Credit Crisis

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This is all about the difficulty of taking the punch bowl away from a roaring good party. Over the past several weeks a number of major banks folded under enormous pressure from the US DOJ to settle fraud claims resulting from the sale of bonds prior to the financial crisis of 2008. The allegations here were that, as they have been in many many cases over the past several years, the banks knowingly sold bonds backed by crappy residential mortgage loans. Apparently, no one else had a clue that this stuff was crap! Who knew? These last suite of deals were relative bargains for the banks because, reportedly, the DOJ was highly motivated to get these deals done before Mr. Trump took the helm at the White House.

For some reason this calmed investors’ concerns.

I don’t get it.
Continue Reading Hey Guys, Let’s Sue a Financial Institution! Our Government at Play

I’d like everyone to go out and buy a copy of Professor Paul Mahoney’s slender new book, Wasting a Crisis – Why Securities Regulation Fails.  Paul is a brilliant guy.  Until this spring, he was the dean of the University of Virginia School of Law where he is the David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law and the Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law, teaching securities laws.  This is a great book and an important read.  Paul argues cogently that:
Continue Reading Why Regulation Fails

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

The slow start to 2016 did not dampen the enthusiasm at CREFC’s Annual Conference, held last week in New York City.  The conference saw record attendance, with standing-room-only crowds at virtually every panel.  As with the Industry Leaders Conference in January, the hot topics on people’s minds were risk retention (and the rest of the regulatory headwinds), liquidity and the competitiveness of the CMBS market.

The conference made very clear that we are at an inflection point in the current cycle.  The general mood of the conference, in our view, was the confluence of nervousness and cautious optimism.  The gloominess of the first quarter, and fears over the “sky is falling,” has yielded to mild bouts of enthusiasm (at least if the parties were any indication).  The capital markets have settled down over the past few months, spreads have tightened, and borrowers have begun to trickle back into the CMBS market.

Clearly our industry faces headwinds, and nobody is betting on a record second half, but we also did not hear anyone ringing the death knell for our business.  We left the conference with more questions than answers.  Here are some:Continue Reading CREFC Annual Conference 2016: Headwinds or Head First Into the Wall?

With apologies to George Dangerfield, who published The Strange Death of Liberal England in 1935 chronicling the collapse of the British Liberal Party prior to World War I, I’m borrowing his title for this commentary.  Okay, bear with me.  Regrettably, we may be witnessing something happening to our banking system which is somewhat reminiscent of the death throes of one of England’s great political parties. The Liberal Party expired in the years leading up to the Great War not because of some single momentous and metamorphic event, but because of a series of modest crises, each in its own right small bore which, at the time, was not viewed as terribly consequential.  It failed because of the stultifying, dismal and confused responses of the Liberals to these events.  In the end, the party became untenable as a party of government.  Let’s hope no one writes that book about our banking system in the years to come.

Our enormously complex, interdependent, vibrant, entrepreneurial, adaptive, world girding and dynamic U.S. banking system has played a seminal and still critical role in making this economy succeed.  It is now under assault by large segments of our political elites and their attendant and enabling (self-identified) intelligencia.  This fraternity inspired by the twin idee fixe that the Great Recession was caused by the failures and failing, economic, structural and ethical of our banking system and a fabulist conviction that banking can be “fixed.”  This is a chimerical crusade to overturn the business cycle.  Fruitless and dangerous.Continue Reading The Strange Death of the Modern Financial System

RRWe may be approaching a tipping point where the burden of the new federal regulatory state, purportedly designed to make our economy stronger by making the banking system safer, will begin to demonstrably become a cure that’s worse than the disease. To my eye, much of the new regulatory apparatus feels like political theatre designed to impress the financial illiterate. Random chest thumping for populist cred on the cynical assumption that the system is big enough and robust enough to tolerate all this tampering.   Of course, I could be wrong and our policy elites could really be doing all this fiddling from an honest embrace of a simplistic, jejune analysis of extremely complex systems which they largely do not understand. I’m not sure which explanation scares me more.
Continue Reading Risk Retention and the Regulatory State: What It Means to “The Folks” in 2016 and Beyond

MERSCORP, Inc. (“MERS”) has been under fire for years. We wrote about it a while back when residential mortgage borrowers challenged the ability of MERS to foreclose on mortgages it held on the theory that MERS, as a mere nominee to the lender, was not a real party in interest.  More recently, local recording offices have filed class action suits against MERS arguing that the MERS system prevented them from collecting fees supposedly required under state law.  Now there’s a sympathetic plaintiff!  In the past month, the Third Circuit and Fifth Circuit both rejected these arguments.
Continue Reading MERS: Better Than a Faster Horse

After years of delays, changes and significant debate, the Volcker Rule is now, largely, in full effect. Sold to a sometimes intellectually incurious Congress and the electorate as a central piece of legislation to limit systemic risks to the financial system, the Volcker Rule, among other things, prohibits “banking entities” from engaging in proprietary trading activities and acquiring or retaining “ownership interests” in (or acting as sponsors of) certain “covered funds.”
Continue Reading Volcker Rule – Five Years On

euroFor want of a baker, a job was lost.  For want of a job, the economy was lost.  For want of an economy, the banking system collapsed.  For want of a banking system – well, ultimately Grexit.

Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, (China), Grexit, Grexit. The Greeks will be fine, right?  There is no such thing as contagion, right?  Your lips to God’s ear, please. As I write this, the Greek Parliament has approved the bailout and it looks like an immediate Grexit is off the table, (although the Germans are none too pleased)!  Wonderful.
Continue Reading Grexit Deferred: The End of the Beginning for Greece?

Or perhaps Prometheus had it right in its original form. “Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.”  Look at what we are doing to construction lending in the name of our seemingly endless safety and soundness crusade.

Under the new regulatory capital rules, we have a new asset class; HVCRE or High Volatility Commercial Real Estate.  HVCRE includes acquisition, developments and construction loans.  These loans are assigned a risk rating of 150% of the basic risk rating for commercial real estate.  Now, to be fair there are limitations and exceptions to the type of loans that attract this higher regulatory capital requirement, but those are somewhat at odds with the realities of the market.  Just by way of a few examples, to avoid HVCRE status the borrower must have 15% cash equity.  The rules about what is and what is not cash equity are artificially restrictive and not in all respects in accord with the market practice.  So-called soft costs count but appreciation in the value of the real estate is disregarded; only cash paid at acquisition counts.  As a property is held for longer and longer, this makes increasingly little sense.  Why is land value equity any less real than cash invested for so-called soft costs?  I have never met a developer without a fabulist view of what should be counted as soft costs.  Please, I’ll take real live equity in the dirt any time.  Also, for reasons which are entirely obscure, one cannot count the borrowers’ other free and clear assets, letters of  credit, cash or unencumbered readily marketable securities held on account of the borrower.  Also neither preferred equity nor subordinated debt counts.
Continue Reading Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Make Meet A Higher Regulatory Capital Burden