Commercial Mortgage Finance

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With apologies to Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, and in the afterglow of a relatively amiable final AB Rule, we are reminded this week that our business remains hogtied to a regulatory establishment that can’t seem to stop regulating.  When a member of the regulatory apparatchiki hears someone observe, “Well, if I don’t get out of bed, I’ll never be in a car accident,” he or she starts thinking, well, maybe…a nice little rule could do wonders…!
Continue Reading Liquidity Coverage Ratio Rule: Birds Gotta Fly, Fish Gotta Swim…and Regulators Gotta Regulate

We at Crunched Credit have taken a bit of a pause of late.  It is, of course, the dog days of summer.  But it’s time to get back into the fray.  Let’s start by noting the doldrums seem to have taken a pass.  From where we sit, the markets seem to be in robust health.  As we look over this complex web of transactions, deal structures, innovations, capital flows, business plans, business goals, failures and successes that is our market, things look pretty damn good.
Continue Reading A Mid-Year Report Card on the Commercial Real Estate Capital Markets

The Financial Times reported on April 2 that the Eurozone Banks continue to load up on sovereign debt; generally, the debt of their respective host countries.  A few days later, the Financial Times reported a bevy of talking heads crowing over the end of the EC financial crisis.  And then on April 16, the European Parliament voted to approve a slew of new laws for the EU banking marketplace, including a single resolution mechanism so comprised to be almost useless and a common rulebook for winding down the banks.  Does anyone here or there think any of this really matters?  First, it’s going to take years to generate the rules that this legislation birthed and even after the Euro apparatchiki spend years creating detailed rules, the dynamics of Brussels will ensure there will be so many loopholes it would make a block of Swiss cheese blush.  Moreover, does anyone actually think the various nation states will honor these rules if a champion bank is in trouble?  I, for one, do not. 
Continue Reading EU Banks –Dog Bites Man, Again

It’s still in the early days of 2014.  I think it’s finally stopped snowing in the East, the sun has come out and the stock market is continuing to outperform the woe purveyors.  Republicans and Democrats have gotten something done on the budget; lions have laid down with lambs; geopolitically, the world’s a mess but no one seems to care back home.  The financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 is beginning to fade into history.  Things are pretty good and likely to get better for quite some time.

Isn’t it, therefore, a great time to reset? To reset some of the regulatory and legislative excesses stitched together with little reflection during the crucible of the late, great credit crisis?  What appeared to make sense in the middle of that crisis simply doesn’t make a great deal of sense anymore and it’s time for a reset.   As John Maynard Keynes famously said, when the facts changed, he changed his mind.  Shouldn’t we?  It is the height of hubris and willful incuriousness to ignore four years of data and not recalibrate.

If we were to recalibrate, let’s think of some of the things we might rethink.Continue Reading Time for Regulatory Reset

I have been mulling our 2014 Outlook for some time and decided to wait until after the New Year and CREFC to write.  Just in case we got the whole Mayan calendar end of the world story wrong by a year (hey, it was 5000 years old) which would make the whole prediction thing a bit irrelevant, I elected to wait and possibly save me some work.  But we’re still here and settling into 2014.  It’s time. 
Continue Reading 2014 OUTLOOK

We have previously written here on CrunchedCredit about Chinese banks lending in the U.S. With recent news that Chinese state-owned developer Greenland Group has agreed to purchase a 70% stake in Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards development for $725 million, we have seen the first headline grabbing real estate acquisition of U.S. property by a Chinese investor. As the Chinese real estate market begins to cool, and the U.S. continues to be one of the few global real estate bright spots, it is unlikely that Atlantic Yards will be an isolated occurrence.Continue Reading Chinese Developer Makes Large Footprint in U.S.

There’s a lot of talk these days about the growth of a shadow banking market. Shadow is right! The growth of the commercial lending market outside of the universe of insured depository institutions and life insurance companies is real and its growth is accelerating, yet it is not easy to discern its size, shape and taxonomy. The shadow banking market, which simply means the community of lenders outside of the bank and lifeco cadres, is a logical response to a worldwide tsunami of regulatory activity designed to constrain innumerable facets of financial institutions’ operations which often seems more about retribution than the safety, soundness or integrity of the financial markets life.Continue Reading The Shadow Banking Market: The Shadow Knows

As we have discussed numerous times in this blog (here, here, here and here), the downturn in the commercial real estate market resulted in much litigation as to guarantor liability for non-recourse debt. As a brief refresher, many of the non-recourse loans made during the CMBS boom included an agreement that, in an event of default, the lender would only exercise remedies against the property securing the loan and not against the borrower (or its principals or sponsors), with an exception for certain borrower “bad-acts” (such as misappropriation of rents, fraud, and in certain instances, borrower bankruptcy or insolvency). In the event the borrower perpetuated any of these bad acts, the guarantor agreed to be liable either for the losses incurred by the lender, or for the full amount of the loan, depending on the bad act committed.Continue Reading On Appeal: The Michigan Court of Appeals Overturns It’s Prior Ruling and Affirms the State’s 2012 Legislation, Nonrecourse Mortgage Loan Act, Which Invalidates Recourse Carveout Guaranties Triggered by Borrower Insolvency

I was entertaining myself early this morning by looking over a joint agency report just released entitled “An Analysis of the Impact of the Commercial Real Estate Concentration Guidance”. This report summarizes the performance of bank CRE portfolios following the issuance of interagency guidance in 2006 entitled “Concentrations in Commercial Real Estate Lending, Sound Risk Management Practices”. Everyone will be shocked, shocked to know that through the course of the worst recession in post-war history, banks lost money because of commercial real estate exposure and many smaller and regional banks went casters up. Well, there’s startling news. We taxpayers pay for this sort of thing. Where is the sequester when we really need it?Continue Reading Undue Commercial Real Estate Risks Are Bad: The Mathematical Proof of the Blindingly Obvious