard if the world actually behaved in a predictable, rational, Newtonian universe sort of way, but blessedly it does not.Continue Reading 2018 Golden Turkey Awards

We haven’t written much about Brexit…largely because, for the life of me, I have been unable to embrace, with any conviction, a view as to whether the Europeans will dodge this bullet, as they have dodged so many in the past, or whether chaos will finally ensue.  Then, if chaos ensues, I’m equally clueless about what the contours of the chaos will be; what a hard Brexit will look like.  I am baffled.  And while it is demonstrably true that cluelessness and bloviation are not mutually exclusive, I, perhaps more thin-skinned than most of the chattering class, have been waiting for some sort of an epiphany before I wrote on the topic.

But birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim and us members in good standing of the commentariat gotta prattle on.  Since I’m not convinced I’m going to get any smarter and since this is likely to be one of the seminal economic events of 2019.  I’m diving in.  Might be ugly.  Hide the children.Continue Reading Do I Have to Talk About Brexit?

As is our tradition here at Crunched Credit, each year, about this time, we present our Golden Turkey Awards. In a year of monumentally bad surprises, we truly had difficulty narrowing our list down to only the exceptionally worthy candidates. Voters, governments and regulators sent shockwaves throughout the world in 2016, upending markets and throwing much of what we thought we knew into the proverbial dumpster fire of society. If what we know now we knew when we last gave the Golden Turkey Awards, we may have taken a pass on 2016. It can’t get any worse, right? As we get ready to step into the unknown of 2017, here is our list for 2016:
Continue Reading CrunchedCredit.com’s 7th Annual Golden Turkey Awards

Maybe it’s because I have been in Europe this past week (Munich at Octoberfest actually – Men in way-too-short leather shorts, dirndls, beer steins the size of a politician’s ego, the most astonishing amount of drinking, etc. Good heavens.) I have been wondering: Has anyone been paying attention to what’s happening in Europe lately? You’ve read about Europe periodically in this commentary because we think that the financial success of the European Experiment continues to matter a lot for financial markets in the US and for the US economy more broadly. Here’s a flash, it is still broke.
Continue Reading Remember Europe? Harshing My Mellow

And now to return to our commentary a few weeks back about the stultifying impact of ill-thought through rules and regulations (at best) (Brexit has intervened).  This is our Regulatory State which broadly attempted to pick winners and losers and modify market behavior, to get an engineered outcome by using the blunderbuss of proscriptive rules and regulation.
Continue Reading A Trip Through the Labyrinth – The Regulatory Man in Full

Back in early April I observed in this commentary that I wasn’t really sure how much Brexit mattered, at least here in North America.  Of course, looking back, I realized we issued it on April Fool’s Day and now I simply can’t remember whether I was being ironic or not.  In any event, at that time we were exploring the notion that neither in nor out may ultimately affect the arc of the success of the European Union project, the health and viability of the City of London or CRE deal volume in the States.

But now that it’s happened…damn!  We needed another disruption in this volatile economy of ours like we need a social disease.  And while I am absolutely sure that a Remain vote would not have ended the ongoing debate about the future of Europe and its ability to get its sclerotic economy performing again, it sure would have been nice to at least take one issue off the table.Continue Reading Brexit – Okay, I Really Do Care!  (I Think)