International Economies

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We thought it would be useful to give a quick, interim update on the slow-motion train wreck that is our industry’s response to the upcoming effectiveness of the Risk Retention Rule.  For those of you who have been blessedly snoozing under a rock these past couple of years, the Risk Retention Rule becomes effective on Christmas Eve and applies to all transactions closed (priced?) after that date.  The Rule, to generalize a bit, requires the sponsor of a securitization to retain a 5% vertical or horizontal strip with the additional possibility of laying off some or all of that risk onto a qualified B piece buyer or a mortgage loan originator.  For more detail, please see our OnPoints, our risk retention briefing white papers and many, many back issues of this CrunchedCredit.

Here’s the headline in Muddville in May of 2017:

We As An Industry Are In Trouble. 

We as an industry don’t have a scalable solution to the problem.  We as an industry do not know what this will cost, who will pay for it, and to what extent this is an existential risk to CRE capital formation as it has been conducted for the past twenty-five years.Continue Reading Risk Retention: It’s the Fourth Quarter and the Home Team is Getting Glum

You know, there’s never a dull moment when one reports on the regulatory states’ endless and so often fruitless and wrong-headed tinkering with the global economy. So now… let’s talk bail-in. The bail-in regime, which was adopted by all European Union countries (other than Poland) and implemented on January 1, 2016 (European Economic Area (EEA) members Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein are required to adopt the regime by December 31, 2016), permits European financial regulators to “bail-in” a failing institution by cancelling, writing-down, or converting into equity certain of the institution’s unsecured liabilities. Affected institutions must include a contractual recognition clause in its non-European-law governed contracts, so that all counterparties acknowledge that the institution’s liabilities are potentially subject to bail-in and agree to be bound by them.
Continue Reading Bail-In, or Just Bailing?

On March 20, 2016, President Obama became the first United States president in almost 90 years to visit the island of Cuba, located a mere 90 miles from the coast of Florida—signaling not only a renewed diplomatic relationship between the United States and the communist country, but also, the dawning of a new commercial age which will undoubtedly transform Cuba and its real estate industry.
Continue Reading Cuba and the Booming Commercial Real Estate Industry to Come

Financial downtrend chart and red pencil. Selective focus

The Federal Reserve announced last Wednesday that it is leaving the federal funds rate where it is, for now.  While the United States is pondering interest rate hikes, other parts of the world are plunging further into negative territory.  Last Thursday, in an attempt to bolster Europe’s weakening growth and spur inflation, the European Central Bank (the “ECB”) lowered its deposit rate by another 0.1%, pushing its deposit rate down to -0.4%.

With other central banks lowering rates into the negative, will the U.S. follow? Why is this happening? What could go wrong? How will this affect our banks?  Click through for three things you should know about negative interest rates.Continue Reading Three Things You Should Know about Negative Interest Rates

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

big benI was in New York with colleagues recently, answering clients’ questions about investing in UK real estate. As in the US, we in the UK have ridden a sustained period of strong capital growth in real estate, which continued into 2015. However, growth has slowed recently in certain areas and former hot-spots can now only be described as lukewarm.
Continue Reading “Find Out Where the People Are Going and Buy the Land Before They Get There”*

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

iStock_000009267719_DoubleToday, there appears to be an ever-expanding number of sponsors and markets for crowdfunding.  Commercial real estate is no exception. At the recent IMN US Real Estate Opportunity & Private Fund Investing Forum, Elizabeth Braman, Chief Production Officer of Realty Mogul, presented at a session focused on crowdfunding for real estate.  It was very well attended.  Dechert and CRE Financial Council (CREFC) recently hosted an equally well attended seminar in San Francisco featuring leaders in the field to discuss the current state of crowdfunding debt and equity real estate investments and that discussion, in our thinking, was illuminating about this fascinating, and perhaps fraught, new business.
Continue Reading Current Marketplace Trends in Real Estate Crowdfunding

I’ve written about Europe a lot over the past couple of years and not out of just a Schadenfreude enjoyment of watching a slow motion disaster far from our shores but because it seems to me that really matters, both in terms of its impact on the global financial marketplace and the probable knock-on effect on domestic U.S. finance markets. It also deserves our attention because it contains lessons for all and sundry policymakers and opinion purveyors about policy choices that simply don’t work.

Of course, the first and most portentous mistake in Europe is don’t ever get into a land war in Southeast Asia, er, I mean never sever control of fiscal and monetary policy; in other words, their big mistake, the Euro-zone currency itself.

Until now, I have shied away from the conclusion that the center could not hold, and held firmly to the notion that somehow Europe would muddle through.
Continue Reading Europe and Its Common Currency: It’s Really Over… But Not Today