If you want to get a preview of where the US is going there’s no better place to look than into the bubbling cauldron of UK politics.  Not to bury the lede, it’s bad for the country, bad for the economy and certainly bad for commercial real estate.  

Fragmentation and radicalization.  

In the UK, the Labor…

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…

Things are looking pretty sweet out there right now, aren’t they?  The economy seems immune to all the handwringing over jobs and inflation.  The stock market is on fire.  The financial community, including but certainly not limited to the commercial real estate finance community, is doing cartwheels over the expectation that 2026 will be the year we’ve been…

There’s an awful lot of happy talk going around about 2026.  Apparently, that’s the year we were supposed to stay alive till.  I surely hope the talk is right, even if it doesn’t rhyme.  2025 was a pretty darn good year for commercial real estate but underperformed the “talk” in late 2024.  We like happy talk.  I keep seeing…